The Power to Defuse: Tips for Conflict Resolution on Project Teams
Transcript
Conflict can occur on any project. And project professionals should know how to defuse it. We discuss this with:
Tareka Wheeler, PMP, VP of client success, Arch Systems, Washington, D.C.: Wheeler details how she handles the inevitability of conflict, strategies she’s used in her career to help manage or resolve conflicts, how she tailors conflict management for each scenario, and her advice on how other project professionals can strengthen their conflict resolution skills.
Prabhath Gunawardhana, PMP, program manager, London Stock Exchange Group, Colombo, Sri Lanka: Gunawardhana shares a real-life example of how he helped client stakeholders and team members find common ground. He also explains how work location can impact which strategies he applies and which skills are necessary to effectively resolve conflict.
TAREKA WHEELER
We hear conflict, and all of a sudden, it’s like this negative connotation, and “Oh my goodness. It’s a terrible thing.” Change your relationship with conflict. Think about it differently. Think about it as a space where you could really prepare and hone in on your strengths so that you can be successful at it as a project manager.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Conflict. Is it really a bad word? Or is it an opportunity to identify issues, work through them and emerge stronger on the other side? Today we’re looking at strategies to make your team and projects resilient when struggles arise.
In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.
This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.
Conflict happens on projects and within teams. It just does. Even among the most harmonious and collaborative cultures, disagreement is inevitable—and at that point it’s not about how well you avoid conflict, but how well you resolve it.
It’s a hot topic: Research firm Gartner named conflict resolution a must-have skill for 2024. Being able to lower the temperature during any disagreement is a sign of leadership. Those who do it well not only boost the health of teams and organizations in the short and long term, but they also impact project success. Thoughtful conflict resolution can bring to the surface ways to improve your work. Of course, PMI has plenty of resources to help you boost your leadership skills. Visit PMI.org/podcast and click on the transcript for this episode to check those out.
Today we’ll speak to two project leaders about how they approach managing and resolving conflicts. First is Tareka Wheeler, VP of client success at Arch Systems in the Washington, D.C., metro area.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Let’s start just by setting the table. Why does conflict management matter to project management success?
TAREKA WHEELER
Conflict management is something that we do every single day. I’m a mom of three, and I think I’ve been doing conflict management for years.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
24/7, yeah.
TAREKA WHEELER
24/7, correct. So I think that it’s really important. It’s something that we’re doing every single day, whether if you’re a parent or not, but it’s something that we have to bring into the workplace because in order for us to have successful delivery, especially successful delivery for our projects, for our customers, for our clients, for our organizations, we have to know how to manage and address, and even sometimes live within, conflict. So conflict resolution is key. It’s critical, and I think there’s a lot of practical strategies and tactics that we can use to do so.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Obviously, there’s some role for conflict aversion, just trying to get everybody along in the first place. So how do you think about just sort of the inevitability of conflict, like, try to handle it when it arises versus try to head it off before it arises?
TAREKA WHEELER
That’s a really good question, because for me, sometimes there is healthy conflict. There are times where you just may need to agree to disagree, and the conversations need to happen. There may be conflicting views, but that’s okay. I would say, though, I like to avoid conflict when I can, but I know sometimes it’s inevitable. But there’s ways to do that. And you want your team, you want the relationship with your leadership, with your clients and customers, to be in a space that’s non-conflict, right? That’s kind of conflict-averse. And I think the way you do that is you just have really good communication. You understand what is needed, you understand what is not needed and you’re really practicing good active listening. A lot of times when people think about active listening, they think, “Okay, I’m paying attention, I’m dialed in.” But, actually, I think one of the most important pieces of active listening is what people are not saying. And when you can kind of hone in on some of that, I think it helps you prevent a lot of conflict because you’re tuned in to what people are actively addressing and saying out loud, but then you’re also sitting back and observing, “Hmm, here are some things they’re not saying that honestly I need to pay attention to, maybe even put into, like, a risk register, because this could be a potential conflict in the future.” So I don’t think everything’s always going to be kumbaya, but I will say, understanding who you’re working with and really doing that active listening can help you prevent some of that conflict on the front end.
Strategies to manage—and resolve—conflicts resolution on projects
STEVE HENDERSHOT
What about if conflict is allowed to fester? You could take this in a couple directions. One is the sort of conference-table dynamics of “Bob and Susie hate each other and might come to blows at any moment,” and that’s harmful to team dynamics, but it also can be directional stuff, like conflict over “I think we should be going in this direction versus that direction, and we haven’t quite settled it.” That sort of more operational, less emotional, but it’s still conflict.
