Conflict Management

Resource technique · See it on the map

Runnable here

Resolving disagreement between team members on purpose, by picking a response that fits the situation.

When to use it

Use it whenever a disagreement is affecting the work — not just personality friction, but a real difference over approach, priority, or resource claim that two people aren't resolving on their own. The earlier it's addressed, the fewer of the responses below require force.

When to avoid it

Don't manage a genuine one-off preference difference as if it were a conflict requiring a formal response — some disagreements resolve themselves in a five-minute conversation and inflating them into a facilitated process wastes everyone's time and signals the difference mattered more than it did.

Steps

1. Identify which of five response modes actually fits: withdraw/avoid (retreat from an actual or potential conflict), smooth/accommodate (emphasize agreement over difference), compromise/reconcile (find a solution that partially satisfies everyone), force/direct (push one viewpoint through, usually using positional power), or collaborate/problem-solve (incorporate multiple viewpoints into a solution everyone can support). They are not interchangeable defaults and not equally good — pick the one the situation actually calls for.
2. Reach for collaborate/problem-solve first when time allows: it's the mode most likely to produce a solution that actually holds, because everyone involved helped build it.
3. Reach for force/direct only when time pressure genuinely doesn't allow collaboration — a live production incident, a decision due in the next hour — and be explicit that you're using it, because a forced decision that isn't acknowledged as forced reads as collaboration that failed.
4. Be honest that smoothing defers the problem rather than solving it: it can be the right short-term move to keep a meeting productive, but if the underlying disagreement never gets revisited, it will resurface, usually at a worse moment.

What it produces

• A resolved (or deliberately deferred, and named as such) disagreement, with the people involved aware of which response mode was used and why

Common pitfalls

• Defaulting to smoothing because it's the most comfortable mode in the room, which reliably produces the same disagreement again later, often with more at stake.
• Using force/direct as a first resort because it's fast, which resolves the immediate disagreement but teaches the losing party to stop raising concerns rather than to trust the process.
• Treating compromise as automatically fair because it splits the difference — a compromise that leaves the technically correct position half-implemented can produce a worse outcome than either original position on its own.

Worked example

A custom cabinetry shop's two lead carpenters disagree over whether to build a client's kitchen island with a traditional joinery method (slower, more durable) or a faster mechanical-fastener method, and the disagreement is stalling the cut list. With three days of schedule slack available, the PM brings both carpenters together to walk through the client's actual priorities (this piece will see heavy daily use) and lets them jointly land on the joinery method — collaborate/problem-solve — rather than picking a side herself. Two weeks later, a similar disagreement comes up the morning of a delivery deadline with no slack left, and she directs the faster method herself, and says out loud that she's doing so because there's no time to work it out together this time.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §9.5.2.1

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.