The Subtle Signs Your Team Is in Trouble - Rachel Muenz, Laboratory Manager

This resource first appeared in issue #5 on 07 Feb 2020 and has tags Managing A Team: Other, Becoming A Manager: Conflict/Difficult Discussions

An older article that Laboratory Manager sent around on twitter this week. It’s written in the context of laboratories, but carries over very clearly to research computing teams. They mention two opposite signs to look out for:

Lack of conflict/disagreement - I think this is a great one, and easy to overlook. If you have a bunch of technical people in a room and there isn’t some steady level of (healthy, respectful) disagreement about how to proceed, then either people are checked out or they don’t feel like they can voice their opinions. Myself, I try to run tight meetings, which is fine, but I find that unless I’m really careful I can easily make people feel like they should keep disagreements or other “speaking out of turn” to themselves.
Escalation to open conflict - whether just a learned behaviour or because disagreement has been felt to be tamped down so firmly, when disagreement does happen does it spin out of control? This is more obvious but still has to be dealt with, and quickly.

In both cases the solutions are the same - do lots of constant listening (e.g., through one-on-ones but also just generally) and give lots of feedback (positive and negative; positive for any input even if disagreeing, and positive for doing so constructively while negative for doing so otherwise).