TAREKA WHEELER
A lot of conflict can be emotion-fueled. It’s coming from just our inherent human ability to just be full of emotions. And I think when we take a step back and look at the facts, look at the opposing sides or challenging sides, and then start to get back to “Okay, where can we collaborate? Where could we come to a point of consensus? Where can I perhaps even kind of mediate through this a bit so that you get a piece of what you need and I get a piece of what I need?” It’s really about being willing to talk it through and work together. As a project leader, you have the ability to facilitate that. You have the ability to work with your team members to make that happen.
On your other side, there could just be opposing views, opposing approaches. Nobody really is upset with one another, it’s just we’ve come to a point of conflict and we can’t seem to get through what’s next. I think at that point, there’s a lot of tools and tactics that you could use. I love doing brainstorming and whiteboarding with teams and just really looking at where are the positive outcomes, where are the potential negative impacts, and allowing data to really drive which direction we go. Like, allow the data to tell us. Allow the facts to tell us how we should move forward and resolve the conflict, not necessarily by ourselves, but leveraging the tools and what we have in front of us to do so. And, quite frankly, sometimes conflict in projects can actually improve projects because it’s forcing you to get out of the monotonous of the day to day and some of just your day-to-day thinking and practices, and it forces you to have some difficult conversations that actually could yield in a better solution.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
That’s great. I’m interested in your toolkit for getting people out of the emotionally heated place. How do you lower the temperature enough to begin doing some of the things that you just described?
TAREKA WHEELER
One of the pieces for me that’s really important is to step away. You have to take some time to step away and reset so that you can come back to the table with a clear mind, I won’t say removal of, but a reduced set of emotions, so that you can effectively, let’s say effectively, really work through conflict resolution. If you have not allowed yourself to kind of take a step back and reset and find a centering place or get back to baseline some might say, it’s going to be very difficult to work through those conversations. Your views are going to be jaded. So one thing is just to step away.
Another piece is, and I love to do this with project teams, let’s write it down. I want you to take the time to tell me, what are the challenges that you have? What are the challenges that you’re seeing? With the conflict that we have on the table right now, document for yourself your side. You know what I find that that does? It actually makes people think. And sometimes the conflict is not as big as one thinks it is. I can think of times where I’ve had individuals do that exercise, and what seemingly was a list of thousands of things that are wrong and how are we going to get through this, boil down to five. Because they took the time to actually take a step back and document it.
And then I think the third piece of that really is reminding individuals that generally your colleagues, your project team members, your leadership, have a positive intent. It’s a positive intent. They are absolutely in the position of wanting things to go well. And so, when you assume positive intent and not mal-intent on the front end, again, it helps you calm the emotion down and it helps you try to put yourself in the other maybe opposing side’s shoes to think about where might they be coming from. So I think when you can do all of that before coming to the table to have a discussion around a particular conflict is incredibly helpful, because it just kind of clears out some of the noise and really gets you to a place of calm, gets you to a place of focus, so that you can actually get to the positive outcome you’re desiring.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Yeah, that’s good. Once people get in the conflict doom loop, it’s easy to lose track of the empathy required to sort of see good intent and the other person as a good-faith actor, and you have got to get there. So can you walk us through a time when this toolkit came into play for you? A time when conflict bubbled up on a team you were leading, how you addressed it and got things back on course?
TAREKA WHEELER
I was managing a project team, and we had project team members who just could not get along. It had nothing to do with the customer, nothing to do with the client, nothing to do with the work. The personalities just did not match. I had an opportunity to really sit down with the individuals and just have a conversation and get us to the point of, what is going to be the best way to work together so that we can operate in this culture that we’re trying to create within this project team? Which is one of collaboration, which is one of innovation, ideation and providing value to our customers. How do we do that?
I wanted to hear from each individual, what’s going to be best for you? What would help you have a better experience on this team? And again, it caused both of them to step back, both of them to write down the information for themselves so they can kind of get from the list of 2,000 things that’s in their head to the actual pain points and their challenges, and then for us to come to some agreements and understanding of how we’re going to move forward. Here’s kind of the rules of engagement to move forward. Honestly, it worked brilliantly. Were they besties? Absolutely not. Were they able to work together for the common goal and the value that we needed to deliver to our client? Yes. Why? Because we got to the heart of the matter, and we took the time to address it and deal with it instead of allowing the conflict to fester and to start to impact our overall roles and goals that we have within the company.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
There’s a common thread there back with where we were earlier in terms of characterization. Sitting down, pulling together, focusing on where you’re trying to realize and getting everyone together on team outcomes opens up some possibilities.
