Mining for Conflict: The Key to a Team’s Success?
Is mining for conflict the key to a healthy work environment? I recently read The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni and thought he made an effective case for why conflict is an important part of how a team operates.
Let’s play it out.
You’re in a meeting. The question at hand is one of the “million incremental improvements” that will decide if your company is successful or not. And, of course, the answer isn’t clear. There’s no playbook that says if you do X, Y, and Z, all signs point to yes!
Of course in circumstances like these it can be difficult to speak up, or disagree, even if you have misgivings about where things are heading. After all, how can you chart this unknown path better than anyone else around the table? Or perhaps you’re busy balancing your own priorities, wishing this meeting would end already so you can go. get. stuff. done.
So you don’t speak. And neither does the person next to you. Or the person next to them. Until the person left leading the discussion is thinking, “Hmm, I’m pretty sure we’re not all in agreement here but I guess we just have to move on…”
As it turns out, getting everything out on the table, or mining for conflict, is something that successful teams do, and less successful ones don’t. In The Advantage, Lencioni explains:
One of the best ways for leaders to raise the level of healthy conflict on a team is by mining for conflict during meetings. This happens when they suspect that unearthed disagreement is lurking in the room and gently demand that people come clean.
In other words, effective team leaders establish an obligation to dissent, knowing that if they don’t the conversations that should be happening in the open will instead happen in isolated pockets, behind closed doors to the detriment of the team. While it’s natural to desire consensus, the more productive approach is to get more people to speak and share their ideas, and ultimately, as Lencioni says, “avoid the destructive hallway conversations that inevitably result when people are reluctant to engage in direct, productive debate.”
But how do you establish healthy conflict in a team?
We’ve all had the colleague who was, quite frankly, too ready to dissent. So how does a team strike the right balance?
First — establish that conflict is welcome and purposeful.
In his book, Lencioni encourages leaders to try something called “real time permission”:
Real time permission: when a leader sees her people engaging in disagreement during a meeting, even over something relatively innocuous, she should do something that may seem counterintuitive but is remarkably helpful: interrupt. That’s right. Just as people are beginning to challenge one another, she should stop them for a moment to remind them that what they are doing is good.
Second — define what healthy conflict looks like.
But of course not all conflict is good conflict. So team members, and especially team leaders, ought to speak up when conflict is occurring, praising healthy examples, and course-correcting when things are veering into unhealthy territory.
Even better: establishing what good conflict looks like before it even happens. Lencioni says:
Another way that leaders can help their teams overcome their aversion to conflict is by creating clear expectations and guidelines around what it should entail.
The book goes further, illustrating how one way to do this is by establishing norms for meetings. For example, a leader can establish that silence will be interpreted as disagreement. If a decision will be made, people around the table need to take turns in the conversation and formally commit to bringing the final conclusion back to their teams.
Third — the hardest and most important step— create an environment of trust and vulnerability.
If a team doesn’t have psychological safety, healthy conflict is impossible. Lencioni begins his book by discussing the foundation a team needs before it can engage in conflict, make decisions, assign accountability, and achieve results. That foundation? Trust. He states:
Trust must be established if real conflict is to occur.
Well that’s a doozy. If it it already feels like a team is off the rails how can trust be established? It’s not easy but there are more and more resources to help us figure it out. For example, check out this tool for fostering psychological safety from Google’s re:Work team.
While creating room for conflict isn’t necessarily the easier path, it’s the path to a healthier, more productive team. Isn’t it worth it?
Quotes throughout this article came from The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni. In addition to being an excellent read, the book also has a set of free resources for people looking to strengthen their teams by creating trust and healthy conflict. Also mentioned above, Google’s re:Work community has a lot of great (and free) resources for effective team building. Do you have other favorite tools and resources? Please share them in the comments!
About Me
I’m an SF-based creator and communicator that discovered a passion for organizational design and culture after working at an educational technology startup for the past few years. I love hand-lettering, design thinking, and finding ways to create workplaces that help the people in them do amazing work.
