How do you handle conflicts or disagreements between engineers and help them find common ground?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

My coaching style is structured and designed to match engineers interests and
preferences.
In our 1:1 we discuss interests and aspirations. From there we can work on
career progression, technical development, or learning more about project
management, company operations, etc

We analyze situation and have written plan. We take notes about projects where
we can try to apply new things and new responsibilities that the person can take
on. 
Engineer T was interested to deepen his skills in distributed computing. We
worked on a system that resembles Spark . When T shared that we was puzzled with
strange occasional performance, I decided to help him to be more comfortable,
independent using this system. I prepared by inspecting source code, and found
the root cause of his issue. In 1:1 I coached T that we have source code access
to the system and showed him how to find how the system works. Further I let T
to produce the fix for the issue and apply it to production. Finally I
encouraged T to make presentation and share with others how to use source code
to solve similar issues.

Result stretched far beyond fixing a complex bug. T became unafraid of
inspecting source code of a large distributed system. He would be able to do
that again if situation requires. T presented the issue, his approach and
methods to handle similar cases in large knowledge sharing meeting. T's image
improved in the team.

I would like to address other methods I use:
- Pair engineers with mentors and coaches
- Organize knowledge sharing sessions ( At my current company I organized 4
conference like knowledge sharing sessions, that resulted in our team presenting
in all hands meeting in the company)
- Facilitating attending and presenting at industry conerences (ie Databricks
DATA+AI, Amazon R:invent)
- Sharing my experience when applicable in 1:1
- Suggesting and making space for engineers to learn more through online classes

Anonymous · Answer

My philiophy around coaching style is it dependes on the situtaion - At xyz - I
had a situtation where in I had to resolve a conflit between my Sr. Dev and a
DBA, I took this as a mentoring moment and coached Sr. Dev to be more
collobrative and present the facts insted of being dismissive and taking a high
ground. 
At the same time my coaching style changes when I am dealing with a Junior Dev -
during the implementation phase I would probe and ask them to come up with a
better solution emporing them to be better developers

Anonymous · Answer

As a Manager of a team, my job is to make it easy for my engineers to deliver -
to empower them to make decisions and move fast. My coaching style depends on
the situation I am dealing with: 
a) If it is a architecture discussion - my job is to make sure that the engineer
has right support.
b) If it is dealing with cross team dependecy - my job is to facilitate the
meeting and ensure that all the things are addressd so that my engineer can move
fast.
c) If it is dealing with other team member - to remove any differences then I
will coach the engineer to find way to work with the other developer to make it
productive for both

How do you handle conflicts or disagreements between engineers and help them find common ground?

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