Resolving Conflict

Hi There,

How do you resolve a conflict or a disagreement between two of your team members?

Today, people have shorter fuses due to the underlying worry and anxiety that comes along with the COVID-19 situation. If people on your team are losing it too easily, it is probably because of that underlying anxiety.

When two employees are arguing with each other, they are not able to rationalize or deal with the situation logically. Use these three tips when resolving conflict on the shop floor:

Resolving conflict on your team can be difficult. How do you resolve a conflict or a disagreement between two of your team members? Use these three tips.

Tip #1: Take control of the situation.

When your employees are getting angry and emotional on the shop floor, you cannot talk them through it. Your first job is to take control of the situation and remove them so that they can calm down. That will include separating them, or potentially sending them home to cool off – but don’t send them home at the same time. Make sure that you get them off at different times so that they don’t end up continuing their argument outside of the workplace.

Tip #2: Meet with those involved.

Once you have taken control of the situation and removed the situation from the workplace, you can meet with those involved and ask them some questions about what happened. When you ask questions, you need to ask mostly open-ended questions, like “How did this get started?” or “What caused this to flare up?” You need to take this time to find out from each party what happened so that you can see where their stories are different and where they are the same.

Tip #3: Seek solutions and commitments.

Get those involved in the conflict back together, to talk about the areas that they actually agree on and the areas in which they disagree. Mostly, what you are trying to do here is seek solutions and commitments.

You can propose some solutions or ask them what will help to solve the problem, but ultimately you want them to commit to not having those kinds of outbursts again on the shop floor.

When you get better at resolving conflict between two team members on the shop floor, you might decide that you want to work on some of your other leadership attributes. That’s where we come in.

We look forward to helping you strengthen your leadership skills, and make you more effective in the eyes of your team and your company.

Watch the full video here.

Thank you for investing your time in developing your leadership skills. Accept our best wishes for success on your leadership journey.

Sincerely,
Greg Schinkel, CSP
President Front Line Leadership Systems