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- Conflict or Collaboration? Open Your Mind to Meaningful Dialogue
Conflict or Collaboration? Open Your Mind to Meaningful Dialogue
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Opening Remarks
It’s widely known to be true of human nature that people generally avoid conflict—in nearly every part of their life, and especially at work. The word conflict comes with a negative connotation and makes people think of fighting and vicious arguments. Sounds miserable for most. But it doesn’t have to be that way—you can reframe, conflict or collaboration.
Conflict or Collaboration
What if we concentrate on collaboration over conflict?
That’s right, listening, providing feedback, presenting new ideas and working with our partners, instead of thinking of it as negative conflict. If leaders or team members don’t agree on something, that’s a great thing. In many teams, that’s just not the case, rather you have teams made of “yes ma’am” or “yes sir”, with yes-first dialogue, bowing down at leaders or the alpha in the room. Might as well be a kingdom with a full medieval royal structure—your Highness. This can be incredibly efficient in the short- yes to everything, head-nods, and confirmations of what one or two people at best are evangelizing. The team gets no say, no opinion, has no agency, which means no ownership or buy-in. The team is useless as a thinking mechanism, and is acting as robots or mindless mercenaries. You don’t have a team—you have an army, assuming they follow orders, waiting on your every word to take your order, with little proactive power.
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Completely unproductive towards building a real team and business, with sustainable growth trajectory, energy, and purpose, and working towards a vision. You’re building their business on the backs of the work of the people in a full-on directive, highly authoritarian regime. Can there be a time and place for this in any business, of course, but not as the long-term leadership method. Not if you want a firm people are proud of, and value. Not if you want a company that people want to help grow, become your biggest sales force, and have strong ties to a purpose that calls them. It comes down to if you want a team of owners, or a team of saluting soldiers.
Giving feedback, addressing an issue, or standing up for a purpose are not argumentative conflicts or negative actions, they are the beginning of courageous and collaborative work, all assuming they are carried out the right way in a non-threatening manner of course. Let’s not discount the value or demonize it, or make it something it’s just not. Healthy conflict breeds collaborative coffee.
Breaking through barriers happens when one person, with the lowest tenure, no power, little credibility, with a hint of a voice people actually hear, can step up and call out what’s important to them. If it’s important to the Custodian, it should be important enough to the CEO to at least listen.
A few takeaways
Scrap the ego at the door and build a leadership team, and even an organization where a voice means something, and isn’t commoditized into irrelevance with a quieting muzzle.
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