3 Tips to Fight Right
When it comes to conflict at work
getting to a Goldilocks moment - not too much, not too little - is hard. Here's
how to get your team to debate productively.
Teams walk a delicate balance with
conflict.
Too much and you get rancor and
paralysis. Too little and your team stumbles along implementing unchallenged
and probably suboptimal ideas. So how do you get to that Goldilocks moment
where there's neither too much conflict nor to little?
Kellogg
School management professor Leigh Thompson has some ideas. In a long discussion
about her new book, Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough
Collaboration,
on Kellogg insight recently, Thompson takes a long detour into the psychology
of conflict and what leaders can do to ensure their teams fight in a healthy
and productive way.
Focus
on Problems, Not People
Thompson outlines the difference
between benign conflict, which can actually sharpen your team's thinking, and
more malignant arguments, stressing that good fights are about ideas, not
people.
"Benign conflict focuses on the
substance of the problem, not the people espousing the argument,” she says.
"The malignant type of conflict is where people attack the person making
the argument. They question their intentions, their integrity, their
motivations."
How can you steer a conversation
towards the former and away from the latter? "Try this exercise: the next
time someone attacks your idea, try to state what you think their argument is.
Try stating their argument even more forcefully than they have stated it,"
Thompson says, adding, "resist getting personal. Instead, offer to share
how you arrived at your belief. Focusing just on arguments and data—and setting
aside personal feelings—takes some practice, like playing piano or riding a bike."
Don't
Settle for Instant Consensus
Sometimes everyone naturally agrees,
but those situations are generally so obvious that you wouldn't have called
everyone together to talk about them in the first place. If you pooled the best
minds of your business to discuss something and everyone is in instant
agreement, you're probably going about debating it wrong and missing a valuable
opportunity to delve deeper into the issue.
"If you have a group in which
everyone seems to be in agreement, that’s a signal that you’re going to have to
do some work. You either need to appoint a devil’s advocate or invite an
outsider in who’s going to disagree with you," says Thompson.
Prodding your people to be less
conflict adverse can lead to real benefits, according to Thompson who cites
recent research that shows, "brainstorming groups that engage in open
debate, challenging each other in benevolent ways, perform better than groups
that don’t have any debate at all. Managers often tell groups not to criticize
each other, but the data actually suggests that debate helps the creative
process."
To help stir up healthy conflict,
she advises suggests discussion participants refrain from staking out a
definite position too early in a conversation. Once people have taken a firm
public stance they're hesitant to change their minds and others are often
hesitant to dissent, leading to what she terms "pluralistic
ignorance." Testing hypotheses and trading arguments about theories often
works better than planting a flag and asking team members to try to topple you
from opinion mountain.
Walk
the Middle Way
Another key to productive debates is
knowing how often to call for them and when to end them.
"You don’t want to always be
debating. Even if you and I are having benign conflict, at some point we need
to be doing other things," she says. Your aim should be the conflict sweet
spot: "Avoiding conflict isn’t good; debating each other all the time is
not that good either. You want to have a moderate amount."
http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/3-tips-to-fight-right.html?cid=em01020week12c&nav=su
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