The Power of Conflict - Leadership Toolkit

Conflict can appear in a variety of forms - some more healthy than others

Conflict isn’t inherently good or bad for team performance. What really matters is how it is expressed, and how leaders respond. A recent study that highlights this identifies four ways conflict tends to surface within teams:

• Debating—direct but lower intensity
• Arguing—direct and high intensity
• Disguising—indirect and lower intensity
• Subverting—indirect but higher intensity

Of these, constructive debate, not surprisingly, was associated with better information sharing, trust and emotional outcomes. Arguing, disguising and subverting were more likely to produce negative effects. This reinforces an essential point: managing conflict cannot be reduced to a single conversation model or leadership response.

Conflict, as we know, is fluid. It can begin as a healthy difference of opinion, become personal, disappear beneath the surface and later re-emerge as avoidance, passive resistance or undermining. The same exchange may also be experienced very differently by individual team members.

Effective leaders therefore need to be equally fluid and proactively look to:

• establish expectations for respectful disagreement
• notice changes in tone, participation and behaviour
• create enough psychological safety for concerns to be raised directly
• reduce the intensity when debate becomes personal
• draw out disagreement that has gone underground
• adapt their response to the people, context and stage of the conflict

Sounds easy right? The goal isn’t a conflict-free team. That may simply be a team in which people no longer feel motivated or worse still, safe to speak honestly. The goal then is a team capable of challenging ideas without attacking people, addressing tensions before they become entrenched and using disagreement to improve thinking and decisions.

Effective leaders don’t just resolve conflict once it becomes visible. They continually shape the conditions in which conflict occurs.

Check out our Team Performance Profile here:  https://www.peopleanalyticsaustralia.com.au/team-performance-profile

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