Joe Apfelbaum walks through a five-step process from Traction for resolving conflicts between two team members: bring in a neutral facilitator, have each person share their strengths and weaknesses, list all issues together, create action items, and check back in 30 days. He says this works 9 out of 10 times. If it fails, remove the person.
Chapters
I'm going to do a little reading from a book called Traction about personal issues and kind of how to solve them. Tell me what you think of this. So the personal issues solving session. Building a healthy team is not always a smooth process. If a team is not opening up, it might be because 2 individuals don't get along. They might even be at odds with each other. When this situation occurs, you must resolve the tension. Sometimes it's the only obstacle holding you back from being a functional, cohesive team. And you need a functional, cohesive team to be a healthy, growing company, right? A personal issue-solving session usually provides the remedy. It's an opportunity for 2 people involved to come together to clear the air and resolve their differences. It's recommended that you have a 3rd party Facilitate this session. Each person prepares and then shares with each other what she or he believes are the 3 greatest strengths and the 3 greatest weaknesses are. So what are your greatest— 3 greatest strengths, and what are your 3 greatest weaknesses? You list all the issues and then you solve them. Number 3, list the action item from the solutions. And number 4, you meet 30 days later to make sure, to make certain that the action items have been accomplished. It's really important to follow up. 9 out of 10 times, their differences will be solved. In rare cases, they can't be, and you would have to make a tough decision. One of them must go for the greater good of the team. The analogy of the dying plant applies here. Once you cut off the dying limb, the plant Flourishes just as your team will. This is sometimes a hard pill to swallow, but assuming you've conducted the personal issue-solving session and exhausted every other option, it's what's best for the health of the team. Hopefully, the dismissed member can be relocated to another team in the organization. Hopefully you got some value out of that reading. I know I did.