“Disagreements, debates, differing perspectives, clashing ideologies, and justice struggles are inevitable…”(Dekker, 2003, p.3). There’s no way around it, when more than one person is set to accomplish a task, the majority of the time there’s going to be some sort of disagreement. How individuals deal with this disagreement decides how well the team will work in a group from that point on. When a problem is not resolved and just let go, someone in the group feels hurt and may hold the group back down the road. Group members should never let a problem go unresolved, since you are only as strong as your weakest link. “Slow down, step back, and try to figure out what is going on (crinfo.org, 2007)”. There’re three basic steps to conflict resolution: Address, Converse, and Move-On.
Step one is very simple, when a problem arises in the planning of a team project, the problem should be addressed right away. “It is much easier and much safer to ignore the necessary conflict and play ostrich” (Heathfield, 2007). Unresolved conflicts can cause more problems longer down the process. “Unresolved conflict does not go away; unresolved conflict can turn into a full boil at any time” (Heathfield, 2007). Conflict is needed for teams to get down to the business at hand. It’s the only way that we can make decisions together. Decision-making within a group is a disagreement until the group finds a resolution in the end. If something doesn’t look right or isn’t going in the right direction and no one says anything, the whole team becomes lost. The topic may be hard to bring back to discussion if your team has moved on from that part of the project. What some people need to understand is that ...