Should I Challenge Or Should I Be Nice?

Removing the Biggest Barrier to Healthy Conflict

The Power of Openness

Openness is one of our core values at Klinify. We encourage honesty, open discussion, and direct communication. We discourage hierarchies, indirect messaging, and siloed information. This often leads to “blunt” conversations. In the long run, it is quite helpful because:

1. Everyone quickly converges roughly to the same page, and
2. Nobody worries about complicated background dynamics.

So if there are clear benefits to being open, it should be easy to follow within the team, right? Sadly, no. To understand why let’s have a crash course in how our brain works.

Crash Course: Brains

It’s useful to think of the mind as having 2 parts:

1. The Amygdala. This fast, primitive, intuitive part is always looking out for threats and evaluating whether to activate fight-or-flight responses.
2. The Neocortex. This slower, deliberate, analytical part is intelligent, can make more nuanced tradeoffs, and follow logical chains.

To get a better sense of this dichotomy, I highly recommend reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

So Where’s The Problem?

Conflict is uncomfortable by definition. Yet, Healthy Conflict is a necessity if we want to consider many perspectives. It leads to innovative solutions and better decisions. Your neocortex understands this tradeoff if you want the best outcome for the team. Unfortunately, the amygdala gets in the way.

It can be intimidating when someone is critical of your work or asks pointed questions or gives you direct feedback. Your amygdala immediately responds to these “attacks” with defensiveness. Instead of objectively looking at the flagged issues, you spend energy thinking about how to defend yourself. This is part of your natural impulse, and thus difficult to control. We all do it. Since the amygdala is so fast, this surge of emotions happens before you realize what’s going on.

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash

So What Do We Do?

How do we build a culture that cultivates healthy conflict, instead of conflict avoidance?

First, we need to accept that this instinctive defense mechanism is part of our brain. Talking about open communication, candor, and flat hierarchies will not change that.

Second, we need to learn how to work around it. Keep this in mind if you’re criticizing someone’s work. Keep this in mind if you’re on the receiving end of criticism too.

Sharing Feedback

• Accept that the recipient of the feedback can instinctively get defensive.
• Choose your words carefully to avoid making them sound like a personal attack. For example, “This looks wrong” is better than saying “You seem to have made a mistake here.”
• Remember that both of you are on the same team trying to find a better solution. Reign in your impulse to be right, or score ego points.
• If the person does react defensively, let them know and have a conversation about their fears. Defensiveness always comes from a place of fear.
• Give them the space to override their instinct. This requires considerable willpower on their part. Don’t make them feel bad that they got defensive.

Once both of you are on the “same team”, the perception of threat goes away, the amygdala is disarmed, and you can actually talk to their neocortex. This tends to be much more productive.

Receiving Feedback

• When someone tells you you are being defensive, try not to see that as a threat. Instead, give them feedback about what triggered it, so they can be more mindful.
• If you do get defensive, don’t feel too bad. As long as you commit to open communication, we can all help each other get over our insecurities.
• Think about why you felt defensive. What were you trying to defend against? Slowly but surely you can override your impulse and yield control to your neocortex. All this can happen within the same conversation. The more your practice this, the quicker you will catch yourself.

Ultimately, it is your responsibility to learn to control your mind, so you can be more effective. If you don’t, then you will find you are upset too often, feel powerless, picked on and it will lead to a downward spiral that would mean you will ultimately hate your job and not fit into our culture.

What About Being Nice?

If you give someone direct feedback or challenge their idea/work, aren’t you being mean? Don’t we want a friendly workplace?

Yes, we definitely want a friendly workplace. We want to attack ideas, not people.

• Sometimes your mind conflates an attack on an idea with an attack on you and that’s what this article is about.
• Sometimes people do slip from attacking ideas to attacking people. If someone does this, you should tell them off. We don’t want this.

Remember: We do not want to be nice at the expense of rigorous discourse.

So be nice, be respectful. We are all on the same team. At the same time, be blunt, and be honest. With a little effort and mindfulness, this can all coexist together, and that’s when we are at our best.

Thanks to Saif Uddin Mahmud for editing and adding context.