Why We Need MORE Conflict in Our Teams

[00:00:00] Rachel: If you are a professional in a high stakes job and you can’t just clock out at the end of the day, it’s likely that you are also a leader in some capacity. So whether it’s leading a team, line managing people, you might be head of your department, but you’ll probably be supervising trainees. You may be mentoring people, you may be a trainer maybe in charge of various committees, so you will be leading in one way, shape or form. I always think that if you are a doctor or a nurse or a physiotherapist or a pharmacist, the longer you are in your career, the more chance you have of being a leader, even if you don’t actually accept that title.

[00:00:38] And recently I’ve been talking a lot about toxic leadership. And what are the most toxic ways to lead is to be a rescuer, and rescue your team from all that difficult stuff. And say, I want to talk about one of those really, really difficult things. And that is conflict. Because I know in healthcare and I’m sure in other professions as well, we pride ourselves on being nice. We pride ourselves on being really lovely, really kind and really caring. And so we hate conflict. But one of the things I’ve observed in most healthcare teams that I’ve seen, if they’re not out and out war with each other, Is that there’s not enough conflicts in the team. We drastically need to increase the amount of conflict we have.

[00:01:23] Now, what do I mean by this? Do we want people fighting and bitching and backbiting and shouting at each other all the time? No, of course we don’t. But here’s what can happen if there is no conflict in the team. And we’re really nice to each other all the time.

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[00:02:05] I was working with a team once in general practice. And they were getting really frustrated because one of the partners had been there a very long time, was an incredibly nice guy, hadn’t taken onboard the new system that they had for communicating results with patients. And this was causing all sorts of problems for the practice. It was also meaning that he was staying really, really late at work, they could see him burning out and he wasn’t getting to the other stuff that he needed to get to.

[00:02:29] But the team were really, really nice. They kept saying, oh, we get on so well is such a wonderful place to work. So they didn’t want to upset anybody. And so when they started to have this conversation in their practice meetings about how are we going to manage the blood results and wouldn’t it be a good idea to text patients instead of the GP giving them a phone call, and then we’ve got a whole system and process where we can get other people to follow that up, someone made the suggestion in the meeting, let’s have a go at this, and everyone just felt they wanted to agree with them. They wanted to encourage them. They wants to be kind. So they didn’t feel they could disagree with it in the meeting.

[00:03:03] So it was the consequence they all said, yes, let’s, let’s give it a go, let’s try it. Then a month or so down the line, they found that this partner wasn’t doing what they had agreed. He was still using the old way of phoning the patients. And that was causing a lot of confusion with the patients. They didn’t quite know they were coming or going. They didn’t know who they should be contacting about abnormal results. Receptionist didn’t know what to do.

[00:03:26] But because they were so nice and they didn’t want to upset him. And make it, see, he was getting really stressed and saying on later, they, they didn’t say anything about it. They, they didn’t challenge his behavior. Because the other thing was, they weren’t entirely sure that he was on board with it. He’d been quite quiet in the meeting.

[00:03:40] You see, he’d just put his head down. He was doing his job. And as far as he was concerned, all his results without with everything was okay. the receptionist for keeping with it, no one had given any feedback that it was having any impacts on the practice. Nobody wants to upset anybody. That meant, they were really nice to everybody. Nobody disagreed. They all said yes to every decision. They didn’t challenge behavior when the decisions weren’t followed, and everyone was just putting their head down and getting on with their own thing. So personally, they were getting results for their own patient, but on a practice level. Things were falling apart.

[00:04:14] Now what team when no one’s upsetting anybody, no. One’s being really challenging. Everybody’s agreeing all the time, on the face of it. It sounds, it sounds lovely, doesn’t it? But actually this leads to real difficulty. The meetings become very boring. They just become a token tick box exercise. Have you ever heard that phrase? Oh, it was just a tick box exercise. No one really agreed, but they just needed to raise it in the meeting.

[00:04:36] You then get politics. You get backstabbing, you get like little factions. You get people just honing down on that own stuff. No one actually working for the goodest, the organization, the team, but trying to just maintain their, their own little world and their own little kingdom. And then any team development or any strategy meetings just felt like a waste of time and energy.

[00:04:56] So that’s what happens. If we don’t have enough conflict and. Bad decisions get through. We all know that it’s often the person who’s the most senior in the room there where it goes, if no one is going to conflict with them, if no one’s going to disagree with them, then actually, it’s like a car crash, but you can see happening. But everyone just thinks, oh, I’m not going to rock the boat. I don’t want to be the person who’s the difficult one, or being mean or being difficult.

[00:05:22] For good decisions, you need debates. You need conflict, you need to disagree. And if you’re able to do that right, then your team performance will be massive. You’ll get much, much better decisions. You’ll get much better outcomes. You’ll get stuff done. People. We’ll report mistakes and failure much more, and you’ll be able to learn from them. But you need to get this conflict thing, right.

[00:05:47] Now I first came across the Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni when I was working with Red Whale on their Lead Manage Thrive course. And he’s written an absolutely brilliant book. It’s written like a leadership fable, so it’s really short, really easy to read, but everything he said really chimed with me.

