Healthy Conflict: Allowing the Refining Fire (Wendy Samson and Curt Swenson, 2016)
If teams and their leaders want to allow and experience the refining fire of healthy conflict, an environment of trust has to exist. Team members and leaders have to have each others’ backs and demonstrate that commitment, daily. With the ability to trust and be vulnerable, teams lay the groundwork for the refining fire of healthy conflict, where iron sharpens iron.
In our last two Facebook posts, FutureSYNC provided needed context by describing the difference between healthy and unhealthy conflict in the workplace and by providing some of the primary reasons that people detest, or at the very least, avoid conflict. Here, we seek to provide researched strategies to evoke healthy conflict within workplace teams. To do this, we cite the seminal work of Patrick Lencioni:
In his book titled, The Five Dysfunctions of Team (2002), author and researcher Patrick Lencioni offers the following healthy conflict strategies. The first four strategies are to be implemented by all team members. The second set of strategies emphasize the role of the leader:
- Acknowledgment – Awareness that conflict is important and effective if used correctly, but is often avoided.
- Mining – Assign a different person at each meeting to be the “miner of conflict”. This person will have the assignment of calling out sensitive issues, bringing them out into the light for examination.
- Real-Time Permission – In the process of mining, when the level of discord makes someone uncomfortable, team members should coach one another that conflict is necessary and not to retreat.
- DiSC – Knowing your team members’ styles and how they deal with conflict, helps with effective approaches to conflict.
Leaders like to protect their people, so it is crucial that they:
- Demonstrate restraint when their people engage in conflict;
- Allow resolution to occur naturally, as messy as it can sometimes be;
- Acknowledge that you, as a leader are not failing, when healthy conflict occurs; and
- Don’t encourage this dysfunction to thrive by avoiding conflict
yourself.
For seminars, strategies and discussion regarding building a trusting work environment that includes allowing the refining fire of healthy conflict, contact FutureSYNC International’s consultants at (406) 254-2326!