Three ways to nurture healthy conflict in your workplace.

Are you a conflict avoidant? Or do you crave open, honest feedback and hearing crickets and tumbleweeds?

Sometimes, it may seem easier to avoid conflict at the workplace, sitting back during the moments of disagreement and saying nothing rather than appearing as the odd one out and voicing concerns.

Workplace conflict is inevitable, especially when your team comes from a large range of backgrounds, with different perspectives and goals. Despite the negative connotations surrounding conflict, not all of it has to be detrimental to the progress of your team. Healthy conflict can be a powerful catalyst for growth, innovation, and improved performance within an organisation. 

Research from the Journal of Applied Psychology showed that teams that engage in task-related conflict, which focuses on work-related issues, show a 30% increase in creative solutions compared to teams that avoid conflict. 

What is Healthy Conflict?

Healthy conflict, also known as constructive conflict, happens when two parties come to a disagreement or debate, where team members feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts, perspectives and concerns as they feel it is a safe space to share their viewpoints. 

Here are a few benefits of healthy conflict and how they can drive your team and organisation forward. 

Benefits of Healthy Conflict

1. Greater Innovation and Creativity:
   When a safe environment is presented to your team members to freely express their ideas, you get a brilliant, diverse range of ideas and solutions. This inherently encourages more innovation and creativity from all team members while promoting unique problem-solving.
2. Improved Decision-Making: Healthy conflict directly influences long-form discussions and in-depth critical evaluations of viable options. Weighing out a higher number of paths to correcting the topic of the conflict leads to more informed and robust decisions being made.
3. Stronger Relationships: Holding more constructive and developmental disagreements can help foster strong relationships between team members, as the discussion of opposing viewpoints reflects the value of each individual’s opinion. Healthy conflicts can cultivate and develop these relationships as more open dialogue is encouraged, synergising team members and bringing them closer.
4. Personal and Professional Growth:  The experience team members go through when handling conflict constructively can boost their communication, negotiation and problem-solving skills. The experience will result in highly-engaged team members who see the viability in contributing to team discussions and moving boh the professional and personal development forward.

How to Nurture Healthy Conflict

Healthy conflict cannot be implemented like a “plug-and-play”, it needs to be introduced, cultivated and embedded within your values and rituals as an organisation. Establishing the safe environment for team members to openly share their stance and concerns on work-related issues is paramount to encouraging healthy conflict in your workplace. 

Here are a few more ways you can establish and nurture healthy conflict in your team. 

Ask for feedback

The higher up we go the less we receive feedback yet it’s imperative we don’t find ourselves in an echo chamber.  Actively seek out to be challenged and value diverse perspectives and opinions. Encourage team members to voice their opinion, even if they differ from the majority and actively reward those courageous voices

Be a role model

Demonstrate the type of behaviour and response that you would like to see. When conflict does arise, be an example of how to handle it in a healthy way. When you show how it’s done and expertly handle differing (yet valuable) perspectives your team will immediately take on the language and tone you used to handle conflict in their teams.

Embed healthy conflict as part of your culture

Normalise the practice of healthy conflict by acknowledging its inevitability in your values, virtues and leadership principles. Define the expectations of how conflicts should be handled and do not dance around the topic. Netflix has a simple rule around ‘Farming for dissent’ which guides employees to actively seek opposing views to their own especially when making decisions. Healthy Conflict is baked into their values and part of their norms.

“Conflict transformation rather than…conflict resolution. To me, the latter suggests going back to a previous state of affairs, and has a connotation that there may be a winner or a loser. [Conflict transformation has] the opportunity to create something new.”

– Brene Brown

If you are struggling with establishing and promoting a culture that encourages effective meetings in service of high velocity and high performing teams, find out more about how we can help you establish the right culture here.

At The Culture Equation, we help businesses transform their culture, teams and leadership. 

Book in for a 30-min Discovery Call to see how we can support you.

Want to hear more about what we do at The Culture Equation? Sign up to our newsletter or follow us on Linkedin.