Learn how to manage intrapersonal conflicts on your engineering team and how to chart a course for your employees’ careers.
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In this article, a follow-up to the engineering manager series, we will talk about conflicts, common scenarios, and some tips on how to manage them in a professional environment. Conflict management is a complex topic and we will address it in a series of three articles, the first of which is this one.
People’s conflicts are common in the professional day-to-day, some people might even say that conflict is not professional behavior, but of course, it is, as we are human so conflicts are inevitable. What makes the difference is how we manage these situations.
As engineering managers we must focus on people and the team, most of us have a technical background and technical education but not many of us have knowledge of people’s behavior. Managing people is not creating a project plan, creating stories in a scrum dashboard, or applying the next trend methodology. It is more complex than that, there are three things that we need to understand:
Mental health is one of the main health problems in the occidental world, the technological sector is no exception. In the last few years, many articles have talked about mental health problems in our sector such as The Wall Street Journal or Business Insider. Nowadays many companies invest in mental health professionals as a continuous support of mental health and not only in some training during the years. Our duty is to support our teams but this does not mean that we have to do everything, many times we will need support from others colleagues or other kinds of professionals.
A simple definition of a conflict situation is a bad relationship between people or between people and the organization that impacts the work environment and/or company goals. Conflicts are caused by different needs, opinions, personalities, interests, or egos.
The discussions around topics, usually are not conflicts and are necessary to improve and get the best version of our product, technical solution, or even ourselves. A discussion evolves into a conflict when it affects the dynamic of people, teams, or the organization for a period of time.
There are several conflict types but we will talk about interpersonal, intrapersonal, and organizational conflicts.
Conflicts always have a negative impact on people, but in terms of company goals, they could be positive. Do not understand me wrong, I do not want to work in a company that promotes conflict as a way to achieve goals because I believe that people, team, and ethical values always have to be more important than the economics or company goals. But there are companies that promote this kind of situation, they believe that conflict has a positive impact based on financial metrics or goal indicators. There are many successful companies in financial, market absorption, and marketing terms that are applying or had applied this approach.
