Engaging in constructive conflict helps teams and organizations build trust, innovate, and thrive

While having acrimonious, mismanaged conflict is culturally detrimental and costly for organizations, having healthy conflict among colleagues is actually a sign of organizational health. And it’s something leaders and teams need to embrace and pursue rather than back away from if they want to grow and succeed.

Here are 3 reasons why healthy conflict is good for your teams and organizations:

1. Healthy conflict fosters good ideas and innovation.

Comedy writers often talk about the sanctity of the writers’ room. It’s a place for them to spitball with each other, throw out a lot of jokes, flirt with (and fully cross) the line of social acceptability, and pick apart each other’s ideas—good, bad, and offensive—to find what’s funny. Since they don’t know how audiences will react, they have to act as their own audiences and debate each other’s ideas to determine the best ones. That debate is a version of healthy conflict.

For those of us in business, we’re searching not for the best jokes but the best ideas. Like the writers debating what’s funny and what’s too far, we don’t know exactly what our customers will respond to, so figuring out which of our team’s ideas will work requires some testing. Our ability to strongly and respectfully question the assumptions of each other’s ideas dictates how fast we can sift through the unknowns and determine the best idea. The faster we do that, the faster we innovate, and the sooner we get new products in customers’ hands..

Healthy conflict is where all good ideas come from. Teams and organizations that avoid conflict are effectively avoiding innovation.

2. Healthy conflict is a sign of psychological safety and trust.

Many teams and organizations avoid conflict because they see it as polarizing and insensitive. They subscribe to the axiom “praise in public; critique in private” not just for an individual’s performance (in which case it’s appropriate) but also for ideas (in which case it’s not). As a result, teams end up with a lot of backchanneling in private and revisiting decisions after people have shared their real thoughts behind closed doors.

We work with a large, household-name company that recently hired a new CEO who actively encourages public debate of people’s ideas. After a few months, the CEO realized the organization was split along two lines: newer employees would happily question their colleagues’ ideas in group settings, but employees who’d been at the company for a long time saved their critiques for private meetings. The old-school employees thought the new-school employees were being aggressive while the new-school folks thought the old-school folks were undermining them by sharing criticisms “behind their backs.”

In our coaching session with the leadership team, they concluded the conflict-avoidance issue was a very well-intended way of working handed down from previous leaders, who actively discouraged conflict. As a result, the old-school team members didn’t know how to engage in conflict of any kind—or even that conflict could be healthy to begin with. Which begs a good question…

What makes conflict healthy vs. unhealthy?

There’s a Goldilocks situation when it comes to conflict in organizations, and it comes down to how much tension is in the system, which you can see in the following chart:

Too much tension leads to polarized teams, distrust, and lower productivity.

Too little tension leads to a sense of false harmony, little urgency, and lower productivity.

The right amount of tension, however, keeps people on their toes while prompting proactive, productive debate, which leads to higher productivity. That’s healthy conflict.

You want to keep the pot at a simmer: enough activation to keep things moving forward, but not enough that it all boils over and burns.

No tension will feel OK, though, if people don’t have a sense of psychological safety and trust within the organization. Leaders, it’s up to you to foster that.

These might sound like opposing ideas to some who think, “How does conflict have a place in a psychologically safe environment?” But as leadership expert Amy Edmondson explains it, “The term [‘psychological safety’] implies to people a sense of coziness—you know…‘we’re all going to be nice to each other,’ and that’s not what it’s really about. What it’s about is candor…being direct, taking risks.”

Leaders who find that their teams can’t be direct need to first establish psychological safety and trust before any healthy conflict can take place.

3. Engaging in conflict saves time.

Bottom line: Not engaging in healthy conflict wastes a whole lot of time. Backchanneling results in too many side conversations, costing many people hours they could have spent doing other, more productive things. And without the innovation that comes from constructive debate, companies end up spending time and money on bad ideas, and ultimately take much, much longer to find the good ones, grow, and succeed—if they do at all. Save your company a lot of resources, and get the debate going.

What leaders can do to help teams recalibrate and start engaging in healthy conflict

Leaders, if you recognize your organization in this article, there are some things you can do to start changing your company’s rhetoric and culture around conflict right away:

Seek dissent, ask people to question your ideas, and publicly praise them when they do. When teams see that it’s OK, and even good, to question their leaders’ ideas, it becomes easier—and psychologically safer—for them to question each other’s.

Model taking feedback well. Part 2 to seeking dissent is actually managing it well when you receive it. If you fire back at people or recite a litany of reasons they might be wrong, you can guarantee they won’t try it again. Thank them for sharing their feedback, and take the time to thoughtfully engage with their questions and arguments.

Give teams language for starting a debate. On the podcast Armchair Expert, when host Dax Shepard wants to debate the claim or reasoning of his guest, he uses a specific phrase: Do you wanna dance? With this simple question, he lets his guest know that he’s interested in engaging in healthy conflict, but with respect, openness, and goodwill. You can do the same with your teams. Giving them language to engage with one another in this way can help everyone understand that the goal of the debate is not to tear each other down but to test ideas and find the optimal conclusion for the benefit of everyone.

Stop taking 1-on-1s with people who want to complain. When people say they want to share feedback about an idea, initiative, or practice of someone else on the team, have them bring it up in a group meeting. Actively reroute these conversations (perhaps many times) and let them know that 1-on-1s with you are not to be used for this purpose.

Open up the dance floor

Lo and behold, it is possible to be too civil among teams, and it can actually harm your company’s growth in more ways than one. By embracing healthy conflict and giving your teams the opportunity to debate ideas amongst themselves, you’re showing your teams their opinions matter and opening the door to the best ideas yet.

So, do you wanna dance? We do.

Nice Teams Finish Last : Why (and How) Great Companies Embrace Healthy Debate