Brita came into my office. I had an open office approach and so it wasn’t surprising to see her in front of my desk before I realized she had entered. As I looked up from my laptop on my desk I could see she was agitated and animated. I asked her what was wrong. We had worked together for many years so I knew her pretty well.

“Those idiots in Germany just don’t get it and I’m getting tired of covering for all their mistakes”, she said. It crossed my mind that this was fairly ironic given the fact that she was born in Bavaria and originally worked for the German team she was now maligning. Quite the entrance I thought to myself, but this was typical of Brita, as she was fiery and said what was on her mind as a constant stream of consciousness.

“What’s happened now”, I said and she launched into a diatribe of things that the German team had either not responded to or not taken seriously, in her view.

I listened to what she said, took some notes but didn’t really respond as this had become a continual complaint recently and I was not sure how really to deal with it. As she left my office my phone went and I saw from the screen that it was Werner calling me from Munich. I pushed the accept button to take the call and before I even finished saying “Hi Werner how are you doing”, I was hearing a frustrated complaint about Brita and her attitude.

Over the last few weeks, there had been a continual conflict between the two teams that reported to me and it didn’t seem that the situation was going to blow over quickly, which is what I’d been hoping. I worked for Coca-Cola and led a team in Vienna, Austria that oversaw 30 countries on the McDonad’s business and Germany was the most important country in my area. I was now faced with a situation where there seemed to be a deep conflict between my two teams. This had to be resolved and I probably had waited too long, but it had all seemed to get bad so quickly.

Every quarter we held planning meetings between the two teams and I checked my calendar and noticed we were approaching one of these in the next few weeks.

If this meeting was going to be successful I had to address what was rapidly becoming a very large elephant in the room.

Over the next few days, I started planning how would be the best way to address what was clearly a conflict and how to confront this without making it so painful it would tear the teams apart. How did I confront the conflict?

Normally we all flew to a location in Germany (the German team drove) in the late afternoon, and had dinner together, had the planning meeting the next day, and left in the afternoon. I changed the agenda so we still arrived in the evening, had dinner and the next day would be a full day of meetings and then a second dinner and before we would all leave the following morning. So two nights instead of one. I got some push back but won the day.

We all duly arrived and checked in to the hotel and met for drinks before dinner. The mood was stilted and a depressing pallor hung over the whole evening. I went to bed that evening with a concerned foreboding for the next day.

The next morning I split the group into two, which is my group and then the German team, with a flip chart for each team, in different rooms. I asked them to capture on the flip chart what was it they disliked most about the other team, but they were not to make it personal just what it was from a business perspective and if it was personal then they should take it offline and speak to me separately. I emphasized my impartiality and said I would work with both teams as my only agenda was resolving the differences so we could get back to building our business.

After about an hour I had both groups come back into the main meeting room and they reported out to each other. Neither group was allowed to say anything until the report out was completed then it was the other team’s turn. After both teams had their turn, they went back to their separate rooms and discussed this feedback, with the instruction to remember that “perception is reality”. I asked them to not be defensive but asked both teams to address what would they do to overcome the other team’s issues with them.

You can imagine the kind of discussions we got into but as the morning unfolded there became a real realization and understanding of the other team’s point of view and how these assessments may have been made arrived at.

The second part of the exercise was to turn this around and ask each team to put together bullet points of what they most admired in the other team. And they reported out in a similar manner.

Then I asked them to go back in their groups and come up with action plans to address both the strengths and weaknesses of each team and specific plans with timelines of how these will be worked on upon and improved.

Lunchtime was a much more humorous and lighthearted gathering and in the afternoon we got into our quarterly business planning and were very productive.

I was glad I had planned dinner to be together and stay on an extra night because it really really started the process of re-bonding and building a tight-knit team, probably even more than we had before.

I learned that conflict really has to be confronted and as long as it’s done positively and with care, it can build the gaps and weaknesses that can so often decimate and undo all the good of successful teams.

 

Photo: “Dueling Dementors”​ – Forsyth Woman