I recently found myself mediating a personal conflict within a team. In this post, I'll share what I quickly had to pick up and learn in order to do so. Disclaimer: I am not a trained professional in conflict handling. If you find yourself in a similar situation, get professional help from a trained mediator and do not try to do anything without the backing of the supervisor(s) of everyone involved! Spotting the conflict I try to keep some tap on the conversations that are happening around the company, and in particular I try sensing conflicts. In this case, I spotted what at first looked like a regular somewhat heated exchange in a distributed team, and then as the discussion continued, the participants started to pull for executives to come in and break the argument in their favor. The topic under discussion was definitely a team-internal thing, so my alarm bell started chiming. This didn't feel like a regular technical discussion. It had an air of threat and desperation
My thoughts on software development.