Creating Healthy Conflict
For some organizations conflict is avoided like the plague. A person simple cannot ever disagree as it would signal disloyalty, or a lack of support for the organizations goals and mission. However, conflict is a necessary ingredient to a fully functioning environment. Conflict can be seen as a sign that there is a good and healthy environment amongst the team. Conflict is not always a sign of a problem. Tension and disagreement are inevitable in the workplace. And there's a difference between healthy and unhealthy conflict. Healthy conflict is vital towards a team’s maturity and growth. The team is better when the members can engage in healthy conflict that allows them to voice their honest thoughts, disagreements, and helps everyone move forward together. Here are ways to encourage productive healthy conflict on your team.
Disagreement is expected
Strong teams disagree in the right place and time. Strong leaders help create a culture that allows and expects disagreement to occur during the proper discussion. The team should know what the proper time and place is for disagreement. Behind each other’s backs to other people is never the right time or place for it. The next great idea for the organization could very well be lost because the idea generator is scared to voice their disagreement within the current discussion. Or the idea is lost because the leader refuses to acknowledge or consider the place civil disagreement has in generating healthy conflict within the staff. Expecting disagreement and allowing for the open and respectful discussion is vital for quality progress for the organization. A leader may have to initiate the disagreement in order to show it is valued, or learn to ask guiding questions to the team to bring potential disagreement to the surface. It is likely that you will have to coach your team to disagree together in a healthy fashion.
Identify positive tensions
Every organization encounters things that are positive tensions that you can’t solve, but you have to manage. It is far better to know what they are rather than continuing to bump into them and rehashing. Team meetings can waste hours of time debating, or seeking to “fix”, an unsolvable problem. As a team you will need to learn to live within the positive tensions of some of these issues. The team has to learn to wrestle with the tension and be good with not arriving at a solution. Having a comfort level with positive tensions will free the team up to deal with the actual problems that need solving.
Separate people from problems
Churches often have the member, or members, who have the spiritual gift of complaining. These people love to bring up supposed problems, but never offer a solution to the problem. However, an environment with healthy conflict means that people on the team are free to bring up potential problems. In fact, this environment invites the identification of problems. To create healthy conflict though the problem and the person have to be kept separate. Too often the discussion of the problem becomes a discussion about the person. Turning it onto the person creates hurt feelings and stalls any healthy discussion. Eventually no one will bring up potential problems because of feeling attached when they do.
Keep emotions in check
Conflict can turn heated and people can get emotionally charged. Leaders must model authentic curiosity but when that turns towards anger, or bitter, feelings a timeout needs to be called. The team may need to take a break. Or just a pause for a moment to pull back to the discussion at hand. Take time to clarify the key issues being expressed. Make sure each person is rightly understanding what the problem is and what the offered solutions are. If one person is speaking over everyone, take time to give other people the chance to speak into the situation. Maybe it is a good time to take a fifteen minute break and grab coffee. Healthy conflict leaves personal agendas at the door and seeks the best path forward.
Great teams know how to walk through conflict ina healthy and constructive way. The conflict helps them move forward as a team and an organization. Engaging correctly into conflict is important to the overall health of the team. A team that is completely absent of conflict is actually not a good thing. That is simply the opposite problem of a team that is always in conflict. There is a balance that must be struck. It takes time and effort to develop the kind of trust in a team that allows for healthy conflict to take place. It is worth every bit of that time and effort to get there.