Middleton-House & Company

Handling Project Conflict  June 14th, 2007

GEA Summer Con-
ference

Handling Project Conflict

Project conflict is unavoidable; in fact, it only becomes more toxic when people try to avoid it. Just the same, relationships may become strained and even break under the pressure. And damaged relationships put the project at risk, too. It is important that you prepare for conflict, face it head on, and manage it a way that minimizes damage to you, to your team, and to your project.

• Lower your residual stress levels so that “one more thing” isn’t “one thing too
  many.”
• Increase your capacity to manage stress in the midst of a conflict and still stay on top of the day to day work.
• Build skills to handle conflict in a highly charged situation: de-fuse the situation, then resolve the issue.

Lowering your own stress increases the odds you’ll become a part of a solution rather than an added part of the problem. When your ongoing residual stress level is low it is less likely that one more thing will be one thing too many. And the signals we get from our bodies are often early warning devices telling us to get the stress under control.

Dr. David Edelberg puts it this way:

Since symptoms-as-messages are only trying to help, they require a good listener (you and, with luck, your doctor) in order to be understood. In this light, symptoms of stress, whether anxiety or headaches, anger or fatigue, are all, in a peculiar way, gifts…. (The Triple Whammy Cure, New York: Free Press, 2006. pp. 198-200)

Dr. Edelberg goes on to recommend that people under stress keep a stress journal to help them listen to their symptoms, recognize the sources of stress in their lives, and decide how to deal with the stress—how to cope with it or walk away from it. We’ve incorporated Dr. Edelberg’s suggestions into our own format for a Stress Journal attached in a pdf file here.

Stress Journal