The Conflict Resolution Skills Every Project Manager Needs

When you’re new to project management, you might think the secret is to keep conflict to a minimum to ensure that your team completes tasks, meet deadlines, and avoids melees. Maybe you frame your role as the bridge-builder — the peacemaker. While that sounds good in theory, trying to keep everyone happy misses the point of effective project management.

The real secret is to foster an environment where the inevitable conflicts between opposing demands are anticipated, appreciated, and resolved in a way that optimizes the outcome for the project and the business overall. A great project manager is less a peacemaker and more a keen, skillful, and respected conflict manager. Effective project managers need to build skills to:

Expose Tensions and Trade-Offs

Projects bring together stakeholders with different perspectives, priorities, and levels of expertise. Maybe sales walks in the door lobbying for a product roadmap packed with new features, while engineering digs in to protect platform stability, and operations won’t be distracted from their laser-focus on streamlined deployment. That’s not a sign that anyone is a poor team player or that the project is doomed. It instead reflects the diverse and often diverging demands on any initiative. Your goal as a project manager is to provide a safe and constructive forum for everyone to understand these demands and to find a path that offers the best possible outcome, given the available resources, within your risk tolerance.

Without someone willing to broach these trade-off conversations, stakeholders often retreat and retrench into their functional perspectives, causing the project to suffer. In cases where decision authority is unclear, this can lead to a stalemate where no one is willing to sign off on the plan. Alternatively, if one group does have the power, clout, or decision-making authority, they might force through a decision that doesn’t work for other stakeholders. In that case, dissenters might respond with anything from protesting openly and stalling the planning; to coalescing passively, but surreptitiously undermining the decision; to proceeding with the plan even though there are inherent risks that might blow up later. None of these options is attractive. While introducing conflict during the deliberations might feel slow and risky at the time, it’s much safer and more efficient than avoiding it.

Establish a Productive Conflict Dynamic

It’s best to start any new project by fostering the right conflict mindset among team members. Productive conflict requires that all parties appreciate the competing demands and necessary trade-offs. But don’t expect stakeholders to show up with clarity about their position or empathy for the needs and demands of others. Self-awareness is in short supply, and empathy is hard to conjure in an environment where SMART goals and the drumbeat of accountability keep individuals focused on their own functional priorities. As a great project manager, you need to foster awareness, understanding, and respect for the different perspectives around the table.

You can get off to a good start when you’re kicking off a new project by doing a team exercise to map the healthy tensions. The first step is to help each team member articulate the unique expertise they bring to the table and the issues they will be paying attention to. Next, have them describe the stakeholders for whom they must advocate. Finally, write a concise description of the tension each role is obliged to bring to the deliberations. For example, sales might be paying attention to the competition, advocating for potential customers, and fighting for a solution that’s differentiated, whereas operations might be focused on the ease of delivery, advocating for people in manufacturing and logistics, and arguing for something that’s scalable. You can find more detailed instructions for doing the exercise here.

Having facilitated this exercise hundreds of times, I can attest to the transformation when everyone in the room feels legitimized to advocate for what their role requires, and feels prepared for the contrasting positions they will hear in response. If you keep the resulting map handy, it can serve as a touchstone you can return to when facilitating particularly contentious conversations.

Solicit Dissent and Facilitate Conflict

Even while doing this project kickoff exercise, it’s common for some team members to keep quiet and leave perspectives unspoken. Your job is to create a safe space where the team considers all of the pertinent options, risks, and trade-offs. Drawing on the tensions map, you might say, “We’ve been focused on the design and haven’t yet discussed the implementation. Hassan, how are you thinking about the effect of the proposed design on the ease of roll-out? What should we be factoring in?” Continue inviting people to contribute until you have each unique perspective in the discussion.

Not only will you need to invite participants to disagree with one another actively, but you’ll also need to ensure that unpopular perspectives, dissenting opinions, and contrary facts get a fair hearing. You can use prompts such as, “What risks have we not addressed yet?”, “Who might object to this plan and on what grounds?”, or “How could this plan fail, and what would we have to change to reduce the risk?” to introduce some tension. In particularly conflict-averse cultures, I allow some emotional distance from the dissent by asking for concerns as hypotheticals, such as what could go wrong or who might object, rather than asking someone to disagree directly.

Manage Friction

Not all conflict is healthy. When the dynamic shifts from productive tension into destructive friction, you, as the project manager, must be able to redirect it. You might need to interject if someone interrupts, contradicts, or belittles others. Your exact move depends on the situation, but practice encouraging people who are talking too much to make space for others to speak, asking someone who isn’t listening to paraphrase a colleague’s concerns before responding, or saying something like, “We knew that there were going to be competing priorities on this project. Let’s spend a minute talking about how we can incorporate what the quality assurance team needs into the plan.”

If one person’s behavior disrupts the whole team or the attacks become personal, you won’t be able to manage the dynamic in the room. Take time before meetings to speak with a contentious person about what you need from them and to have a frank discussion about what might derail them in the room. If unpleasant or unprofessional interactions occur, give the person private feedback about how their behavior affects the project. If problems persist, you might need to speak with the person’s manager — not to complain or tattle on them — but to share what’s been happening and ask for advice about how to get the best from the person.

Influence Those with Power

Most project managers have tremendous accountability, but often lack the formal authority to make the important calls. Instead, you have to influence the formal decision-makers and executive sponsors who are in control. When the required conflict is with someone who has more power than you, it’s helpful to follow four guidelines:

• Connect your concerns to the stated goals of the project, preferably the goals that the leader articulated. For example, “I know the most important thing for you is that this is done on time. I’m concerned that your proposed scope will jeopardize the timelines.” That way, you’re making it clear that your objections are in service of the project.

• Translate your concerns into an objective description of the person’s behavior. For example, if the executive sponsor is sucking the oxygen out of the room, say, “When you give your opinion before others weigh in, I notice that the conversation stops. How can we ensure that we hear the issues now rather than later?”

• If you need to raise a contentious point with someone in power, be sure to state your goal in doing so. If a brass plaque on the office wall says that the company values transparency, say, “I’m trying to live up to our value of transparency.” If you are acting in the project’s best interest, say, “It’s uncomfortable to broach this with you, but I think it’s important if marketing is going to buy in.”

• Leave a way out by framing your recommendations as a question rather than making emphatic assertions — think could, not should. For example, you might say, “What if we were to leave that for Phase 2?” By framing contrary opinions as questions, you leave room to change course if the person in power has a strong adverse reaction.

As a project manager, you are the linchpin that holds together a team of individuals who, without you, might spin off in all directions. Your job is to harness the opposing forces and ensure that decisions are made with the benefit of diverse perspectives, the full knowledge of their impact, and the optimal trade-offs between various priorities. Fulfilling that responsibility will require that you embrace productive conflict and hone the associated skills.

Copyright 2023 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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