Friction goes hand in hand with teamwork. Every day, people striving to collaborate hand in hand must contend with divergent interests, risks of misunderstanding, and all sorts of factual constraints. These sources of tension should not be taken lightly, at the risk of seeing the situation worsen. People might then feel like they are being held hostage68. To smooth out difficulties, leaders must wield emotional intelligence, the art of negotiation, and feedback management. It is important to
remember that disagreements, when well managed, are drivers of growth: teams emerge strengthened, with proven resilience and introspection capabilities. Moreover, conflict management specialists assure that one should not hesitate to tackle problems, in order to gain efficiency…

• Base your conflict management on common rules. Your team must feel that they can relate to it. Therefore, your approach must reflect their own representation of things. Help them establish standards, mechanisms, and a unified language for addressing problems.
• Create a feedback culture and rituals, which you will then embed into routines. Plan special meetings to allow your team to "put the fish on the table," according to George Kohlrieser, professor at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne. The principle is simple: during these sessions, which can also take place one-on-one, everyone is allowed to talk about sensitive topics.
• Train your team in non-violent communication (NVC)69. Give them opportunities to practice feedback according to NVC principles or another method applicable to your situation (e.g., Situation-Behavior-Impact, or SBI).
• Adopt an adult-to-adult position to manage conflicts. You can draw inspiration from the transactional analysis model70 by American psychiatrist Eric Berne. He distinguishes three ego states: Parent, Adult, and Child. In case of conflict, typically, there is a risk of slipping from an adult-to-adult relationship to a parent-to-child relationship (the child can either rebel or submit). Talk about this with your team, highlighting the interest of this model for conflict management.
• Ask for help. Solicit a neutral third party (e.g., mediation specialist, ombudsman, work psychologist, coach) before the situation escalates. The pictogram below illustrates unhealthy psychological games (involving three interchangeable roles: victim, persecutor, and rescuer) that are frequently observed in conflicts. This model is known as Karpman's Drama Triangle71.

• Deny or ignore the conflict, or let the team flounder. Dysfunctional teams are often too permissive. But it also happens that they suffer from a kind of allergy to conflict: they strive to maintain at all costs what I call an artificial harmony. The group is in danger of remaining stuck in its development.
• The conflict spiral. Excessive passivity could open a breach to the escalation of violence. Try to preserve possibilities for dialogue so that people can glimpse a win-win outcome.
• An exaggerated expression of power and authority. In a conflictual context, an overly strict attitude could lead to incivilities within teams: bullying, sarcasm, shouting, etc. We have seen people throw objects across offices...
• The under-expression of power and authority. Leaders who wisely use the power of their status provide their teams with the foresight necessary for conflict resolution. They thus help reduce errors and inefficiencies.
• Turning towards manipulation and inauthenticity. Unfortunately, there are leaders who show preferences, divide and conquer, speak ill of people behind their backs and/or criticize them in the presence of hierarchy. Or else, they wall themselves off in a passive-aggressive attitude, snubbing colleagues and not bothering to answer their questions.