Three Detailed Steps to Leading Healthy Conflicts in the Workplace

A boss at work has a new project and provides the team a suggested path to getting it done. Two other team members believe there is a better way of executing the plan. One does not speak up and typically prefers to avoid disagreements. The other team member provides an alternative path, but does not substantiate it with supporting evidence on why the alternative would be better. Healthy conflict involves both the confrontation itself and sound logic for the alternate suggestion. How can you create healthy conflict?

To help navigate your reading, the following sections were utilized:
I. Purpose
II. Background
III. Approach
IV. Closing Remarks
V. Additional Case & Resources

I. Purpose

Many posts and articles from recognized publishers (e.g., HBR, Forbes) have spoken about the importance of disagreeing in the workplace to generate better ideas. I want to expand on the “How” in developing healthy conflicts within the workplace whether you are an entry level employee, a middle manager, or an executive.

This post’s goal is to help team members structure their approach to leading conflict and challenging ideas. For managers and executives seeking to create a conducive environment for healthy conflict, after reviewing this post, you may refer to this article of mine.

II. Background

For the purposes of this article, “Healthy Conflict” signifies openly discussing ideas and objections with other colleagues in order to determine the best course of action.

What this looks like:

• Boss gave orders for solving problem A.
• Employee believes there are potentially better approaches to solving a problem.
• In a world without Healthy Conflict, the employee would follow the boss’ orders.
• In a world with Healthy Conflict, the employee would discuss alternative approaches with the boss. The two would then decide on the best approach together.

In the scenario above I utilized Boss and Employee, but note this could be also be cross departmental (i.e., Marketing Manager speaking to Operations Associate)

In case you haven’t read the articles or books on why healthy conflict is important, here’s a summary from two perspectives:

• As an Employee: the more you challenge and improve a business’ ideas → the more repetitions you will get at being a decision maker → the more responsibility you will receive moving forward
• As a Boss: Developing a culture where employees feel comfortable to contribute and criticize ideas is crucial to 1) their satisfaction and retention and 2) utilizing everyone’s brainpower for problem solving and thereby not relying on only your own

III. Approach: Three Steps to Leading the Healthy Conflict

The three steps to leading healthy conflict are 1) Understand, 2) Propose, 3) Set Up or UPS. The following sample case will be provided within the explanation to help deepen understanding of the three steps.

Sample Case A: You work in the marketing department at a software company. Boss gave orders to tell consumers about a new product feature immediately.

1) Understand Context and Align on Existing Plan Fully:

Before even raising a potential suggestion, you must understand the complete context of the project or problem you are looking to solve. If you do not understand the context fully, ask the relevant lead to further explain the details of all of the moving pieces until you do understand.

To understand fully, ensure you are able to answer the following questions

• Context: What is the overarching goal or objective? What are our key performance indicators (KPI) for success? Ideally the KPI is numerical — sales target, cost per X target, conversion target, click target, number of users target, etc.
• Plan: What are the key steps of the plan? Who is responsible for each step? What are the respective deadlines?

Once you fully understand the above, you can then ask yourself: “Is this the BEST way to achieve our goal?” If yes, proceed with execution of the plans as initially stated. If No, continue to Step 2.

Sample Case A-1. Understand
Given the information from the boss to tell consumers about the new feature, we are not fully aware of why we should test this new product feature. Before proceeding, we need to understand our underlying objective (KPI) for testing such a feature. We can do so by asking the manager or project lead directly, what is the goal of this product and how does it align with our overall goal? After understanding the rationale behind the task, we should ask ourselves if we agree with the reasoning. If yes, go ahead and follow orders as suggested. If you do not agree with the rationale, proceed to step 2) Propose.

2) Propose Alternative Actions with Supporting Evidence:

After fully understanding the context and plan, if you believe the initially proposed plan can be improved, you should develop proposed alternative actions and provide supporting evidence for these ideas.

Proposed alternative actions can be major changes, such as changing the process flow completely or choosing to spend resources on a completely different initiative, or minor changes, such as adding one additional step to the process or shifting the focus slightly for the existing plan.

Supporting evidence can be from similar past projects and the results of their KPI. If no similar projects have been conducted in the past, KPI projections or impact on process flow for the various methods should be mapped out.

Ideally, you would have been able to develop both hypothesized alternative actions and supporting evidence, but it may be possible that you only came up with one of the two.

• If you have hypothesized alternative actions, but cannot come up with supporting evidence, perhaps because there is not enough time or data is not available, you can still proceed to Step 3. However, note that supporting evidence will increase your chances of successfully convincing stakeholders to take your suggestion seriously.
• If you cannot come up with hypothesized alternative actions, but have supporting evidence for why the initially proposed plan would not be successful, still continue to step 3.

