What Startup Leaders Can Learn About Cultural Strategy from a Polarized Political Environment

Productive Conflict Improves Team Potential, But Getting There Can Be Tricky

This is the first of a two article series on developing a startup culture that drives healthy decision making excellence.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

-Peter Drucker

Agreement Isn’t a Prerequisite for a Great Relationship

I am blessed to have great friends: people I can trust to have my back, no matter what. One of my best friends and I disagree on practically everything. We have nearly opposite positions on politics, the role of science in public policy, where to find reliable news, and how we interpret the motivations and decisions of leaders. Nearly every time we sit down for coffee or a beer, we have a spirited debate. For those that know me well, I hang out with some pretty rowdy characters. Incorrectly navigating disagreement with my clan of wonderful beasts can be physically imperiling! And while there may be abundant profanity in our spirited discourse, there is a true air of curiosity and lack of judgment. We work to understand how the other makes sense of the world. We don’t seek to change each other’s minds because that’s not the point. By listening and probing the boundaries of our positions, we move forward together on even the tiniest spots of common ground we find.

Through this shaking out of our differences in the sunlight, we unlock opportunities for growth, decision making, and areas of compromise and alignment. We are in a continuous cycle of productive conflict.

For organizational leaders, seeking productive conflict on their teams is the result of an intentional cultural strategy that can lead teams to higher performance. Let’s consider the challenges and benefits of this strategy.

Learning Mindset + Trust & Mutual Respect + Ownership Clarity →
Productive Conflict → Decision Making Excellence

Productive Conflict

Productive conflict comes from pressing divergent ideas together with a learning mindset. It involves pulling together a diversely talented group, considering what can be learned from their perspectives, and discussing the path forward with clarity. The outcome is stronger decisions and more efficient execution.

Anti-goal: productive conflict is not intended to change the minds of others to your position. That’s the normal state of conflict (minus the “productive” part): where people seek victory over their opponent. In this world, only one stands at the top of the hill and someone must lose. Behavioral economists have been warning us of the futility of that approach for a long time. Today, more than ever, that path is worse than a waste of time, it’s destructive to the fabric of relationships, communities, and teams.

Productive conflict is a cultural strategy that can drive improved team health and decision making.

An Interpersonal Engagement Model that Drives Decision Making Excellence

Getting to Productive Conflict for Decision Making Excellence

Strategy and Decision Making

The function of strategy is to influence actions and decisions of the organization by coordinating decision making toward the objective. But ambiguities in how people communicate, relate to each other, and coordinate on the path to decision making can immobilize progress. It takes more than a foundational vision and strategy to accomplish decision making excellence. Every organization should support strategy with frameworks for decision making and ownership. Clear expectations must be set for how people work together to get there. Potentially great organizations can get bogged down by decision drag, a lethargic or tentative approach to clearing decision obstacles.

Why Seeking Productive Conflict is a Cultural Strategy for Teams

When people ask me what the culture of my startup organization is, I say that it’s a work in progress. While it is taking shape nicely, culture is the outcome of how your people engage one another. When you’re growing from 10 to 30 to 100, it emerges slowly. Leadership should have a cultural strategy, an aspirational plan for the stable form of the company culture. You can’t edict a culture into being, but you can paint a vision of the goal and continue to beat the drum as your team takes shape.

A cultural strategy is a plan to imbue the foundations of your team with an interpersonal engagement model with a specific goal in mind. By articulating the intended outcome with your organization about how the approach to decision making can yield a more healthy and effective organization, your team can reshape its culture from being tangled in conflict to being empowered by it.

The vision of a cultural strategy is always aspirational. We work to live up to it and we constantly remind ourselves of its purpose.

The Prerequisites to Productive Conflict

Teams need lots of prep time and support to get to productive conflict. By focusing on these prerequisites, you can improve the odds your organization will reap the rewards. Each of them is rooted in how your team members engage with one another.

1. Fostering a learning organization
2. Focusing on trust building and encouraging diverse perspectives
3. Clarifying ownership and driving it to the lowest capable level of the organization

1. Fostering a Learning Organization

A learning organization eagerly seeks new information to test the validity of the current state of knowledge and demonstrates an agility in responding to new learning. Its members are hungry for information to drive decision making and fearless of pivoting when they learn. The interpersonal engagement model required for learning organizations is one where people listen, are willing to yield their beliefs to new ideas, and work to make sense of new information. The quality bar is set high for new information so team members know to come prepared with data or a sound intuitive argument.

Failure States of a Learning Organization

Things to watch out for:

1. Decision drag. A learning organization can seize up with too many options to consider.
2. Groupthink. Homogeneity in backgrounds can drive out the diversity of opinion needed for new information to break through.
3. Not making time / too many meetings. By overloading the working capacity of your team, you squeeze out the quiet time needed for teams to research, analyze, reflect on, and integrate new information.

2. Focusing on Trust Building and Respect for Diverse Perspectives

By focusing on building strong relationships, demonstrating commitment for the success of your teammates, and respecting the diversity of perspectives they bring, a disagreement doesn’t drag in unspoken questions of motivation, hidden agendas, or turf conflict.

Failure States of a Trust-Building Organization

Things to watch out for:

1. Trusting without verifying information is hazardous to decision making. Decision integrity requires sound inputs and these should be reviewed rigorously. We can trust the intent of our teammates, but we should still seek proof with data or a basis in a sound argument.
2. Avoiding conflict by steering clear of debate to prevent upsetting a trusted partner.
3. Lack of safe spaces for debate where team members can openly discuss concerns and topics of potential conflict.

Debate, review of someone’s work, or challenging their intuition without attacking their character is a way you can support their growth and success. It has nothing to do with a lack of trust.

3. Clarifying Ownership and Driving Ownership to the Lowest Capable Level of the Organization

Conflict without clarity of ownership creates decision drag. Every problem domain in the organization should have a clear owner, supported by an ownership framework. A framework such as RASCI clarifies the roles and people who are involved in a problem domain with a precise set of rules of engagement to help prevent decision drag.

Failure States of Ownership and Delegation

Things to watch out for:

1. Lack of training. Delegating to a level of the organization that isn’t capable of driving the decision happens when the team is insufficiently prepared for ownership. For example, when introducing Agile to a development team, telling the developers they own their process without first ensuring they understand the goals or how the process works can cause an avoidable failure or stall progress.
2. False delegation. When a leader delegates to a capable level but overrides their decisions, trust and accountability is damaged and morale can be diminished.
3. Ambiguous ownership boundaries. Unclear ownership boundaries creates “no man’s land” or “free for all” zones ripe for unproductive conflict.

The Outcome of Productive Conflict: Decision Making Excellence

The cultural strategy of productive conflict is a route to decision making excellence. The components of this strategy require intentionally working to focus your teams on learning, trust building, ownership clarity, and delegation. Great decisions come at lower stress to the organization, without the turf battles, hand wringing, flip-flopping, and fear of failure that is the modern tar pit of organizational progress.

“A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must unbend his mind.”

― Sophocles

Stay tuned for my article The Five Sources of Organizational Decision Drag to continue exploring this topic.