Adapted from “Resolve Hot Topics with Cooler Heads,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter, May 2007.
Negotiating effectively with colleagues can be more challenging than dealing with outsiders. Conventional wisdom advises addressing team conflict by staying focused on tasks and avoiding relationship issues. Yet a study by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson and Diana McLain Smith of The Monitory Group concludes that this approach works only when the issues are “cool” ones that can be resolved through objective analysis.
The researchers found three common symptoms of “hot conflicts,” which are usually prompted by differences in underlying belief systems, interests, and values:
• Team members persist in arguing the same points.
• When the team reaches impasses, talks get personal. Accusations may be spoken out loud, and members may speculate privately about one another’s motives.
• Once negative attributions take hold, emotions flare and progress halts.
The authors discovered that management teams can resolve hot conflict by integrating three specific skills. First, engage in individual self-management, or “the ability to examine and transform the thoughts and feelings that hijack one’s ability to reason calmly when conflicts heat up.”
Second, mutually manage conversations so that taboo topics and feelings can be raised without fear of emotional eruptions. That requires deft framing and a willingness to find the concern beneath seemingly irrational comments.
The first two practices support a third skill: managing team relationships for the long term, which requires trust building and investing in the key individual relationships, specifically those that lie on “organizational fault lines” where intrafirm conflicts occur. It also requires shared appreciation of the dynamic quality of relationships: how “what I say affects what you think, which affects what you say and then what I think next, and so on.” Without that kind of insight, each teammate will feel blameless for the problems that plague the group.
