Five Tips for Defusing Discord

One of a manager's biggest challenges is responding to discord on the team, usually the result of long festering wounds. Disarming a personal grudge can be a painful, teeth-grinding exercise, like extracting a badger from its hole by hand. But it must be done if the team is to focus and learn to work together.

Harvard Business Publishing blogger John Baldoni offers five ways to handle discord on your team, a list worth filing under "D" the next time you need it.

Baldoni suggests:

1. Diagnose the root cause.
2. Stay high and dry.
3. Defuse the conflict.
4. Find common ground.
5. Follow through.

For my money, the hardest task on this list is to get to the root of the problem. These internal conflicts may have occurred long before you arrived on the scene as a manager, or were forged when your staffers were in other departments. Maybe one employee was favored over another at promotion time or was given vacation time that the other employee also wanted.

Often these discords grow undetected by management under the surface, eventually building into mythic proportions. Getting to the heart of the manner will lay the proper ground work for steps 2-5.

Have you had classic cases of working through discord on your team? Share what worked and didn't work for you in solving the issue.