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Resolving Intragroup Conflict in an Executive Team

The President had lost patience with the infighting among the members of his six-person Executive Committee. Two members were constantly at each other's throats and meetings would sometimes end when one of the two stormed out of the meeting. The President was seriously considering disbanding the Committee.

It is especially difficult for an OD consultant to confront intragroup conflict when the participants are the members of a company's executive committee. The intervention has to be approached gingerly so as not to bruise tender egos, yet it has to be powerful enough to eliminate the root causes of the conflict.

I tried getting the President to add some structure to his previously loosely run meetings via advanced agendas. With some suggestions from me, he established some ground-rules for interactions. I eventually approached each of the two offenders to see if they would allow me to engage them around this conflict issue. Each initiative helped temporarily, but I had not found the right "hook" around which a productive dialog could be held.

The PTPS proved to be the right vehicle for this particular team to confront its dysfunctional behavior objectively without making anyone "wrong." Two elements of the application of the PTPS were especially powerful: (1) presenting a profile of the team that listed each member's style and (2) a discussion of how a style when used to excess can become a weakness.

The two principal "offenders" turned out to both be off-the-scale Challengers. They both had significant "ah-has" during the discussion of style excess. In addition, two other executives were strong Communicators and the team decided to press these two into service as facilitators during meetings. The PTPS team profile allowed everyone to step back from his or her own position and look at the dynamics of the various styles interacting on this team. Follow-up over a two-year period showed team members to be working effectively and managing conflict constructively.

Victor M. Kline
President
Princeton Consulting Associates, Inc.
teambuilding@compuserve.com
(609) 896-3559