Team members may disagree from time to time. Leaders play an essential role in resolving these disagreements.
But what happens when Leaders do not know how to handle them? Conflicts that are not managed and left unresolved can confuse and demotivate team members, reducing the performance of the team.
The best advice I got about handling disagreement was from reading Patrick Lenceony's book "The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team". Leaders should not avoid conflict and try to find an "artificial" harmony but rather detect and explore conflicts among team members and discuss them to help them resolve them.
How can you resolve the conflicts? Learn to "Disagree and commit" as a team. This means everyone agrees that they are free to raise their voice and the rest of the team is going to listen to their ideas, but, when there is a disagreement, a person in charge of the decision is going to make a call and everyone is going to commit and support that choice.
The catch is that there is a prerequisite to achieving this level of commitment: Trust. You can't build an effective team if they not trust each other or their leaders.
Follow me on Twitter or subscribe to the newsletter for more articles on software engineering leadership and troubleshooting software engineering teams' problems.
