Task Conflict v. Relationship Conflict
Can some team conflict actually be good?
I have been reading a book recently called Think Again by Wharton Professor Adam Grant. In the book, Grant makes the case that there is indeed a type of team conflict that might be good: task conflict.
Team conflict probably conjures up negative connotations for you–as it did for me before I read Think Again. In my mind, team conflict would lead to negative interactions, toxic behavior, lack of trust, and the inability to make decisions and move forward. In other words, the last thing that I would want for any team.
Grant differentiates between two types of conflict: relationship conflict and task conflict. Relationship conflict is what I described above– “personal, emotional clashes that are filled not just with friction but also with animosity.” This is in contrast to task conflict, which are “clashes about ideas and opinions.”
According to research conducted by Grant, high-performing teams actually had decent levels of task conflict, but low relationship conflict. When analyzing low-performing teams, Grant writes:
“The teams that performed poorly started with more relationship conflict than task conflict. They entered into personal feuds early on and were so busy disliking one another that they didn’t feel comfortable challenging one another. It took months for many of the teams to make real headway on their relationship issues.”
He contrasts this with high-performing teams:
“What happened in the high-performing groups? … They started with low relationship conflict and kept it low throughout their work together. That didn’t stop them from having task conflict at the outset: they didn’t hesitate to surface competing perspectives. As they resolved some of their differences of opinion, they were able to align on a direction and carry out their work until they ran into new issues to debate.”
Synthesizing from other research, he shares more about why relationship conflict is bad, but some task conflict may actually be good.
“All in all, more than a hundred studies have examined conflict types in over eight thousand teams. A meta-analysis of those studies showed that relationship conflict is generally bad for performance, but some task conflict can be beneficial: it’s been linked to higher creativity and smarter choices. For example, there’s evidence that when teams experience moderate task conflict early on, they generate more original ideas in Chinese technology companies, innovate more in Dutch delivery services, and make better decisions in American hospitals. As one research team concluded, ‘The absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy.’
“Relationship conflict is destructive in part because it stands in the way of rethinking. When a clash gets personal and emotional, we become self-righteous preachers of our own views, spiteful prosecutors of the other side, or single-minded politicians who dismiss opinions that don’t come from our side. Task conflict can be constructive when it brings diversity of thought, preventing us from getting trapped in overconfidence cycles. It can help us to stay humble, surface doubts, and make us curious about what we might be missing. That can lead us to think again, moving us closer to the truth without damaging our relationships.”
Grant argues that we should tap into challenge networks: people who share feedback openly, question our assumptions and thought processes, point out blind spots in our thinking, and add to our pool of ideas. “We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions.”
As PMs and designers, I believe that we should encourage our colleagues to speak up and challenge us on our product and design thinking. We should actively seek out the critical feedback and challenges that will help us strengthen our ideas. What are the risks inherent in my proposal? What assumptions am I making that might be wrong? Why might my solution fail? What are the alternative ways of approaching this problem? What holes do you see in my rationale? All of this input will help us strengthen our ideas and our solutions. In seeking this critical and challenging feedback, we have to remember that this is all task conflict and not relationship conflict. Whenever we get input that conflicts with or challenges our thinking, instead of getting defensive and arguing against it or ignoring it, we should ask ourselves what we can learn from it.
In addition to seeking out challenging feedback, we should also be willing to share our own ideas, opinions, and perspectives — especially if they conflict with others on our team.
When I was a consultant at McKinsey, I remember one of the problem-solving principles was for everyone on the team to have an “obligation to dissent.” This meant two things. First, we were required to think about a topic (or a question or decision) independently and critically. We needed to formulate our own independent point of view. Second, if that point of view competed with others on the table, we had an obligation to speak up and share it–especially if it was a dissenting opinion.
This can be uncomfortable, especially if you have more of an agreeable and accommodating personality. If you have the mindset that you’re not attacking the other people, but that you’re contributing to the discussion, it makes it easier. Sometimes people hold back because they’re not confident that they know enough about the topic, or that their ideas may not be compelling or persuasive enough to sway the group. That doesn’t matter. The sheer act of speaking up and surfacing a competing view forces others in the group to consider that view and evaluate it against the others on the table. It forces people to think creatively. It expands the pool of available ideas, which might stimulate other ideas from the group. Don’t hold back when you have a conflicting point of view.
In order for “obligation to dissent” to work, however, the receiving party has to be able to gracefully listen to it, consider it, and then decide what to do about it. When I first joined McKinsey, this was something I struggled with–and I’m still not perfect at it today! I remember one heated project discussion where I made a proposal for how to solve a problem, and I got challenged by my colleagues. Rather than listen to their feedback and adapt or strengthen my thinking, I started to get emotional and frustrated. I was misinterpreting their feedback as relationship conflict rather than task conflict. My project leader pulled me aside later and told me that I was taking their feedback too personally. He shared that all of us were working together to come up with the best solution to the client’s problem, and that this type of debate was part of our process for pressure testing and iterating our thinking to get to the best answer. I took his feedback to heart and over time, I started to love these challenging debates and discussions–it’s always where I learn the most, and where I feel my ideas and thinking get so much better.
In Think Again, Grant offers some tips for how to have productive task conflict discussions:
- Bring the mindset of supporting the individual to strengthen their thinking and their solutions. Pixar uses the Braintrust to offer candid feedback to each other. As Ed Catmull (Pixar co-founder) wrote: “any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves… The Braintrust is fueled by the idea that every note we give is in service of a common goal: supporting and helping each other as we try to make better movies.”
- Stress that your feedback is not personal, but an opportunity to test and refine our thinking.
- Frame your feedback as a debate, rather than a disagreement. A debate “signals that you’re receptive to considering dissenting opinions and changing your mind.” A disagreement “feels personal and potentially hostile… We expect a debate to be about ideas, not emotions.”
- Debate about how rather than why. “When we argue about why, we run the risk of becoming emotionally attached to our positions and dismissive of the other side’s.” Grant notes that when you ask people why they believe a proposal will work, they often double down on their convictions. Asking them to explain how their proposal would work helps them to notice gaps in their own thinking and become curious about alternative solutions.
I encourage you to welcome some amount of task conflict (but low relationship conflict) within your teams. Note: this doesn’t imply that you should endlessly debate everything. However, it does mean that for important decisions, proposals, or problem-solving sessions you should actively seek out critical and challenging feedback. When you receive it, remember that this is task conflict and not relationship conflict. Listen to the feedback, consider it, and use it to adapt or strengthen your thinking. This feedback can come from your peers as well as from leadership. Whenever I provide challenging feedback, it’s in the spirit of engaging in a debate and supporting my team and my peers to strengthen their ultimate solution. Also we all have an obligation to dissent. Make sure that you speak up and share your dissenting perspective. Our ideas will only get better the more we test and refine them with critical feedback.
