More often than not, high performing teams operate in high pressure environments. And many times on a high performing team, you have some strong personalities at play. When you combine pressure plus strong personalities there are plenty of opportunities for conflict between the members of your team.

Your job as a leader is not to mediate those conflicts and be a referee. Instead, you need to teach the members of your team how to resolve those conflicts with one another. It’s going to help them build relationships, ultimately it will build their interpersonal skills, and it keeps you from having to dedicate a significant amount of time and energy every time somebody has a conflict with another member of the team.

Your job, when there’s conflict, is first to recognize it. Identify when you have team members who are butting heads and figure out what the root issue is. Then you should suggest that they go figure it out and come back to you when they’ve developed a solution on their own. Hopefully if they’re really high performers they can go in a room, hash it out, come up with a solution that will be acceptable to both of them.

However, there will be certain opportunities that you’re going to have to take advantage of to get involved in it and teach them how to resolve conflict better. When you do so, first sit them down and acknowledge the conflict. Hey look, I know you have a problem with this perspective that the other individual has. Get to the root of the issue and focus on the facts. Here are the facts, let’s remove the emotions from it. What do we disagree on? Then have them define a goal for resolution and what the desired behaviors should be in terms of how they perform with one another. Drive it to the level of specific behaviors where they had points of difference with one another. And then, teach them how to give constructive feedback to one another going forward so they can apply it in their day-to-day conversations with each other.

There will be times where they won’t be able to resolve the conflict on their own. And in those situations you’re going to need to mediate that conflict, but this is a last resort. If they can’t resolve the issue, talk them through the resolution but do so one step at a time. Don’t just jump to the end and say, I know what the answer is, here’s my decision, go make it happen. Because you’re not building their skills in doing so. Instead, talk them through it. Okay, what’s the issue? And have them describe it and have them figure it out. And then ask, what are the emotions that are involved here and why are those emotions coming up? And they’ll talk through that. Then ask them, how are those emotions getting in the way of a resolution?

So for each step of that conflict resolution process, all the way through identifying alternatives and desired behaviors, and then coming to a decision they can live with, you should walk them through that conversation rather then just giving them the answers. At the end, when they’ve identified a solution that’s acceptable to both of them, get their commitment to resolving the issue that way and more importantly set expectations that the next time there’s conflict between them, that they go through this process on their own, before they involve you to mediate the conflict.

By doing so, you’re going to build their skills and their capabilities, you’ll spend less time mediating conflict going forward, and your team members will be able to focus more on execution than arguing.

Members of high performing teams are going to be the most satisfied when they feel like they can have an impact on the outcome of their work. To get to that point you need to understand the difference between accountability and responsibility and how authority interplays with both of them.

Accountability is an external force. That’s where somebody tells you, “You are responsible for these results and I am going to hold you accountable to meeting them. If you meet them, there are benefits and if you fail to, there are consequences.” Responsibility is when we as individuals hold ourselves accountable. We find that inside and say, “Here’s the standard and I’m going to make sure that I achieve that goal.”

Making sure that people are able to be satisfied in performing those activities requires you, as the leader, to give them authority. Authority is the power to make decisions. It requires you to delegate and accept risk if someone makes a mistake. It empowers people to give them authority and it makes them feel like, “Hey boss, you trust me. You’re letting me make these decisions where I’m accountable for the results.” It’s really unfair to hold someone accountable for a result if we don’t give them the authority to impact the outcome.

At one point in my career, I was responsible for making acquisitions for our division. We would buy companies that were out in the marketplace and try and grow our business unit in doing so. My boss said to me, “You have to do this many deals a year and we need this type of financial return. You’re going to be measured on your performance on how well those deals go. Whatever you have to do to make that deal happen, you are empowered to make those decisions.”

Now the critical piece of this was my boss gave me the authority to impact those decisions. There was one deal that came up where it was pretty contentious between us and the person we were trying to purchase the business from. I personally got to negotiate with this other business owner. I tried multiple different deal structures. I offered certain things and in return asked for others. I was able to negotiate the entire deal, but my boss had empowered me to make those trade-offs and make those decisions.

Ultimately, I was able to hold myself responsible for the performance of that deal. The deal went well, but more important that than was I felt like my boss trusted me. I felt like I had the ability to control the outcome of my work. I probably worked harder on that deal than I’ve worked up to that point in my career because I was excited about it and I owned the result.

As you think about your people and what you hold them accountable to in terms of metrics and performance, you have to be willing to give them the authority to make those decisions. Because if you don’t, it’s unfair to hold them accountable for the result when they can’t affect that result with the decisions that they make. That empowerment is going to be the key to their satisfaction with their work.

For you to get the most out of the members of your high performing team, you need to empower them. Remember, on a high performing team, those team members are typically very self-motivated, and they like being self-directed. You need to understand how letting go of your agenda, creating space for them to flourish, and then accepting that there are different ways of doing things is going to bring out the best in your people. Setting direction is critical for those people, but then as the leader, you need to get out of the way and let them run.

I like to use what I call a concept of lanes where you set a direction for a team member. Say the goal is here, and here are the boundaries within which you can operate. But it’s up to you to decide how you get from here to that goal. You’ll also need to accept, if you’re giving them those lanes, that there are different ways of doing things. A team member may take an approach that you fundamentally disagree with. The measure of a good leader is being willing to step back and say, “Hey, I think you might be going the wrong way. Here’s a different way to think about it. But ultimately, it’s up to you how you want to proceed, and the goal is the same. Let me know what you need from me to be successful.” You have to let go of that agenda and give them the resources, then get out of their way.

I had a great leader I worked for at one point when I was in the army. He was my company commander. He had very specific ways that he wanted to deploy our unit. He would make no bones about it and say, “This is what I want you to do, here’s the map, here’s the route I want you to follow, and here’s what I think will get us the best results.” But what was great about him was he would then say, “I understand when we hit that line of departure, I no longer have control. And you know what the objective is and I want you to go out and achieve it. And if you see a different and better way to achieve it, I’ll support you in that. Now, here are the rules of engagement, and don’t do anything outside of them, but ultimately, it’s up to you how you perform.”

Now there were times I was right and everything worked out great. Even though I didn’t follow my commander’s plan exactly, we got a good result. There were also plenty of times that I made mistakes. I took a course of action that was different than what my company commander told me to take and I learned from it. We had those learning moments because we were able to explore and learn what does and doesn’t work.

So as you think about the members of your team and trying to get the best out of them that you possibly can, take a minute and set a direction, think about the boundary conditions, and then let them go and see what happens.