Avoiding Confrontation is Ruining Your Team
Have you ever avoided confrontation at work in order to keep the peace? Do you notice that your peers tend to smile along in meetings and come to you after with complaints? Is the push for people to be flexible and positive stopping them from confronting real issues? This is becoming more common in the workplace as we focus on employees feeling positive, engaged, and enthusiastic about their work. But we cannot function if we are constantly sunny. Disagreement, confrontation, and conflict are natural parts of teamwork that need to be encouraged.
Teams need conflict to be successful! If properly managed and facilitated, conflict in work teams can increase innovation and productivity, as well as increase interpersonal relationship satisfaction, creative problem solving, and lead to improved efficiency, creativity, and profitability. Jehn and Bendersky (2003) found that conflict within teams has been shown to improve decision quality and strategic planning of groups and organizations. Simon and Peterson (2000) found that working through task conflict builds stronger buy-in for those working on the project and results in improved group-decision quality. Conflict based on tasks can lead to more creative thinking and solutions. The research shows clearly that when teams use conflict productively- in that they expect conflict, have good leadership, and leverage conflicts at the right time in the group process- they can have better outcomes.
Conflict comes in different varieties. We might not always think of a situation as a “conflict” if it’s task- or process-based. Usually we default to thinking of interpersonal conflicts, which are more complex and frequently uncomfortable. They don’t always relate directly to the work being done, but we certainly feel the impacts as a team if members disagree with one another.
Task conflicts arise when a group’s goals do not match with the work that is actually being done. Jehn and Bendersky (2003) defined task conflict as “disagreements among group members about the tasks being performed” (pg. 201). Generally, task conflicts relate to who is doing what work, and what work is actually being done. Process conflicts, sometimes called systems conflicts, are about the logistics of the work; the why and the how and the who. Some research describes these as administrative issues, and are usually about division of responsibility and coordination of projects. Relational conflicts are interpersonal and involve conflicts about the relationship between people, rather than the specific work at hand. Relational conflicts are often related to power dynamics within working teams. Research shows that relationship conflict is the most negatively impactful on team effectiveness and job satisfaction, and employees often avoid handling conflicts directly. Avoidant strategies exacerbate conflict and can entrench problems in teams.
Shifting Conflict Culture
Reframe the Concept
The first step to successfully moving your organizational culture to one that is accepting of conflict is reframing the concept of conflict. Confrontation, conflict, and disagreeing can be uncomfortable in the workplace. When you add in power dynamics based on position or social identities, they become even more complex; people are even more hesitant to engage in necessary but uncomfortable conversations. They might even actively resist engaging in contentious conversation because they don’t believe conflict is “professional”.
It’s about taking ego out of the equation and saying, “It’s not me versus you, but instead us versus the problem.”
Reframing conflict involves changing attitudes and norms about engaging with one another. This does not and should not allow for people to be toxic, disrespectful, condescending, dismissive, or discriminatory. It is a fundamental shift in culture to allow for the free expression and disagreement of work-specific ideas. This is not a free pass for people who use “I’m just being honest” as a way to couch their bad attitudes. Instead, it’s an opportunity to think about how employees value one another, and value the work they complete together. It’s about taking ego out of the equation and saying, “It’s not me versus you, but instead us versus the problem.” This attitude helps us turn relational conflicts into task conflicts. The research shows us that task conflicts are easier to resolve and have fewer detrimental effects on the team dynamic.
Teams that do this well are high in emotional intelligence, or EQ. EQ has multiple dimensions: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Conflict management generally falls in the relationship management dimension, but requires skills in all the dimensions to be successful. It’s important for employees to understand how they tend to respond to confrontation and conflict so they can look for signs and adjust at work. Consider having training sessions for the team or individuals around active listening and empathy to get people started.
The ability for this strategy to stick is dependent on whether or not your team members trust each other and trust the process. You must invest in the team trust before you begin to address conflict candidly. There are multiple tools and frameworks that exist to help you do this. Personally, I have used Kim Scott’s Radical Candor and Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability and shame to great success with newly-formed and existing teams. Trust and vulnerability also require skills in EQ, in the self-awareness and self-management dimensions. These can be trained in well-designed workshops, but can also be encouraged as part of professional development plans for employees to explore on their own.
You can take multiple approaches to reframe a conflict. You can frame the need around creativity, encouraging your team to be innovative and think outside of the bounds they normally work in. You can take the Radical Candor approach, which frames giving critical feedback as caring so much about the person that you can’t let them not understand they’re making a mistake. But ultimately, teams need to understand that the right kinds of conflict at the right time in the group process will make them better. Stating that clearly early in the process and frequently during brainstorming helps our team members understand that we expect and encourage conflict. It’s a natural part of any team process. And when we change our orientation to conflict and let it be good AND uncomfortable, we are all better for it.
Taking Action on Teams
There are actions you can take to actualize the team culture change. First, take stock of your team meetings. Make sure the team has a clearly defined goal and responsibilities. Ensure that the team understands their shared commitment. Then, take time to set ground rules for the brainstorming and strategy work. How are people sharing ideas? How are people sharing critiques? How will deliverables be shared? How will we hold each other accountable to our deadlines? What language do we want to use with each other when emotions are heated?
Consider putting time limits per speaker. This is especially helpful if you have long-winded team members, or those who simply like to repeat points over and over again. At Heineken, executives were all given small toy horses to keep near them at meetings. If someone tips over their horse, it was an indicator that someone had made their point, and was now “beating a dead horse”. Nonverbal indicators help the team set norms without needing to be confrontational.
Encourage your team to acknowledge their emotions in the moment, in what Brene Brown, in her book Rising Strong, calls “shitty first drafts” (SFDs). These initial emotional reactions are not always based in reality but can still be the basis for our behavior. On her team, they’ve normed using the phrase “The story I’m making up is…” to let the team know that this is an SFD and impacting their ability to engage and they want to confront the issue. It allows the team to clarify what’s happening and get everybody back on the same page.
Supporting Individual Contributors
When it comes to helping your individual team members manage conflict outside the team setting, consider implementing a few guidelines with your team members:
Use the 72 hour rule- if you haven’t confronted someone about it in 72 hours, you need to let it go. If it’s worth handling, it needs to be handled soon. Otherwise, someone might not remember the incident and can’t properly explain, apologize, or make amends.
Always consider the time, place, and manner of the confrontation. Generally, confrontation should be close to the incident, in a place that is private, and done using appropriate tone and language. Different types of confrontations will call for variations in this.
Describe the impact of someone’s language or behavior or decisions in terms of feelings or consequences; avoid laying blame. For example, if you’re consistently being interrupted by a team member you could say, “You frequently interrupt me in team meetings before I can finish what I was saying. This makes me feel like you don’t care about what I’m saying and are not listening to me. I feel disrespected and not valued.”
At the end of the day, leaders need to encourage conflict in order to maintain effective, innovative, and engaged teams. Leaders need to cultivate trust between their employees, make it unacceptable to avoid conflict, and praise people who share their feedback willingly and openly. Teams and workplaces will be better off when we can eliminate work-arounds for processes, employees, and leaders who aren’t up to the task. Don’t let toxic positivity become the name of the game- insist that your employees confront one another, respectfully and tactfully, and your team will benefit.
