A CEO shares his key ingredient for cooling team conflict
Squabble with colleagues on the regular? You’re far from alone.
In one recent study of conflict at work, more than one third of employees say they deal with it often or constantly. Poor communication is the top cause, and almost one in four people say their managers handle conflict poorly.
Shaun McAlmont has a few ideas for avoiding that unhealthy team dynamic.
The president and CEO of Ninjio, a cybersecurity awareness training company with about 100 employees in the U.S. and Israel, has always been a team player. (As for Ninjio, it takes an unusual but effective approach to informing workers about cyber risks: animated content voiced by Hollywood actors.) While attending Brigham Young University as a rare minority student on an athletic scholarship, McAlmont also competed on the national track squad for his native Canada.
For the former team captain at BYU, leadership is about making sure everyone is aligned and supporting each other: “What’s the goal, and how do we all get there?”
Along the way, conflict is inevitable. But one factor can make a huge difference for teams.
McAlmont, who went back to school in his forties for a PhD in higher education from the University of Pennsylvania, steers the conversation to author Patrick Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of a team. No. 1: absence of trust.
Trust is foundational, McAlmont argues. “You have to build that trust as a team to be able to deal with the tougher things,” he says. “And in the absence of that trust, the tough things become super difficult and almost insurmountable.”
Take conflict.
“In the absence of trust, sometimes conflict can just seem like somebody going after somebody else,” McAlmont says. “And it feels personal where it shouldn’t. If it’s truly related to improving the business, the communication, the level of trust that you’ve built as foundation should help you have those tough dialogues and honest debate amongst team members.”
So how does McAlmont build that foundation of trust?
By talking to his people. He holds weekly one-on-one meetings with each member of his executive team, plus a weekly gathering that brings them all together. “We talk about the efforts going toward that shared vision,” McAlmont says, adding that he’s expanded the discussion to include VPs and a leadership development group. A company’s leaders must be aligned on the overall mission, he emphasizes. “As soon as you start saying, ‘Oh, those guys,’ that’s where there’s a crack, and conflict will seep right into that crack very, very quickly.”
Managing conflict also means acknowledging that you might not have the right team, McAlmont notes. To stop other people from quitting, sometimes a leader has to show a problematic team member the door: “It builds trust, just in the fact that you recognized there was a misfit or dissonance, and you actually addressed it.”
Likewise, if McAlmont gets wind of a conflict or something brewing, he tries to jump on it fast. His game plan: “Bring the teams together and talk through the elements that are conflicting, and really try to find resolution.”
On that note, when it comes to conflict, McAlmont thinks leaders should set a good example. “If I’m in a meeting and…I’m swearing and calling people out, yeah, that’s one style. And it basically says, ‘Hey, that’s okay in this organization.’” McAlmont calls his style respectful: “It’s staying on the side of positivity and getting to the right answer and listening and collaborating.”
No argument there.
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
