How can your team overcome conflict and mistrust amongst its members?
Open conflict and hidden conflict can happen in any organisation. It's so sad that day-to-day conflict is synonymous with teamwork for some people. The good news is that in almost any situation, you can overcome it. It's not as difficult as you'd think, either!

Why is this a problem?
It arises for several reasons:

• Expert staff have an invested a lot in developing their own views. They have what they think is a clear vision of future solutions. Their first instinct when faced with different ideas is to defend their own postitions.
• Where team members believe that others have negative motives. So just in case, they don't share valuable information, ideas or opinions that the team should be working with.
• Senior people are often poorly skilled at criticising; conversely some junior people can be over-sensitive to criticism.
• Misunderstandings escalate, often reinforced by 'debate' (like politicians!) rather than dialogue that gets to the heart of problems.

What could be done about it?
The team must secure some time away from routine work. Usually a day wuold be the minimum required. It could begin by using one of the 'icebreakers' which encourage people to share some personal information. This builds a bridge of trust, and is also fun to do!

After this, there are a couple of ways to approach things. The best is to have a structured discussion about a real problem that the team has encountered in the past. very member should recount the problem, why it occurred, why it was difficult to deal with, from their own perspective. Misunderstandings may well surface, which are often root causes of what appears to be more intractable conflict later on.

Another method is 'continue, start, stop'. Each member of the team (with the team leader beginning) stands at a flipchart and collects feedback from the others: what are their good points - things they should continue doing? What things should they begin doing? What irritating or counter-productive things should they stop doing?

All in all this is quite a challenging problem to overcome, and needs a highly trained facilitator.

Case Studies: Building connections - defusing conflict

There are many examples of different functional teams that have had dificulties working together. Talking to them individually, people have said things like "They treat our group as second-class citizens"; "Some people in the other group are real troublemakers"; "We do our job, and then we find the other group have been interfering on our area of responsibility".

We've worked with a lot of these teams. The problems have ranged from logistical ones to serious mustrust and interpersonal conflict. After the individual consultations, spending perhaps 1.5 days with a whole set of groups has seen the serious conflict evaporate, misunderstandings being cleared up. Typically, each group has been encouraged to prepare some thoughts - 'what do we want from the others; what do we appreciate about them; what do we wish was different.' And then encouraged to talk through some past flare-ups, with adequate time to hear each others' views and feelings. They have forged some new operating principles, and harnessed some great ideas for working better together.