How you handle ego clashes between team members?

So to reflect that back –

– you have two people on the team who lack the skills to collaborate effectively as professionals?

To some extent it boils down to that; there’s often a chronic under-investment in non-technical skills within a team, which can lead to some pretty destructive behaviours being considered okay.

There’s lot of paths forward from this, but at a point it’s about

– identifying what behaviours are not acceptable professionally
– supporting the growth of key confliction resolution skills
– not allowing unacceptable behavior to continue

I generally start off with developing a team working agreement from the outset, based on a discussion about what behaviours we see on high performance teams, with a strong focus on “above the line” behavior and psychological safety. That create a platform to build from – or indeed a gap to coach into.

In one-on-ones the discussions become about how the individuals can be more effective in meetings, so providing other approaches than a win-lose conflict when it comes to how to address issues. At a point this kind of thing will liming their career development significantly, unless they get ahead of it.

Good facilitation skills help too; when a conversation is deadlocked asking what experiment or spike we could do to determine who is correct is one approach, but so is getting to the point where you can use ELMO (Enough, lets move on)

Of course, fist make sure you actually have an issue. Perhaps this is just how these two interact, and that the level of push-and-shove is okay for them and the rest of the team.

if it’s not okay for even one person, however you need to start in on addressing it.