Sample Case A-2. Propose
Perhaps the goal of launching the new product is improving user retention, but you learned from a previous study that messaging fatigue was the largest driver of declining visits. Given this information, you think a better alternative is to tell your manager that there are multiple messages we are looking to send out to our user base this month and we need to prioritize between them.

3) Set up Discussion and Action Plan:

Before having the actual discussion, you will need to let relevant stakeholders know that you have suggested improvements for the initial plan. Note that the method in which we course this communication and our word choice are particularly important — poor execution here could result in individuals taking things personally or being offended that their idea is not up to par. So we need to call the discussion “Optimizing [Project Name]” or “Improving Process Flow for [Project Name]”. This will create a healthy frame for the discussion — ‘what is the best decision we can make’ as opposed to ‘shooting someone’s idea down’.

The channel of communication (e.g., email, messaging client, in-person 1:1, group meeting) will also impact the roll-out of your proposed alternative actions. Different channels (see image below) may be more optimal for varying cases depending on the scale of the suggested change and number of stakeholders involved. For our purposes, we will define stakeholders as number of different teams or groups involved, including yours. See the proposed alternative actions section for samples of major and minor changes.

• Email / Messaging Client: For minor changes and any number of stakeholders, these channels can allow for quick communication with limited alignment needed. If preferred, the other channels can also be used here, but note that email / messaging client channel should not be substituted for group meetings or in-person one on ones.
• Group meeting: For major changes with <= 2 stakeholders, a group meeting to discuss your proposed alternative actions and supporting evidence would be best suited so all members can align. Before the meeting, make sure to send the proposal and supporting evidence to all relevant parties so they can review beforehand.
• In-person one on one: For major changes that will affect >= 3 stakeholders, I would recommend having a one on one with each relevant stakeholder first to get their opinion. Similar to the group meeting channel, prior to the one on one, make sure to send the proposal and supporting data to them via email so they can review beforehand. After aligning with each stakeholder, cap it off with a group meeting for all stakeholders to make a the final decision.

During the actual meeting, present your alternative actions along with supporting evidence and ask the relevant stakeholders for their thoughts. If they agree, you can proceed to talk about next steps, deadlines, responsibility changes. If there are recommended changes to your idea or the other stakeholder(s) do not agree, make sure you understand why. Remember the goal for you going through this whole exercise is to learn how to make better decisions. Paying attention to any logic gaps will be crucial in expediting your learning. In any case, you will want to track the results of the plan to see how well it performs.

Sample Case A-3. Set-Up
As mentioned previously, a good set-up will lead to better relationships between the involved parties. Aggressively walking into the managers office and saying, “immediately telling consumers is a dumb idea” perhaps is too aggressive.

Since this change is minor, going with an email or messaging client channel can be appropriate. The phrasing is also important to ensure the manager is aligned with your intentions of improving the idea and not shutting it down. Ensure to give your manager the full context and supporting evidence, “there are currently multiple messages in the pipeline and we found that consumer fatigue is leading to a decline in return users”, along with your proposed alternative action, “so I believe we need to re-prioritize the current messaging pipeline, if we want this new product feature to be mentioned next. Here is my suggested re-ordering of messages. Let me know what you think.”

From here the manager should be able to say, “Yes, I agree with your order” or “Make these changes to the order”, either of which is a success because you helped the business make a better decision. If the manager says, “No, send all the messages to the consumer”, they should be able to justify it with a reason, since they are going against historic data.

IV. Closing Remarks

Healthy conflicts in the workplace are essential for making the best decision for the company and for you as the one leading the change to grow to take larger responsibilities. The actual nuanced execution involves three steps, Understanding, Proposing, and Setting-up (UPS). To help make the discussion more concrete, you will find an additional example case to help illustrate the steps after this section.

Are there nuances that I missed? If you have any comments or questions, feel free to respond below or connect with me on LinkedIn.

V. Additional Case & Resources

Sample Case B: You are working on a cross-department initiative to grow awareness of your organic food delivery segment. The project lead from another department has outlined the process flow.

B-1. Understand
Let’s assume you understand the underlying objectives and process flow, but see improvement points in the process flow.

B-2. Propose
Based on your prior knowledge of similar projects, you notice that perhaps the process flow does not mention how the data will be tracked or leaves out a quality assurance step to insure the food is of the company’s standards.

B-3. Set-Up
Since there could be potentially multiple parties involved (e.g., project lead, data team, quality assurance team), we should go with the one on one communication channel to get better understanding and buy-in from these other teams first. After aligning with these relevant parties, we can then present out recommended alternative action(s) during a group meeting to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Additional Resources
In case you are curious about the HBR or Forbes posts about Healthy Conflict, you may find them here:
- HBR Post (click here)
- Forbes Post (click here)