How to Have Healthy Conflict in the Workplace
Are you feeling a lot of conflict within your team, the kind that isn’t necessarily healthy? I want to provide a framework for understanding three different types of team conflict. One of them is great and should be encouraged, but the other two can be really problematic.
Tension in Team DynamicsThe first type, which we want more of, is what I call “tension.” Tension is when we have conflict in our team because we’re looking at a problem through different lenses. We have different expertise, we’re coming from different departments, different teams with different priorities and goals or performance metrics. We have consider different stakeholders and their concerns.
This diversity of perspectives naturally puts tension on the conversation, on the deliberation. It can feel uncomfortable, for example, realizing that your obsessive focus on suppliers is just one aspect of a broader issue that includes customer needs. But this kind of tension is healthy and necessary for a well-rounded decision-making process.
The Problems of Pressure and FrictionThere are two other things I’ve been seeing a lot of in teams, recently—things that are not healthy and that we will want to avoid: pressure and friction.
PressurePressure is a situation where there’s conflict, but it’s one-way, with no forum in which to go back and forth or come to a workable solution. Pressure comes from unilateral demands, like a CEO insisting on a certain course of action with no room for anyone to say, “that’s not actually workable or achievable.” It comes from one department in an organization having all the clout and all the influence—and deciding on how something will be without any input from the rest of the team, and then creating unrealistic expectations and impossible timelines.
In a way, pressure is half of the tension equation. It would be a positive if only that one perspective could be melded with the other perspectives to understand what’s an optimal outcome. But pressure doesn’t work like that. It’s a one-way street.
FrictionWhen it come to friction, on the other hand, everyone is involved in the conversation, but it is misdirected. Yes, there is a forum for the conflict, but instead of that conflict being focused on those different perspectives, different stakeholders, different priorities, different ways of looking at the problem, friction is where it gets focused on the individual. It gets competitive. It gets to the point where no one’s looking for the optimal solution—everyone’s just looking to win their case. You’ll see a lot of interrupting, not listening, and entrenching in initial positions rather than seeking an approach that benefits the whole. And that friction is what really wears us down.
Tension Is HealthyWe need conflict in our teams, but we’re looking for it to feel like tension, stretching our thinking and optimizing our limited resources. Tension may be uncomfortable, but it’s necessary and healthy compared to pressure, which lacks a healthy forum for conflict resolution, or friction, where the forum exists but is not used to get the best answer.
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I want you to think about scenarios where you might be feeling that tension, but also where you experience pressure or friction with no helpful, constructive, useful forum to resolve it. Understanding these dynamics is the first step in resolving conflict within your team—and that’s what we’re going to be talking about next time.
More On ThisThe Importance of Conflict Resolution at Work
The Steps to Resolve a Conflict at Work
New Research on Healthy Conflict
Video: Lack of Conflict Is Not a Good Thing
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