Team Communication: Using Conflict Wisely

Team Communication: Using Conflict Wisely

Effective team communication is not about the avoidance of conflict, but making conflict useful to the achievement of the team's desired goal. Every team is made up of individuals with different skills, personalities, and personal agendas. Ideally, these will mesh in such a way to make the team stronger, rather than weaker. One person's strength can compensate for another team member's weaknesses. Not everyone can be a leader, all of the time, even if a specific person has the designation of 'team leader.' Always, some members will need to follow the guidance and direction of others at certain junctures, and lead during other points of the work process. Like a sports team, every team member must work to a common goal of 'winning' or achieving a particular aim, even if they play vastly different 'positions' on the team. A light-footed quarterback may have different tactical skills and a different physique than a linebacker, but both players are necessary for a football team to win, and to function as a team in any sense of the word. A baseball team made up only of great pitchers may never hit a home run when the team is up at bat.

What makes a team?

Teams are conglomerates of individuals all working to achieve a common goal. Without a common goal a team is merely a group of people, not a true team. Having a general long-term goal is not enough. After all, even though everyone on a sports team may want to win, this does not mean that they can ignore the need for short-term, specific, and clear goals to achieve the ultimate objective. "For example, in the sports game of soccer, instead of just indicating to win the game, the team can set clear and specific goals by scoring two goals and conceding no goal to win the game"(Yusope 2008). Agreeing upon the necessary aim and determining the best ways to achieve that goal is often where thinking gets fuzzy, and disagreements conflict may arise.

To retain clarity of focus and to improve communication, teams can take one step that is very simple to understand, but may be very difficult, logistically to achieve. They can meet frequently -- but not so frequently the team generates a groupthink mentality. A study of 11 Dutch companies involved in developing hardware, based upon questionnaires from 243 employees on 44 team found that creative performance, as self-reported by the employees, was significantly affected by the levels and patterns of communication among team members and the frequency of communication was the critical factor in improving creative output. Earlier research indicated that effective teamwork required that team members communicate a minimum of one to three times per week. The authors found that too little communication among a team's subgroups lead to poor cohesion and poor group performance. But staying in constant touch lead cliques to form, and completely stifled conflict. "Extensive communication, whether face-to-face, by phone, by e-mail or through instant messaging, can lead to a group-think mentality that stifles originality. Some team members may start to evaluate assumptions less rigorously. Others may coast on the group's ideas and expend less of their own effort on the project" (Kratzer, Leenders & Engelen 2005:7).

People can also get blocked into performing certain roles, such as the 'loudmouth' or self-appointed leader, and the 'mouse' who merely sits in the corner and does not pull his or her weight, or self-censors his or her valuable input because of disagreement with the more vocal members of the group. Utilizing everyone's talents and capabilities, however diverse or occasionally contentious will maximize efficiency, as will create an atmosphere that fairly solicits input; perhaps by creating rules that every one speaks once during a meeting, rather than allows one member to dominate. "It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing leadership. As with geese, people are interdependent on each other's skills, capabilities and unique arrangements of gifts, talents or resources" (Missico 2001).

The ideal state of group interaction and communication is not one of total autonomy, or total integration, but one of "interdependence and flexibility," in which "everyone knows each other well enough to be able to work together" but "trusts each other enough to allow independent activity"("Famous Models: Stages of Group Development," 2001, Chimaera Consulting). "In simple terms, the group process leads to a spirit of cooperation, coordination and commonly understood procedures and mores. If this is present within a group of people, then their performance will be enhanced by their mutual support (both practical and moral)" (Blair 2008). Groups, and members of a group, must have strong interpersonal and managerial skills, to become self-managing units. A group must exercise collective leadership, not merely be lead by a single individual (Blair 2008).

Even if one person may be designated as a leader, the group must agree upon a particular way to organize meetings, plan, set goals, and monitor and review performance. Having a mission statement can help give clarification and focus to all of these duties. If the mission statement becomes a point of contention, it at least encourages the articulation of issues in a clear and directive fashion and may even establish that disagreement is 'okay' within the group, early on. Having a formal feedback procedure ensures not only that the group is less likely to go off-task but helps to generate an atmosphere in which criticism is neutral rather than focused upon personality (Blair 2008).

Managing team diversity

In today's workforce, teams are more likely to be diverse, ethnically, geographically, and in terms of age and gender than ever before. Depending on their cultural as well as personal orientation, team members may have different levels of conflict tolerance, and more direct and indirect means of articulating their opinions. Fostering sensitivity towards such cultural differences, as well as personality differences, is a positive goal for a team leader or member. This can be quite difficult, causing Geert Hofstede to tartly note: "Culture is more often a source of conflict than of synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster," given that individuals with different backgrounds may have trouble communicating, due to their different levels of respect for individual vs. group identity, respect for power hierarchies, and avoidance of uncertainty ("Geert Hofstede Analysis," 1999, International Business Center).