As a chief people officer, I have seen firsthand how unaddressed and unresolved interpersonal tensions and toxic behavior can lead to organizational failure. A subtle racial slight, an argument over a project’s deliverables, or gossip over perceived unfair advantages can negatively impact team performance, collaboration, and productivity, create operational friction among teams, and cause employees to feel disengaged, distrustful, and unmotivated. These issues can arise due to various factors, including differences in personality and perspectives, racial, class, and gender privilege, work and communication styles, power imbalances, and/or lack of transparency and clarity over work processes and business goals.
How to Proactively Defuse Tension on Your Team
Five strategies for managers and individual team members.
June 13, 2023
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Summary.
Unaddressed and unresolved interpersonal tensions and toxic behavior can lead to organizational failure. They can impact team performance, collaboration, and productivity, create operational friction among teams, and cause employees to feel disengaged, distrustful, and unmotivated. While conflict at work is inevitable, we often have our own agency to proactively root out problems and stop them from escalating swiftly with empathy, accountability, self-awareness, and courage. The author, a Chief People Officer, offers five steps to do this: 1) Root out toxic behavior and tensions, 2) seek to understand, not just be understood, 3) assess the right time to intervene, 4) ask for help, and 5) repair harm; repair trust.