Conflict Resolution Activities
Conflict is inevitable in teamwork, and handled well it improves decisions rather than damaging the team. These exercises put the practice to work on a situation your team is actually in.
The explanation lives in the guide: what kind of conflict you are looking at, where it comes from, how to raise a contribution problem without wrecking the relationship, and when to escalate.
Assess Your Team’s Conflict Styles
Section titled “Assess Your Team’s Conflict Styles”Find out how your team actually handles disagreement before you are in the middle of one, and agree which style fits which situation. One hour as a team, in fall.
- Read the five modes in the guide: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating, positioned on assertiveness and cooperativeness.
- Name your own default. Everyone says which mode they reach for first. Being honest here is the whole exercise; the person who claims “collaborating” for everything is usually avoiding.
- Fill the assessment together on a real disagreement your team has had or expects.
- Complete the outcomes matrix below: for each style, what would happen to this specific situation if you used it.
| Handling Style | Positive Outcome | Negative Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Compete | ||
| Collaborate | ||
| Compromise | ||
| Accommodate | ||
| Avoid |
A good output is the completed assessment and a filled outcomes matrix, plus one line in your charter naming which style your team defaults to and when you have agreed to override it.
Feeds: the Team Charter conflict-and-inclusion criterion.
Rehearse a Performance Conversation
Section titled “Rehearse a Performance Conversation”Practice saying the hard thing in factual language, on a low-stakes example, so the words are available when it matters. Thirty minutes, in pairs.
- Take a real situation, either from your team or a plausible one: a task in progress for two sprints, missed stand-ups, a commitment that slipped without warning.
- Write it as situation, behavior, impact: when and which task, what you actually observed, what it cost the team. Three sentences.
- Strip out every inference of motive. “You clearly don’t care” and “you’re not pulling your weight” both fail; find what you would have written instead.
- Say it out loud to a partner, who responds as the teammate would. Notice which sentence you flinch at, because that is the one you will soften into meaninglessness in real life.
- Swap and repeat.
A good output is a written three-sentence version of the conversation, with no inferred motive in it, that you would be willing to say to the person’s face.
Feeds: the Incident Postmortem blameless criterion, which is the same language discipline applied to systems instead of people.
Map Your Team’s Working Styles
Section titled “Map Your Team’s Working Styles”Find the trait gaps inside your team that will otherwise show up as friction nobody can name. Thirty minutes each, plus half an hour together.
- Take the Big Five test individually. It is free and open source.
- Compare as a team, one trait at a time. You are looking only for the gaps: where two people sit at opposite ends.
- For each gap, write one tactic each way. A conscientious member working with a spontaneous one agrees not to impose rigid schedules; the spontaneous one agrees to commit to dates and flag slips early. High extraversion agrees to leave space; low extraversion agrees to prepare contributions in advance.
- Keep it about behavior, not identity. The traits are spectra, they shift with context, and none of them excuses anything.
A good output is a short table of the trait gaps in your team with one agreed tactic on each side of each gap.
Plan Your Escalation Path
Section titled “Plan Your Escalation Path”Write down what your team will do when someone stops delivering, while everyone is still getting along and nobody is the subject of it. Forty-five minutes, in week 2.
- Set the trigger. Not “if problems persist” but something you can point at: two consecutive sprints with no completed task, or three missed stand-ups without notice.
- Write the three steps: private one-to-one, raise at the retrospective, escalate to the Teaching Assistant (TA). Say who does step one, so it is not left to whoever cracks first.
- Agree the timeline, in sprints rather than in feelings. The usual failure is waiting six weeks.
- Agree what gets written down at each step, and where.
- Say what happens to the work in the meantime, since somebody is going to absorb it.
Doing this in week 2 is the point. A team that writes its escalation path while nobody needs it produces a fair one.
A good output is the escalation section of your charter, with a measurable trigger, a named first mover, and a timeline in sprints.