Conflict at Work – Productive or Destructive?

Several months ago, I was reading the book “Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, and learned about the concept of “artificial harmony”. This is when everyone is super nice to each other on the surface, but underneath they have different feelings, opinions, and perspectives that they aren’t sharing. It’s a great concept, because it helps us begin to see what’s going wrong in organizations where people seem to be getting along just fine, but the team is not achieving stellar results. What you learn from reading that book is the importance of what I call “productive conflict”.

Productive conflict is when people openly talk about their disagreements, and they may even get frustrated with each other at times, but they all stay with the conversation and work through it, and as a result you create a solution that is better than any one person could have created on their own.

Destructive conflict is when people go beyond disagreements to personal attacks, and this creates a stressful environment that drains most people and begets marginal performance at best.

If you aren’t clear on how to prevent productive conflict from deteriorating into destructive conflict, the “safer” road is to create an environment of artificial harmony. In this environment there isn’t as much stress, but you wont be getting as much out of your team as you could be, which could be a HUGE opportunity cost.

So how do you create an environment that supports productive conflict, but insures that it does NOT deteriorate into destructive conflict?

The key to this is creating a safe environment, where people have a solid level of trust and respect for each other, which means that when something starts going wrong, they’ll have a tendency to extend the benefit of the doubt to their co-workers, instead of quickly reacting and making character judgments. If they hold on to their character judgments of each other, then whether they express them (destructive conflict) or repress them (artificial harmony), the team cannot work effectively together.

Creating this environment takes time, because people are people and we all have personal baggage. The baggage usually shows up in our automatic reactions to things – especially the reactions that seem to be stronger than a given situation would warrant. Since we all react sometimes it helps to acknowledge this, and then set clear ground rules on how to handle our reactions:

Ground Rule # 1 – NOTICE THAT YOU ARE REACTING
If you notice that you are reacting, you can separate yourself from the reaction and that gives it less power over you. Remind yourself that most reactions come in the form of anger or hurt over how someone treated us in the past. So, although the extreme emotion you are experiencing has been triggered by a current event, it is really about something entirely different. You can’t handle a situation effectively while you are in a reaction, so knowing you are reacting enables you to hold off on firing off that angry e-mail or marching into someone’s office with a dramatic ultimatum.

Ground Rule # 2 – NO CHARACTER JUDGMENTS ALLOWED
Most reactions include a negative character judgment towards the person deemed responsible for the negative situation. But character judgments aren’t the truth. They simply allow you to feel self-righteous and superior when you are feeling threatened. When you feel completely safe, it’s easy to have compassion for people, even when they are behaving in a negative manner. So no matter how rude, inconsiderate, dishonest, power-hungry, manipulative, lazy, or unethical your mind is telling you a person is, you need to understand that your mind is making that up from the perspective of your reaction, and no matter how true it FEELS, it’s not the truth.

Ground Rule # 3 – WORK THROUGH YOUR EMOTIONS AWAY FROM WORK
Find a way to separate from your reaction, and take the time you need, away from the work environment. This where it’s great to have a coach, because you can call your coach, vent, get some perspective, and calm down without jeopardizing your reputation at work by venting there.

Ground Rule # 4 – COMMUNICATE AND FIND OUT THE WHOLE STORY
Once you are calm enough to refrain from saying something you’ll regret later, it’s time to ask questions, find out what perspectives others have related to the same situation, and especially to have a conversation with the very person you were reacting to. Find out what lead to their behavior. In most cases, you’ll find out their intention was completely different from what you originally thought it was.

Most professionals can manage steps one through three, but then go back to work and decide not to “dredge it up” again. That’s artificial harmony. When you don’t have the conversations that uncover real intentions, character judgments and mistrust persist.

It’s only when people have the courage to follow ground rule # 4 that you can create an environment of trust, productive conflict, and as a result, innovation.

For leaders, the key is to keep pushing the ground rules, and moving your team into conversations about issues even when they insist that they are ok. Once they’ve gone through the process a few times, and find out that their initial reactions weren’t based in reality, they begin to trust the process more than their reactions. Little by little, trust builds in the environment, and conversations happen more freely.

And then, hold on for a great ride – because your team will begin to feel a magical synergy amongst them, and they’ll take you places you’ve never imagined!