Where groups of people gather, conflict is bound to crop up. Wherever highly motivated Type-A personality sales personnel gather, conflict is nearly a given. In these situations, it often does not matter so much what the conflict is about so long as management has a formal plan in place for turning the conflict into concord.
In this post, learn tactics for how to resolve sales team conflicts and rebuild unity among the team members.
Tactic #1: Understand how different people try to resolve conflict.
For every conflict, there is a potential path to resolution. Where trouble often arises is when one person's preferred path or strategy actively conflicts with the strategy of another.
For managers working with their salespeople to resolve conflict and rebuild team unity, having a firm grounding in the 5 basic conflict management techniques is a must:
- Collaborating. A collaborative approach treats all parties to the conflict as equals, with equal rights and equal worth. While the most time-consuming approach, this is also the one most likely to achieve lasting and unifying results.
- Avoiding. Avoiding an unfolding conflict can be a risky move, unless the root of the conflict itself is ephemeral or simply non-negotiable. Typically, conflicts that are avoided will only grow.
- Compromising. Compromise-based conflict completion, where each party gets at least some of what is demanded in order to end the conflict itself, is best achieved with the aid of a manager or impartial mediator.
- Accommodating. An accommodating approach can be handy if there is a tight time deadline or one lone dissenter that keeps the conflict alive. However, an accommodation too early on may actually overlook an essential issue that needs to be addressed.
- Competing. A competing approach is the right choice in matters where company policy is being violated or illegal activities are going on. In most other cases, taking a competitive approach may cause long-lasting resentment that can lead to additional future conflicts.
Tactic #2: Remove ambiguity and require accountability - in writing.
Even the most dedicated employees are still people first and workers second. As such, conflict at some level tends to be unavoidable. This is especially true among salespeople, who are tasked with following required business processes while maximizing sales and bonuses.
The best way to sort out petty from serious conflict is to remove ambiguity. Forbes calls the latter "he said, she said" conflicts.
When managers put a business process in place to resolve conflicts that starts with writing down the official conflict at hand, continues with documentation of all conflict-related discussion and concludes with a written resolution all parties sign off on, there is zero ambiguity left to create further conflict.
Tactic #3: Act now or pay later.
This tactic can be perceived as confrontational, and should be reserved for serious conflicts with policy or legal ramifications.
One study shows that senior management and executives in a typical company spend up to 30 percent of their annual work hours managing litigation. The cost of this is extremely high when you add up the hourly rate of top managers and executives plus the costs of legal representation and court fees and potential legal payouts to plaintiffs.
Such litigation can bring down even a well-heeled company, but it doesn't have to. One of the best and actually easiest ways to avoid such costly conflict resolution is to simply step in early and do whatever it takes to resolve it from within, restore unity and get the sales team back on track.
There is no one single right or wrong way to resolve sales team conflicts, especially when there are many people involved. Luckily there are as many conflict resolution techniques as there are conflicts, so persistence is likely to yield a strategy that works.
