Conflict Management

Conflict Management

Reflecting on my professional experience, I recall a few months ago, a colleague in the advisory department wanted funding for a transaction from my team. The advisory department wanted the funds to be given directly to them with a significantly higher fee to be paid also for bringing the opportunity. This didn’t go well with my team as we wanted to invest directly in the transaction (rather than giving the funds to them to support the trade as if they were the owner of the funds) and also pay a moderate fee. This created severe conflicts between both teams, so it had to be escalated to our common supervisor.

From the reading “Managing Conflict in Organizations,” two primary sources of this conflict were role incompatibility and environmental stress (1). Although both departments’ tasks are interdependent, our roles are incompatible. Also, the advisory department was lagging in their revenue budget and was looking for an opportunity to improve this, hence the need to charge a higher fee to my department, which was already meeting the revenue target. Revenue generation wasn’t a priority for us. Still, my team was concerned about the regulatory risk of using the client’s funds to invest in a related party transaction.

The two teams’ leaders have equal power and are highly committed to mutually exclusive goals (1). This makes the compromising conflict resolution style the most appropriate tool to use in this situation. To resolve this conflict using the compromise style, both teams will be willing to make sacrifices to obtain a typical gain (1). In this case, the advisory group will get the fee they want, while my team will invest directly in the transaction. This way, the advisory group can benefit from improving their revenue while my team avoids any regulatory risk now and in the future. Ultimately, we both get some portion of what we want (1).

As revealed by the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), my conflict management style played a part in this situation. My TKI Profile showed that I scored the highest on compromising, followed by competing, with my lowest score on collaborating (2).

In my leadership journey, my usual response to conflict is finding the most important thing to both parties and looking for ways to meet these critical needs. My mindset is “protect that most important thing and everything else is fair game.”

Reference

Managing Conflict in Organizations. (2019). Retrieved from https://services.hbsp.harvard.edu/lti/links/UV0416-PDF-ENG

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Reflecting on your professional experience and what you have been reading from Lencioni, describe a time when there was damaging conflict on a team you were a member of. This conflict may have been suppressed, not directly addressed, or it may have surfaced in a destructive way to team effectiveness.

Conflict Management

Applying material from this week, the Internet, and Library research, explains how the team and team leader could have better managed the conflict. Consider how your conflict management style, as revealed by the TKI Assessment, played a part in this situation.