TAREKA WHEELER
Agreed. My hope for project teams as a whole is that they keep the common goal and the outcome in mind, right? That’s why project charters for me are so important. I know some folks are like, “Wait a minute, that’s real?” Yes, project charters are absolutely real, and it wasn’t just in your PMBOK® (A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge®) for the time that you studied it. It’s real. And you should be doing them on your projects. But I think project charters are so helpful because it’s the foundation. It’s like the level-setter of what is it that we’re doing here, again? And that to me is almost a grounding rod, if you will. And if we are clear at the beginning of a project, if we’re clear at the beginning of an engagement what the expectations are, who are the key players, what are their goals, what is everybody’s roles and function? That’s why I love RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) charts, right? Just to understand who’s responsible, who’s accountable, who do we need to consult, who needs to be informed? All of that is so key, and it’s a part of conflict resolution because it’s mitigating it on the front end as much as you can so you actually don’t get to conflict. Right? So I think as much information you can have and give your key players, your stakeholders, your project team members, your leadership, your executive sponsors, whoever it may be, that you give them as much information as possible so that we can prevent as much conflict as we can from a negative space, right? That we can prevent that as much as we can. And I think a lot of it is just people need to be informed.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
So how do strategies for resolving conflict differ depending on who is at loggerheads? This could be within your team, could be an external project partner, could be cross-departmental with your organization. How do you adjust your approach based on what’s going on?
TAREKA WHEELER
You definitely have to tailor your approach to your audience. Right? So the way I might deal with or address conflict or pursue conflict resolution strategies with a project team member is very different in the way that I might approach that with a customer, which is different from the way I might approach that with my senior leadership. And that’s not to say that there’s a special treatment there, but each individual is looking at this potential conflict or brewing conflict through a different lens. If it’s internally within the organization and it’s coming from your executive leadership, you’re in a position to where you may be looking at your day to day, they’re looking at the bottom line. If it’s with a customer or client, they’re thinking about what is the final deliverables of the work that’s in front of you, and they’re two months, three months, even maybe a year down the road, and you’re looking at right now. If it’s a project team member, sometimes project team members get very boxed into their task, right, their deliverable, their role, their position.
Sometimes your strategy must start with a listening mode. It’s not the time to just jump in and start talking and speaking. You really need to listen and hear from your customer of what their challenge is. Before you go off and try to develop a solution, before you start building out mitigation strategies and contingency plans, you really need to stop and listen. However, if it’s a conflict that’s brewing in your project team and you’re project leader, yes, you need to listen, but you also need to kind of have some strategies in your toolbox to where you can jump in immediately and start to help resolve the situation. You know right off the bat that if I have a conflict that brews on my team, “Here’s my process, here’s my steps, here’s what I’m going through.” If it’s my senior leadership and executive and I have a conflict there, I have to really sit down and think about, “Okay, how am I going to characterize this and speak to this so that they truly understand what my conflict is and where I need their help?” or, goodness, if my conflict is with them directly, “How can I self-advocate for myself in a way that I understand what’s going to resonate with them?” And one might say, “Well, wait a minute. If there’s a conflict, you need to say what you mean and mean what you say and speak up.” Absolutely, but there’s a way to do it so that your response in this moment of conflict is not detrimental and that your intent does not get misconveyed because of your approach. I’ll say that again. With conflict resolution, your intent, you do not want it to be misconveyed in any way because you did not take the right approach and that you did not know your audience. So I think knowing the audience is key.
Ways project professionals can boost their conflict resolution skills
STEVE HENDERSHOT
All right, so I’m imagining as a project leader with a customer success role, you probably have a pretty high emotional intelligence that helps you deal with this, and as we shift the conversation to advice for other project leaders, lessons learned, things like that, how would you suggest that someone who would not rate this as an innate skill set go about building their conflict mitigation toolkit?
TAREKA WHEELER
I think the first thing you have to do is do a self-assessment. Conflict resolution for me, from a project leader perspective, and for any leader perspective honestly, starts with self. How do you manage conflict? Not at work, but just in general. What does that look like for you? What happens when things get contentious? What happens when challenges come? How do you normally respond and react? Because 9 out of 10, it’s not going to be much different from your personal to your professional activities. But you have to do a self-assessment and understand what that looks like. You also need to do a self-assessment to understand where are your strengths and where are there areas of improvement for negotiation. And I highly recommend that you dive into some of the great webinars that are [out there] around negotiation, around conflict management, things of that nature. PMI has a great suite of a ton of webinars that folks can go through to just hone in on some of those skills. Because it starts with self. I think the second thing that you want to have in your toolkit is that you want to understand, are you really good at mediation? Are you good at advocating for yourself and others? Are you good at collaboration? Like, where are those strengths? And then maybe start to even document some strategies for yourself of how you’re going to utilize those, should conflict arise.
