Healthy conflict: Defined
Healthy conflict enables teams, with many perspectives and opinions, to debate and challenge viewpoints openly. When effectively managed, healthy conflict can then help generate innovative ideas and be a constructive way for groups and individuals to problem solve effectively. While it may involve disagreements, healthy conflict can encourage motivation, drive progress, and ensure issues are addressed without personal animosity.
Why healthy conflict is useful
Having multiple opinions and diverse perspectives can help teams find the best solutions to problems and issues – helping them become more productive. As a result, high performing teams are able to move forward far more quickly, because they actively seek out those differing opinions – never shying away from them.
Conversely, poorly performing teams will stop asking questions, and therefore not be able to identify all possibilities and solutions on the way to achieving aims. As a result, if a team eschews and avoids conflict, they can never be as high performing as they potentially could be.
At first, encouraging conflict and debate may sound counterintuitive. Surely a team that never argues just gets on with the job in hand with no drama? That won’t be the case, though, as the opposite of conflict is not sheer, blind agreement. When it comes to teams, the opposite of conflict is, in fact, disinterest, detachment and distance.
Healthy conflict on the other hand shows passion and drive. When both are present, they help create a stronger team that is motivated to achieve its aims and targets.
The art of healthy conflict
Encouraging conflict does not mean doing away with sensitivity and empathy. It is possible, and essential, to keep conflict healthy by striking the right balance – a feat not as daunting as it sounds.
While it may seem hard at first, it is entirely feasible by leveraging the trust and connections between team members. A team’s social glue should provide a cushion which enables everyone to explore differences. It will offer comfort and confidence to explore issues, while also allowing a team to depersonalise any challenges thanks to pre-established mutual understanding.
Directing conflict with purpose
Team members must also remember to focus on the issues at hand to ensure that healthy conflict prevails. Maintaining focus relies on another condition for a high performing team: clarity of vision and alignment. These must absolutely be kept in mind so that every team member can understand what any debate is trying to achieve. It also ensures that debates do not drift into other areas, potentially causing a disagreement to become a far bigger beast than it needs to be.
The difference a leader can make here is vital – in any team. Sporting teams are a great example. After a loss, the instinct might be to blame a player for a missed pass or forgotten set play. While these issues need discussion, it’s equally vital for a captain and team members to avoid spiralling into listing all of a person’s weaknesses. Doing so becomes demoralising for them and could potentially foster a toxic atmosphere.
Nurturing healthy conflict with Goldcrest Partners
The benefits of healthy conflict are therefore far-reaching, but it can be tough to move a team from one that nervously voices opinions to actively seeking out better ways to work.
It’s important to remember that conflict cannot be artificially engineered – in fact, trying to do so makes the conflict far more likely to descend into personal clashes, moving away from any debate based on the issues at hand. Plus, also remember that conflict is not the end in itself, merely a route to greater clarity.
Goldcrest Partners can help leaders introduce healthy conflict into their teams more effectively. We have worked with countless teams before, helping them work towards a more efficient way of identifying solutions to problems. Through constructive debate, teams evolve into a closer knit circle, with an enhanced alignment. With our support, teams are thus much better placed to become high performing, by leveraging their differing perspectives and opinions, as opposed to simply agreeing to keep the peace.
