While effective teamwork is important to any business, not everyone will be on the same page 100 percent of the time. Disagreements, big or small, are inevitable when working with others — but that doesn’t mean your team is doomed. It is possible to work through a dispute and move forward as a team, with better understanding than before.
We asked eight successful entrepreneurs to share their best approaches for handling disagreements with colleagues. Follow their advice the next time you and your colleagues seem to be butting heads so you can return to a state of cooperative collaboration.
Bring everyone together and nip it in the bud.
Saloni Doshi, co-owner and CEO of Eco Enclose, LLC, views gossip as a mushroom: It thrives in the dark and shrinks when light is shed on it. To avoid this, it’s important to gather everyone together as quickly as possible to solve the problem before it gets bigger.
“As soon as we hear discontent, we try to bring involved parties together to voice their concerns and come to some understanding,” says Doshi. “These conversations can be incredibly uncomfortable but ultimately leave us in a much better place over time.”
