How To Be A Better Manager, Part 5: Manage Team Conflict

 

Do you want to be a better manager?

Here is the fifth piece of advice in an occasional series. Remember, these processes are usually free and have high ROI. Ready? OK:

Manage employee conflict on your team.

First, let's get this straight. Yes, there is conflict among employees on your team. In fact the better each team member is, the more likely they are in conflict because the more they care about what they're doing and they are more invested in team outcomes, in addition to being good at their technical work.

I once worked with a leader in a cross-organization role. She led a team of industry experts, each of whom believed they were "right." She once in my presence looked at them and said "if you're not managing conflict, you're not paying attention." Bingo.

Second, you probably know of business lore/war stories (can't even avoid the term, can we) regarding Very Famous Tech Giants who reveled in having subordinate managers 'fight it out' in the belief that the 'winner' had the best plans. Well, that's great if you're the founder and you sign the paychecks of your subordinate leaders. For anyone else, encouraging conflict is probably not a good idea. And that's especially true when you have staff from nontraditional backgrounds who will feel even more marginalized by factional skirmishes.

Because you will have conflict, you need to be better at managing how the conflict plays out.

Next, let's stipulate that paying attention as a leader is the start of managing team conflict. You need to know who's in conflict, about what, with what track record and resources.

Then, know what the dimensions of conflict are. Yuan et al., in a 2026 meta-analysis, reviewed four areas of team conflict: task conflict, relationship conflict, process conflict, and status conflict. 

• Task conflict refers to "disagreements over task-related aspects of teamwork (i.e., content and goals)" (all definitions on p. 195). It is the most widely studied area of team conflict, and at its best is a disagreement over the answer to this question: what are we trying to accomplish?
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• But a more obvious type of conflict is relationship conflict, defined by Yuan et al. as "interpersonal incompatibilities." If that sounds vague, it is and that's because some people just don't get along or don't want to get along. We'll come back to that.
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• Process conflict is different as it refers to "disagreements among team members over the process used to carry out team tasks." If task conflict is about what we're trying to do, process conflict is about how we're trying to do it.
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• Status conflict is defined as "conflict over relative within-team status." This might actually be particularly salient as cybersecurity teams try to fill their pipelines with more and more junior staff -- who at the same time might be more technically current. 
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Yuan et al. found that all four aspects were negatively related to team performance, but not equally. Process (population correlation of -.33) and status conflict (-.38) were the most harmful and the most consistently so. Relationship conflict (-.28) was nearly as harmful on average but varied more from team to team. Task conflict, the one many leaders hope is productive, was barely negative on average (-.09) and also varied widely. (Status conflict has the strongest estimate but the thinnest evidence: 15 samples, versus 211 for task conflict.)

Finally, what are you going to do about conflict? Yuan et al. have some ideas based on their meta-analyses, and these ring true in our experience with teams and leaders.

• Task and relationship conflict correlate strongly (between .49 and .79, p. 209), and the overlap worsens outcomes. Intervene before a task dispute turns personal.
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• Establish team processes up front rather than encouraging divergent opinions (p. 213), especially for larger teams and operations-style work such as in a SOC.
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• Bring conflicts into the open. When team members saw the conflict the same way (symmetry), the relationship-conflict penalty weakened (p. 206).

As a cybersecurity leader you need to balance risks, and the biggest unknown risks are people risks. When you have team members who cannot or will not get along naturally, their relationship needs your intervention for the betterment of the team. While your team members are adults and, yes, they are responsible for their own behavior, and they may always dislike each other, their dysfunction is a detriment to your team. As a leader, your job is to get them to coordinate relative to your priorities, even if they personally dislike each other.

Ultimately your best retort to conflict is that you need to coordinate to be in the right conflict: against cyber-threats, not each other. That buys you a beat. Then you need to continue aligning in terms of security culture.

Security culture is something that you 'own' and security requires coordination, not friendship and not dominance. That's why leadership is not for everyone.

Ask us how you can improve the conflict to keep the peace.

(image credit: immediate source: [1], Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)