Maximize your Team’s Effectiveness: Turn Destructive Conflict into Productive Conflict
Picture this: Armed with the knowledge that having a variety of perspectives and working styles on a team boosts innovation, your team has decided to hire new employees who think differently from them. Your team wants to patch up its collective blindspots and knows that cultivating a broad range of perspectives and styles is one of the best ways to do that. The only problem? The new hires and the rest of the team aren’t exactly meshing. After all, it’s hard to see eye to eye with individuals whose needs and behaviors in a workplace setting are drastically different from yours.
This was the case with one team of financial executives that our head coach Katherine Lewis worked with recently. The team had learned during a coaching session a few months earlier that its members all tended to approach problem-solving and decision-making in the same manner – they’re swift, action-oriented, and no-nonsense. We’ll call these people the “doers.” Absent from the team was anyone whose behaviors fell into the “thinker” category – the creative, sensitive “idea people” who prefer to ponder abstract, long-term problems than address the more immediate, practical ones. This discovery helped to explain a roadblock that the team had been hitting time and time again: While they were highly effective at addressing short-term targets, they sputtered when it came to long-term strategic planning. But now they finally knew why, and could make a concerted effort to address the problem. So, over the following months, the team of doers set out to hire more thinkers in the hopes that representation of these new perspectives would help generate the long-term, big-picture innovation and creative conflict the team felt it lacked.
And generate conflict it did – but not the kind the team had wanted. The doers and the newly hired thinkers, unable to understand each other’s working styles, each retreated into their respective factions instead of meeting each other where they were. In one key instance, the doers, being the quick-thinking, results-oriented people they were, couldn’t understand why the thinkers worked at such a slow pace. And this befuddlement soon morphed into resentment when the doers began talking amongst themselves offline about the thinkers’ work habits: Reinforcing each other’s opinions, their observations of the thinkers’ “slow pace” turned into accusations of laziness, indifference, even incompetence. Far from broadening the team’s point of view and fostering innovation, the team’s newfound variety of perspective was producing a rift between the original team members and new hires, stymying collaboration and fomenting discord. Without clear, deliberate action toward bridging team members’ divergent perspectives, the heterogeneity that would otherwise be a team’s greatest strength instead becomes its kryptonite, siloing the new hires off from the team’s original members and halting innovation in its tracks. “It was like the body was rejecting the organ,” Katherine recalls.
Fortunately for this team, they got the chance to do this vital bridging work during their team effectiveness sessions – specifically through the process of creating “team norms,” a set of operating principles that a team works together to develop and then agrees to adhere to. Team norms are crucial for cultivating harmony among team members especially when the team has members with different behaviors and expectations, because they provide a sort of common ground, a set of standards that even the most disparate of perspectives on a team can take as given.
When Katherine noticed and shared with this team that offline conversations among the doer members seemed to be thwarting team-wide harmony, the team collectively agreed to develop and adopt a norm that actively addressed this problem: “No offline conversations.” Rather than engage in private, informal conversations about team members’ work habits – conversations that invariably strike up between like-minded individuals with similar perspectives (and who might agree, for instance, that “a slow working style = a bad working style,”) – critiques like these would thereafter only take place “in the room” and with the subject of the critique present. This way, the thinkers could participate in the conversation and offer their perspective in response.
And respond they did. In the session, the thinkers explained that their slow pace was the result, not of slacking off, but of their thoroughness and their commitment to mapping out the consequences of every possible decision before finally landing on one. Far from laziness, the thinkers’ slow pace was a byproduct of the attribute of theirs that inspired the doers to seek them out in the first place: Their thoughtful, visionary, long-term-oriented perspective and working style.
Had this “No offline conversations” norm not been established, had the team not taken the time and done the work to create a space for their members’ varying perspectives to flourish, these creative differences might have continued to drive them apart. Instead, the common ground they established through team effectiveness sessions enabled this team to harness the variety of perspectives that they’d spent months curating. Within just a few weeks following their first team effectiveness session, the team came together and developed a five-year plan – one of the long-term planning tasks that had given the doers so much grief a few months before. Now, with the necessary foundation built, the team’s destructive conflict was, at last, becoming productive conflict.