And then I think the third thing is going back to the basics. As scary as it was in getting my PMP® (Project Management Professional certification), I think the things that really stick with me the most are at the foundation. You have got to leverage what many of us are just already trained to do and certified to do, and just being a good project manager. Documenting, communicating, making sure that you have a charter in place, making sure that you know who your stakeholders are, and you’ve done a stakeholder analysis, and you understand the folks that you need to keep engaged and keep happy, or those who really just want to have a seat at the table but are really not going to have too much of an impact on your project, right? You have to take yourself through that matrix. And then you’ve got to do really good risk management. I think conflict resolution and risk management go together. And when you’re able to kind of pre-identify potential risk, and then should those risks start to show themselves and kind of become a little bit more relevant, you’ve got strategies in place already. You’re putting almost like a little force field around yourself as a project leader, as a project manager, when you go back to some of the basics.
There could be conflict around budget. Okay, let’s think about what are the things that you could do better for managing costs. There could be conflicts around schedule and scope. Okay, let’s talk about scope management. Again, charter. Let’s talk about schedule. What did that look like? Did you really take a look? Did you give yourself enough time and resources to build that out? Did you utilize a work breakdown structure to really think about the task? Like, take yourself back to some of the basics and the foundation, and I guarantee you that’s going to help you have some tools in your toolbox when it comes to conflict management and resolution.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT
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Taking time to understand the source of conflict helps project leaders move toward resolution. Prabhath Gunawardhana, a program manager at the London Stock Exchange Group in Colombo, Sri Lanka, spoke with Projectified’s Hannah LaBelle about how he uses active listening to find common ground during conflict.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
HANNAH LABELLE
Prabhath, let’s start with why—why is conflict management a must-have skill for project professionals, especially given today’s world of work and project environment?
PRABHATH GUNAWARDHANA
Number one is, conflict is an inevitable aspect of human interactions, especially when you are in project management, where we will have diverse teams and very complex work happening. So, these conflicts are pretty normal. But effective conflict management will definitely ensure that these conflicts are resolved constructively. In today’s global work environments, where project teams often include members from different cultural backgrounds and different geographical regions, different time zones, conflict management skills will help navigate these differences and promote cohesive team dynamics. So that is an advantage.
And also, conflict management will always enhance the team collaboration. Managing conflict proactively fosters a better communication and collaboration among team members. It helps them to maintain a positive work environment, where it will prevent the minor issues from escalating. So this is another benefit. Conflicts will be there always, and if we left them unresolved, those can actually derail the project timelines and objectives. So effective conflict management contributes to the timely completion of projects by ensuring that these disputes are resolved quickly and do not hinder the project progress.
HANNAH LABELLE
Let’s talk about a time when you had to manage and resolve a conflict on a project. Let’s start by just talking about who was involved in this conflict and how did it affect the team or the project’s execution when this conflict started happening?
PRABHATH GUNAWARDHANA
Sure, Hannah. So I would like to take one example from one of my previous organizations where we were working on a very large, complex solution for a bank in Singapore. At some point of the user acceptance testing (UAT) period of the project, there was a conflict occurring in between the project stakeholders, mainly the client-side project manager, as well as the project sponsors and the development team. The conflict was related to the requirement ambiguities, where certain issues came up in the UAT phase. Client has tagged them as defects, where the project team is stating that those are not defects, those are new requirements. The root cause of this problem was, of course, there was a certain documentation related to the requirement that was not detailed enough. And because of this, these discussions were continuously happening, and this conflict was increasing. This was a two-phase project, so we were in the first phase UAT period, and the sponsor has stated that they’re going to put on hold to the phase two. So this was the time that I actually took over the project. So these things were escalated, and client was not happy and the team morale was down.
HANNAH LABELLE
So what were some of the skills or strategies that you used when trying to manage this conflict? And how did you ensure it wasn’t going to affect team morale and kind of get this project and phase two restarted?
