The gift of conflict in successful teams
July 3, 2018
The very first time I led a team I thought we could live happily ever after on the back of one successful away day. What it actually gave me was six months of harmonious togetherness followed by looming dark clouds and incredulity that my team building efforts had been thwarted. These days I’m pleased to say my attitude to leading teams is far more mature and I know, boy do I know, that developing successful teams requires constant care and attention. Gains are hard won and easily lost.
Recently I’ve been working with a new leadership team on banishing boredom and process from our conversations and decision making. Together we’re striving to create a regular meeting format that works for us, one that inspires us, challenges and supports us to conceptualise new ideas. And of course it must help us keep on top of our “business as usual” tasks without process overload and it must support us to be accountable for the things we say we will do. We want a lot from our meetings. We want our time together to really count.
Avoiding death by meeting
In taking inspiration from Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting, my team and I agree that the key to achieving a great meeting is creating the right environment to challenge each other; for conflict to be normalised (and forgiven) so creativity can be maximised. To be clear, when we talk about conflict there’s no room for rudeness, arrogance or crushing of ideas and innovation. Conflict for us is about challenging assumptions; it’s about asking the awkward questions so the solution can be found. It’s about valuing and using the strengths and weaknesses of the team to ensure the end product is the best it can be. High challenge = High support.
Doing more and better
Asking the charity’s leadership team to engage in conflict goes against their basic human instinct to please and to be liked. It has taken time to develop the skills to do it well and to persuade the team that conflict is a truly special gift - when we are challenged to do more and better, we are more likely to be a high performing team - a successful team.
To succeed they’ve had to develop deep trust in each other. In doing so they’ve taken risks, lowering their defensive barriers and working incredibly hard to receive often very difficult challenge in a positive way. This hasn’t always been easy and it hasn’t always gone well, but forgiveness and understanding have been swiftly offered.
The concept of conflict is having a truly transformative impact on our leadership team. Conflict is moving our leadership team from good to great, it’s a powerful problem solving tool that allows us to take risks, to challenge assumptions and it enhances our creativity. Conflict helps us to care for one another. It challenges us to do more and better. Conflict is a gift and I’m pleased we have it in our charity’s leadership team, because we have a lot to do, and we’re moving progressively closer to being able to do it so much better now we understand the value of conflict.