Resolving Conflict

Approach

This question is asking for handling conflict, which indicates that the interviewer is hoping to understand how you'd approach conflict, and is checking for skills like communication and teamwork. In this answer, we'll use the STAR method but tailor it to focus on highlighting the following aspects:

• Teamwork: Conflict and teamwork are closely intertwined - you can't have one without the other. In this answer, we'll focus on demonstrating our ability to be a team player.
• Communication: Communicating through conflict is critical to the success of a healthy team.
• Empathy: Lastly, empathy and connection are important values to demonstrate during conflict to ensure a healthy team environment.

Be sure to tailor the traits to the interviewer and the company, but for this interview, we'd like to focus on those three in our approach and pick a relevant story from our story bank to fit this.

Answer

Situation

When I was a program manager at my previous company, we were beginning a new, multiple-quarter project, to build a comprehensive analytics dashboard for a partner team. The team dedicated to build the project had three engineers, two of whom were new hire, new grad engineers with less experience. The other engineer was the tech lead, who was also recently put into the position for being a tech lead, because of her success as an engineer.

When I scoped out the timeline for the project, I realized we wouldn't be able to hit milestones with the team with the current resourcing. However, the tech lead said that the team would be able to hit the milestones just fine and that her coding ability was fast enough to make up for potential issues with speed. I was struggling with how to respond, given that if we did need another engineer on the team, we'd need to know within the week given resourcing constraints.

Task

I had to decide whether or not to ask for another resource for the engineering team, which I believed we needed given timelines, while our tech lead said that another resource wouldn't be necessary.

Action

As always with all conflict, I first started by trying to understand all perspectives. I first talked to my manager to ask if my resourcing timeline made sense and for any suggestions on how to navigate this conflict. My manager, both an excellent manager and coach, encouraged me that my reasoning seemed rational, and it'd be effective to talk to the tech lead.

I scheduled a 1:1 with the tech lead and told her that I thought the current timeline with resources wasn't tenable. However, the tech lead seemed very defensive and insisted that she could hit the deadlines and that this discussion wasn't valuable.

The meeting ended early and I was a bit stumped on how to approach this problem. I considered escalating the issue to higher management but decided to keep that as a backup option in case I couldn't figure out what the issue was. I considered talking to the other engineers on the team, but I thought that the tech lead might see me as going "behind her back," and I wanted to develop a strong, trusting relationship with my tech lead for this project.

I came up to the tech lead later that day, pulling her aside and instead trying a different approach: "I'd love to support you in making sure you accomplish the timeline, and I'm sorry for suggesting that you couldn't complete the project in the given timeline. Our mutual goal here is to set this project up for success. I'm still a bit nervous about the upcoming projects, but I trust your judgment. Could we sit down and work out what each week would look like for the upcoming weeks?"

After this, she agreed to sit down with me and talk through the proposal. As we talked through each week, some of the weeks were clearly overloaded with work, and we were able to reallocate the tasks in a way such that the timeline didn't have to slip significantly. I communicated clearly the tradeoffs we'd have to make, and the amount of work on each team member for the week. I then asked the tech lead: "It looks like our options are to either let the launch date slip by a couple of weeks, or to resource the team with at least another engineer. Do you see any alternatives?"

The tech lead pointed out that both of their reports were hoping to get a promotion soon, and they didn't want to take off the workload from them since they both had a strong appetite for a leadership track. After realizing this was the issue, I changed the angle of how I approached the problem, empathizing with helping get the reports promoted, and encouraging the tech lead that we could work on helping them get promoted while still resourcing the team more.

I worked with the tech lead on developing a promotion plan, with reallocating tasks in such a way that it built a comprehensive story of the engineers' career trajectories and accomplishments. The tone of the meeting changed significantly, with the two of us feeling more partnered on the same goal, while also the tech lead letting me know that she was fine with having another resource, given the career planning work we did together.

Results

The result of the conversation led to a beautiful partnership between myself as a program manager and the tech lead. We were able to hit our milestones, get the team promoted, and work together without further conflict on that issue. It was also helpful to understand the working style of my tech lead to deal with follow-up conflicts in a similar way. The key for me was taking the time to understand the tech lead's perspective and realizing that there was a shared goal between us that wasn't actually in conflict.