PRABHATH GUNAWARDHANA
I was new to the team. So first, I had to get an understanding about what is happening around me. I had to understand what went wrong previously. I had to understand what are the major concerns currently that the team and the stakeholders are having. So some of the first steps that I have used is, setting up certain meetings to go through the ongoing issues or ongoing disagreements that they had in terms of whether it’s a defect or a new requirement. From stakeholder side, we have a few team members, including the project manager and some of the business analysts, some of the end users, some of the testers. And from the development team side also, we had multiple team members joining. Through the facilitation of these meetings, I managed to get an understanding about the current situation. And also I use other skills like active listening skills because I need to first understand what has gone wrong. Then only I can actually work with both the parties to come into a solution and resolve this conflict. Then during this conflict resolution, I need to first identify what is the scope that I’m going to focus first.
I established a criteria where we will first focus on these priority issues to resolve them. And also, not only setting up this framework, but also I established regular checkups of the health of the project to see and make sure that we are going in the right direction of resolving this conflict. So once I identify this initial scope that we need to focus on, it was of course related to the ambiguity of the requirements. So we created some additional steps. For example, we added additional workshops between the end users and development team, and we created prototypes. We created additional mockups, and we created additional bridging documents to clarify anything not 100% elaborated in our requirement documentation. And by achieving this result, and by facilitating more discussions between these two parties, we managed to resolve most of these problems, roughly around within [a] two-to-three months period. And, I mean, nobody believed at that time that this project will pass the UAT phase, but within around two-to-three-months period, we managed to complete the UAT phase with zero defects open. And even we got the phase two also.
HANNAH LABELLE
Once these things started to be implemented—this greater communication, these additional workshops, different strategies that you used—how did you see the change within your development team, as well as the change with the relationship with the client stakeholders and the client project manager?
PRABHATH GUNAWARDHANA
Initially, it was challenging because this conflict was happening for some time and I was new to the team. I need to build the trust among all the parties about myself—and that I’m going to help both the parties to come into an agreement and resolve this situation. I listened to both the parties, like I mentioned before.
The second step was that I understand the situation there. I had to understand from the development side, what they’re saying is certain requirements were not documented in the SRS, or Software Requirement Specification. And from the client side also it is true, certain requirements were not clearly documented. Because of that, we are not clear about what is in scope and what is out of scope. So I had to listen to both the sides, and then, of course, I had to create a win-win situation where we all come into a common ground and agree upon, “These are the things that we are going to do as defects. These are the things that we are going to do as additional functionalities or change requests.” So, through that, I managed to create a good relationship among the development team, as well as [with] the client, and all together, in this situation. So that helped us to build the trust continuously and also to get the future work for this project.
Conflict management strategies for in-person vs. remote team members
HANNAH LABELLE
How does work location come into play? You have maybe folks that are working remotely versus in person, how does that impact the conflict resolution or conflict management strategies that you’re choosing?
PRABHATH GUNAWARDHANA
Nowadays we have more and more remote working, so because of that, we will have these situations happening in-person as well as remote. So if you look at the communication methods, for example, if it is in-person, of course direct face-to-face conversations are possible. So that will help us to have immediate feedback, as well as maybe use nonverbal clues also, which can help us to quickly resolve misunderstandings. If it is a remote working pattern, definitely we will have to rely on digital communication. It could be emails, it could be video calls or chats. But it requires clear and well-documented communication to prevent any misinterpretation and ensure all parties are on the same page.
HANNAH LABELLE
You’ve mentioned a couple of skills throughout our discussion: active listening, problem-solving, collaboration, empathy. Are there any other skills that you think project professionals need when it comes to effectively managing conflict?
PRABHATH GUNAWARDHANA
In addition to what I have mentioned before, I would say, emotional intelligence will play a major part also. We will be challenged in certain situations, because sometimes you have to take hard decisions. Sometimes you have to see both the parties and see what is the best solution, which might not be ideal for a single party. But still you need to have your calmness. You need to have your self-awareness. You need to have your empathy and social skills. So emotional intelligence will play a major role also.
HANNAH LABELLE
As you look back at your career, what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from managing and resolving conflicts that you’ve really taken forward as you continue on?
PRABHATH GUNAWARDHANA
The biggest lesson I have learned from managing and resolving conflict is the importance of understanding different perspectives. When we drill down into the situation and when we actually discuss this with both the parties, it helps us to understand different perspectives of the situation. So this insight has been crucial in fostering effective communication and collaboration in my career. Because the more I understand about the people I’m working with, [it] will always help me to work with them in a more collaborative manner, as well as [to] create high-performing teams. By actively listening and empathizing with others, I have been able to navigate this conflict more constructively. So it always leads to more innovative solutions, and also stronger team dynamics, which will be a highly beneficial thing for any of the projects. So these type of approaches will always help in recognizing that conflict often arises from misunderstandings or different viewpoints, rather than actual personal attacks or different other reasons.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
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