Why Does My Team Feel Divided? | Warren Whitney

Why Does My Team Feel So Divided Right Now?

By Tom Prest, Director, Warren Whitney

If your team has gotten quieter, more guarded, or quicker to disagree lately, you’re not imagining it, and you’re in the right place. This is for leaders trying to figure out why workplace tension is rising even though nothing about the org chart has changed.

The Problem You’re Actually Feeling

Economic anxiety, social tension, and political polarization don’t stay outside the building anymore. They show up in conversations, in social media posts employees bring into the break room, and in the way coworkers interact, or quietly avoid each other. Leaders feel it too: the pressure to provide stability without pretending everything is fine, and to create unity when people genuinely disagree.

The short answer: trying to keep conflict out of the workplace doesn’t make it go away; it pushes it underground. People still carry strong feelings; they just lose the safe ways to express them. The fix isn’t to suppress the tension. It’s to name it.

Why Tom Prest

Tom Prest is a Director at Warren Whitney with more than 30 years of experience in human resources, administration, and organizational leadership, including work as interim and fractional nonprofit CEO. He’s a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a Master of Social Work from Virginia Commonwealth University, and his consulting practice spans nonprofit, retail, hospitality, and service organizations, which means he’s helped leadership teams navigate exactly this kind of workplace tension across very different environments, not just one industry playbook.

What This Article Covers

• Why suppressing workplace conflict backfires
• The three-part move for naming what’s really going on
• What leaders owe their teams in this moment and what they don’t
• A simple next step if your team needs this conversation now

Naming the Moment: A Three-Part Move

When a team is carrying unspoken tension, a simple but powerful leadership move is to name the moment directly. That has three parts:

1. Acknowledge that people are experiencing events differently. Not everyone on the team is reading the same headlines the same way.
2. Recognize that those differences show up at work in tone, in participation, in who talks to whom.
3. Set the tone that the goal is respect and impact, not agreement on every issue.

Leaders don’t have to take sides on the issues driving the tension. They do have to be honest that this is a stressful, noisy time, and that the team can navigate it thoughtfully together. That honesty is itself a form of stability; teams read a leader’s silence as either denial or avoidance, and both erode trust faster than acknowledging the obvious.

What This Looks Like in Practice

• Say it out loud in a team meeting: “I know this has been a tense stretch for a lot of people, for different reasons.”
• Set one explicit ground rule going forward: respect and impact over unanimous agreement.
• Watch for who goes quiet, not just who speaks up. Withdrawal is data too.

Next Steps

If your organization is feeling this kind of tension and you’d like a second set of eyes on it, that’s exactly the kind of conversation Tom has with leadership teams. Please feel free to contact us or view Tom’s full bio for more on his background in leadership development and organizational change.