Arriving at Consensus

Conflict is perhaps most likely to arise in team work during decision-making. You can help to avoid unnecessary conflict by ensuring that individuals see and understand the logic of what you are proposing, by exploring and discussing the proposals and by making sure there is agreement before proposals are finalised. Some guidelines are:

• Present a position logically, pointing out strengths and weaknesses and illustrating with examples.
• Try to avoid using your extra power as team leader or manager.
• Demonstrate the benefits as well as any disadvantages of the proposal.
• Avoid changing your mind or agreeing with something because this is easier than promoting or defining what you regard as a good proposal.
• Remember that consideration of a variety of ideas and opinions is likely to be constructive.
• Make sure that everybody has access to all the information needed to reach considered opinions.

Sometimes during the life of a team, conflict can run so high that communication is impaired and intervention may be necessary. At such times, the team will need to examine its own progress. Here, you will need to:

• ensure that behaviour between members is appropriate
• reinforce and support desirable behaviour
• be prepared to raise the issue of inappropriate behaviour
• create a sense of fairness by empowering or sharing power across team members
• make sure the team goals are shared. (adapted from Hill and Farkas, 2001)

Task and Maintenance Activities

One way of monitoring the successful functioning of teams is to look at two different types of behaviours. Task behaviours are those that aim to achieve the project or overall tasks set. Maintenance behaviours are those that keep the team running smoothly. It is important that both types of behaviours are present. Some examples are shown below:

Task Maintenance

Proposing: Proposing ideas or courses of action that help the achievement of the task.
Gatekeeping: Making a positive attempt to bring a person into the discussion or making an equally clear attempt to prevent a person from being excluded.

Building: Adding to other people's proposals.
Encouraging: Behaving or responding in a warm and friendly way.

Disagreeing: Contesting proposals that seem to be misconceived and might work against the achievement of the task.
Resolving conflict: Being ready to compromise and accept what others want to do.

Giving and seeking information: Providing data and opinions relevant to the task achievement.
Giving feedback: Giving position feedback on feelings and opinions

Summarising: Summarising a discussion or the group's progress.
Recognising feelings: In general, recognising that people have personal feelings about their work

Finding a balance between the two types of behaviours can be difficult. You may need to work hard to control the emergence of individuals' personal interests, motivations and agendas which can be detrimental to team working. Trust between team members can help individuals to suppress their personal interests for the good of team development and performance.

Developing Trust

A reasonable degree of trust is an essential ingredient of any successful relationship. Without trust, communication will deteriorate because people will begin to hide their views or try to impose them.

Each member of a team must take some responsibility for the development of trust, although team leaders and managers have the greatest responsibility and the greatest influence. Trust is likely to develop when people listen to and respect each other's views, irrespective of whether or not they agree with them. Then they are able to share their ideas and views without fear of recrimination.

As you can help to ensure the development of trust by involving team members in setting team and individual goals and by giving the team members the necessary autonomy to carry out their tasks without undue interference. You should take care, however, that delegating responsibility to team members does not result in abdicating responsibility - that is, ceasing to monitor the performance of team members. A team must also have ways of monitoring and giving feedback on the performance of its members. Any effective team will need to conduct regular reviews.

The higher the level of trust a group has, the easier it will be to deal with conflict when it (almost inevitably) occurs.

Developing Individual Contributions

Based on their prior experience, team members will bring assumptions and ideas about how teams should operate, what is expected of them and what they can expect from the team-working experience. These assumptions, ideas and expectations may not be appropriate to the current situation. Conversations are essential to bring to the surface any possible tensions. Questions for you to address here include:

• How well do the tasks allocated fit with the person's preferred 'role(s)'?
• Who has the skills and experience to handle a particular task competently and efficiently?
• Who will find the task useful for their development?
• What further training, development or support might an individual need?

Allocating Tasks

The allocation of tasks, responsibilities and priorities of individual team members is usually done, at least partly, through joint discussion and negotiations in the team. If the team has a manager, it will be the manager's responsibility to see that this is done effectively. Usually the process will be supported and strengthened by regular supervision and appraisal. Key questions for you to ask are:

• Has work been fairly distributed between team members?
• Have roles and responsibilities of team members been decided?
• Has each individual member taken personal responsibility for at least some aspect of the team task? (adapted from West, 2004)

Ground Rules

The team needs to establish a mutually-agreed working approach. The means of participation and expectations of the team experience should be agreed on. Discussions will inevitably consider the norms and values held by the team and what rules are needed to preserve these.

Team members will also need to discuss process issues, such as how the group evaluates and self-regulates itself (that is, how any performance issues will be addressed) and how conflicts are managed.

Team Goals and Objectives

A team needs clear goals that members believe are important and worthwhile. A team is more likely to be effective if it can participate in developing team objectives and work out how they are to be achieved, even if the team's overall goal has been imposed from above. Discussions should lead to action planning, including specific milestones, timetables and monitoring activities to keep the team focused and to create an appropriate sense of urgency. Defining a measurable output gives the team a framework to work within.