Stakeholder Management: 5 Ways to Resolve Conflict

This week’s article comes from my fellow LinkedIn Learning author Natasha Kasimtseva.

Projects are the vehicle of change, and a key project manager competency is leading the team through rough waters of learning and evolving. Resource constraints, competing priorities and requirements, differences of opinion – these are a few examples of the sources of conflict that can impede project delivery. So how do we reconcile differences and resolve conflicts on a project? 

• Recognize that conflict is not always a bad thing. Conflict can be an opportunity to enhance clarity and alignment. Say your team is resource-constrained and your key stakeholders disagree on which features to build first. This can be a great opportunity to go back to the drawing board and evaluate and rank features to make sure the ones with the most business value get implemented first. 
• Pay extra attention to communication. Building lines of communication becomes more critical in the era of remote work. Information exchange that used to happen organically (“water-cooler” conversations, team lunches, informal touch-points) now have to be engineered using communication technology. Invite your team members to have coffee over Zoom or schedule an informal touch-point using MS Teams. 
• Keep the project team on the same page. A Single Source of Truth for the team to lean on is a great way to reduce confusion and potential conflict. Project management software with real time reporting can be a great investment. Tools like JIRA and SharePoint can provide virtual space where the team members can retrieve necessary information to stay informed. 
• Try short interactive meetings rather than lengthy project debriefs. More interactive methods like SCRUMS and STAND-UPs resolve misunderstanding between technical and business teams.  Shorter, more frequent meetings provide teams an open forum to remove roadblocks and collaborate. 
• Focus on belonging and inclusion to create trust and respect within the team. As project managers, we often work with multi-disciplinary teams and have to be aware of different layers of diversity, including organizational and cultural. Aligning your team around common project goals and team values will build a stronger synergy and break up the silos. 

If you would like to learn more about managing project stakeholders and conflict resolution, check out these LinkedIn courses:

Project Management Foundations

Managing Project Stakeholders 

Mistakes to Avoid When Resolving Conflict 

Developing Cross-Cultural Intelligence