Cross-team drama draining your team?

Your guide to survive the conflict and stay sane

This is the last part in the conflict resolution series. So far, we’ve covered “the general framework for resolving conflicts” and “how to defuse conflicts within a team”.

Don’t forget to checkout the announcement today.

Quick Recap

We covered how to respond when a member of your team -

• ⛔ Denies to work with a person or group of people

• 😑 Constantly express dissatisfaction in working in a project

• 💪 Shows sign of contest beyond healthy competition

---

Today, let’s talk about how you can handle conflicts between two teams and find a constructive solution.

Conflicts between teams are very common. I used to suck at conflicts and always made it about me. The strategy I’ll share today helped me handle some serious conflicts at Apple and Google. You’ll learn how to:

• Control the narrative of a conflict

• Respect the boundary of the other team

• Reach your desired outcome

There’s a lot to cover, let’s get started.

🔥 De-escalate the Situation

Conflicts are an unstable stage after a series of disagreements. It is expected that both parties will be very frustrated. But when your team clashes with another one, your ability to directly influence reduces. My intuitions told me to,

• Defend your team externally. It’s not a bad idea. As a leader, you are taught to correct in private and defend in public. When faced with a conflict with another team, my natural instinct was to protect my team.

• Back-channel conversations to gain support. Conflicts outside your direct influence sphere require additional lobbying. It makes sense and is prevalent in politics. But in engineering teams, it causes a trust deficit.

The outcome was obvious, losing the ability to influence. There was no mutual trust. In addition, it made me look not ready for collaboration. So I changed my behavior by,

• Separating emotions from the problem

• Taking a deep breath, and resetting the tone

• Acknowledging concerns with respect

In the middle of chaos it’s important to show empathy. Defense is not a good mechanism at this stage. A leader should defend their members, but not by discounting others. Listen, build trust. Once they recognize you as a reasonable person, conversation becomes easier.

🕵️‍♀️ Empathize with the Unknowns

In my experience, the majority of cross-team conflicts happen due to mismatching priorities. Every team is trying to fulfill some company goal. When you aren’t exposed to that, it might feel unreasonable. My typical responses were to:

• Build a case to convince. With my local knowledge, I used to look for evidence to support my team’s mission. By trying to make our team seem more important than the other team. It can easily upset them.

• My way or the highway. I'd happily drag conversations for weeks, if not months until the desired outcome. This involved escalations, unending discussions on the same topic, and speaking with different individuals.

Your goal is NOT to win! It should be about what’s good for the company. The ugliest conflict I was involved in happened due to organizational misalignment. Between our teams, we didn’t agree on the priority. We pushed for changes when they had a do/die situation at hand. 

This team got an ultimatum from the executives to deliver on a project. On failure, the outcome would be dissolving the entire team. We didn’t know about it until we,

• Asked open-ended questions to uncover the other side

• Gathered the full story without assumptions

• Found common grounds wherever possible

Every team in your company has some unique goals. Priorities can change between teams. I used to assume intent, which led me to craft a winning argument in conflicts. Before doing so, try to understand the reason.

In my case, if I'd known that this team was going through a stressful time, the conversation would’ve been much different from my side. Before assuming intent, it’s important to investigate the reason. Understanding why will solve the problem most of the time.

💡 Respond with Impact

We spend a lot of time figuring out who’s right. The impact of losing a conflict felt like a weakness in my leadership ability. I often found myself in a conversation so far from the actual conflict. Trying to prove superiority, I forgot I was wasting everyone’s time. I used to,

• Overanalyze the downstream impact. When both sides are there to win, arguments become pointless. People grab whatever they can get to support their cause. An example, “if we don’t do this, our customers will not be happy 5 years from now”.

• Leave conversations ambiguous. We found ourselves walking out of meetings without any clear progress. This resulted in repeatedly coming back to the same topic.

One of the major reasons for dragging out resolution is lack of ownership. A leader who owns the narrative can really stand out. Now, I started doing the following in conflicts:

• Focusing on the outcome, not winning it for my team

• Being more approachable by offering collaboration

• Leading with clear next steps, and finding the right owners

Most humans react to stress. When we start responding instead, it makes a huge difference. It also increased my influence. Nobody likes conflict. If you can make visible progress in solving them, people become more considerate.

🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts

I used to suck at conflicts. I started with the idea that there’ll be a winner - And I liked winning. It was not long before I realized it was all wrong. The moment I shifted my strategy towards handling conflicts better, I noticed a huge difference across multiple aspects of my leadership. Building trust became easier across teams. Other leaders pulled me in to diffuse conflicts they were dealing with.

A big part of a leader’s job is convincing others and dealing with conflicts and other stressful interactions. Having a framework really helps set yourself apart. I Hope you enjoyed this three-part series, let me know in the comments.

How has your experience been with escalations? What’s your goto strategy to resolve conflicts between teams? Share them in the comments!

---

Special thanks 🤗 to Anton Zaides for proofreading this edition and providing tons of actionable suggestions! Anton also writes practical tips for leading teams, subscribe to Leading Developers, if you haven’t already!

---

📢 🎤 Announcement

Our favorite Jordan Cutler, the author of High Growth Engineer, recently launched a library of 100+ actionable career growth insights you can read in an hour!

It’s filled with very actionable tips that you can gradually ingrain into your work life and accelerate your career growth!

Use the link above to get a 20% discount on your copy, and I assure you won't regret it. The price is minimal compared to the value packed in the material.

---

🐦‍🔥 This Week’s Favorites

• Use your mentors right from Techlead Mentor by Raviraj Achar

• Managing up from The Caring Techie Newsletter by Irina Stanescu

• Top AI tools for productivity from AI Supremacy by Michael Spencer

• Done is better than perfect from The Hustling Engineer by Hemant Pandey

  ---

👋 💬 Get In Touch

Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.

If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly on akash@chromium.org. 

---

If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and subscribe 🔔 if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going. It truly makes my day!