In my business, my team is my professional family. Just as in any family, we experienced a major conflict. We were working toward a shared goal—a major new product launch—but my marketing and operations teams were at a stalemate. The disagreement was over a small, yet critical, aspect of the launch, and it was threatening to derail the entire project.
The communication approach that made the critical difference was to foster a new level of empathy and understanding. The traditional method would have been to simply mediate the conflict, but I realized that would have been a temporary fix. I gathered both teams in a room and told them, "We're not going to talk about the problem. We're going to talk about the customer."
We had a conversation about what the customer would want and what the customer would need. The conversation was no longer about a disagreement. It was about a shared goal. The impact this had was a massive increase in our team's trust and morale. The conflict disappeared because we were all working toward the same objective. The biggest win is that we learned that a conflict isn't a personal attack. It's a sign that we have a problem that we need to solve.
My advice is that the best way to navigate a conflict is to find a common purpose. Stop trying to mediate. You have to find a way to get people to see the world from a different perspective. When you do that, you achieve a new level of empathy and a team that is resilient.
