It's Not Always About Agreeing

Excerpts from an HBR article with an unusual, and well articulated perspective, by Liane Davey

If Your Team Agrees on Everything, Working Together Is Pointless

                                                            

Collaboration is crumpling under the weight of our expectations. What should be a messy back-and-forth process far too often falls victim to our desire to keep things harmonious and efficient. Collaboration’s promise of greater innovation and better risk mitigation can go unfulfilled because of cultural norms that say everyone should be in agreement, be supportive, and smile all the time. 

You’ve probably been taught to see collaboration and conflict as opposites.  As a team, you’re “all in the same boat.” To be a good team player, you must “row in the same direction.” These idealized versions of teamwork and collaboration are making many teams impotent.

There’s no point in collaboration without tension, disagreement, or conflict. What we need is collaboration where tension, disagreement, and conflict improve the value of the ideas, expose the risks inherent in the plan, and lead to enhanced trust among the participants.

It’s time to change your mindset about conflict. Let go of the idea that all conflict is destructive, and embrace the idea that productive conflict creates value. Building on one another’s ideas only gets you incremental thinking. If you avoid disagreeing, you leave faulty assumptions unexposed. As Walter Lippmann said, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” 

Unfortunately, our distaste for conflict is so entrenched that encouraging even modest disagreement takes significant effort. I find that three specific techniques help people embrace productive conflict.

First, discuss the different roles in the team and highlight what each role brings to the conversation. Highlight how the roles are there to drive different agendas. 

As you work through each role in the team and their different motives, you’ll see the light bulbs going on as people realize, “You mean I’m supposed to fight with that person!” Yes! “And when he’s disagreeing with me, it’s not because he’s a jerk or trying to annoy me?” Right! If the team has the right composition, each member will be fighting for something unique. They are doing their jobs (and being good team players) by advocating in different directions, not by acquiescing. By taking the time to normalize the tensions that collaborators already feel, you liberate them to disagree, push, pull, and fight hard for the best answer.

Second, use a personality or style assessment tool to highlight differences in what people are paying attention to. In addition to differences stemming from their roles, team members will have different perspectives on an issue based on their personalities.

A third approach to normalizing and encouraging productive conflict is to set ground rules around dissension. Ask your team to define the behaviors that contribute to productive conflict (i.e., conflict that improves decision making while contributing to increased trust) and those that detract from it. 

One case that would benefit from clearer expectations is the use of the devil’s advocate role. The true role of the devil’s advocate (originally, the person appointed by the Pope to counter evidence of sainthood in the Roman Catholic beatification process) is to question the veracity of evidence and to propose alternate explanations for what has happened.  A true devil’s advocate does a great service.

Giving people permission to challenge, disagree, and argue isn’t enough. After all, giving someone permission to do something they don’t want to do is no guarantee that they’ll do it. If you want to create productive conflict on your team and use it to generate better ideas, you need to move beyond permission to making productive conflict an obligation.