[00:06:04] He talks about the fact that they’re all five dysfunctions that you see in these teams, the teams that are too nice and the teams that avoid conflict. So let’s go back to that practice team that we saw. They didn’t want to upset anybody. Why not? Well, the first dysfunction of a team that Patrick Lensioni talks about was that there was a lack of trust. Not trusting that you’re not going to do a good job, but trust that actually I can disagree with you and say, I’m not sure about that and our relationship’s going to be okay. That I can fess up to a mistake I’ve made, maybe that I can even come in on a bad day when I’ve had no sleep and be a bit snappy and go and apologize later, and that team member to say, well, don’t worry, Rachel, I know it’s really tricky at the moment.

[00:06:44] That is vulnerability based trust, otherwise known as psychological safety. And this is why we bang on about psychological safety all the time. And if you want to read an excellent book about psychological safety, Start with Amy Edmondson, the Fearless Organization. She talks about the fact that when they looked at healthcare teams, the teams that performed the best got the best outcomes were not the ones that never made mistakes. They were actually the ones that reported mistakes far, far more, learned from them because they weren’t afraid to speak up, to disagree, to really sort things out between them and work out what was going on. So vulnerability based trust is the first thing you need within a team. Otherwise, you just don’t say what you really think.

[00:07:28] So that practice team, they didn’t say what they really thought. This GP wasn’t able to express the fact that actually he wasn’t sure how to even do it. When I spoke to him about it, he said, actually, he was really worried about the tech. He was worried the text wouldn’t get through. He was worried. It would be a patient safety issue, but he didn’t want to raise it because he didn’t want to upset the person who brought it up in the first place.

[00:07:51] So Patrick Lencioni says that the second dysfunction of a team. Is a fair of conflict. And if you fear conflict, you can’t see what you really think. And resentment will grow. Because in any team, when you work together with anybody for long enough, there will be annoyance. We are not all the same, which is a really, really good thing, but that doesn’t mean that we work in slightly different ways. We might not understand each other that well, There might be things that we just don’t understand. And that hidden resentment, those hidden disputes grow, and they will always be there under the surface, unless you raise it. Now, Jane Gunn has talks about this a lot of time on the podcast. We’ll put the links to those and if you want to hear more about how to save the unstable, how to raise stuff that needs to be raised.

[00:08:34] But while we fear conflict. Resentment will grow. Hidden stuff that needs to be discussed. will stay hidden. And why do we fear conflict? Because there’s an absence of trust, absence of vulnerability based trust and a lack of psychological safety that we will be safe if we raise the issue.

[00:08:50] So in this practice team, because they all fared conflict, they didn’t have a proper discussion about it, people didn’t raise their concerns and they all just said yes, but you’ll just said, yeah, yeah, we’ll we’ll do it, we’ll get on with it, and not everybody really committed to it. Obviously the person whose idea it was committed to it. Someone else who thought it was a good idea, also committed to it. But this partner, he didn’t, he just sort of nodded his head and, and went along with it and didn’t say anything.

[00:09:16] So in team meetings, watch out for the people that aren’t agreeing, and they’re not disagreeing, but they’re not agreeing. That’s assigned for you. So as a leader, your job in a meeting will be to actually try and surface this conflict. You know, where have I got this wrong? What am I missing here? Can you tell me why this is a bad idea? Give people permission to raise their issues and conflict in a good way. Because if you don’t let this happen, then you’ll get sort of internal politicing, you’ll get backbiting and factions and things like that.

[00:09:46] So, if you can’t conflict, you won’t commit, you won’t get commitment. I think there’s a very famous organization whose catchphrases disagree then commit, because if, when we’ve discussed it in a meeting, I’ve been able to say, you know what? I really disagree with this decision, and this is why, and people have really heard me, they’ve thought about it, they’ve been empathetic to my side of things, they’ve batted it around between them, but they still go ahead with it, I’m much more likely to say, okay, I disagree, but I’ll do it because I’ve been heard. If I haven’t voiced that and I disagree, I’m just probably not going to do it. And that’s exactly what happened in this practice.

[00:10:21] So if we don’t really agree with the decisions that have been made, and we probably know that other people may be not entirely on board then. It’s very difficult to challenge them and call them out when they don’t do it. ‘ Cause we’re not sure if they’ve really committed to it and said that they were in the first place.

[00:10:37] So this leads to the next dysfunction of a team after the lack of commitment, that’s avoidance of accountability. I don’t really need to do that thing because I didn’t agree to it. And how can I hold that team member accountable when ooh crumbs, did they really want to sell or not? I’ve no idea. And so we feel totally unable to challenge people on their behaviors. Say hey, you said you’d get that to me by Friday or Hey, Bruce, why aren’t you finding the test results and the way that we said? It made it really tricky with the receptionist yesterday.

[00:11:07] It feels like we’re in a lovely team when no one’s being challenged and everyone’s getting on well, but if we’re not challenging behavior, that’s upsetting people, that’s toxic or even just making things not work properly, how on earth are we going to get results? And that’s the final dysfunction of a team. Inattention to results.

[00:11:26] In that practice team, they will all just get in their heads down, they would serving their own jobs, making sure they were okay, but actually the practice wasn’t functioning right. So if there’s an inattention to team results, we just don’t get the outcome that we need and stuff doesn’t happen.

[00:11:41] Now, when I spoke to the part about what was going on and challenge, why wasn’t he. Doing the test results and the way that they’d agreed, the answer was he just didn’t know how to use the system properly. And the fix was really easy. They blocked off an hour of his surgery, got one of the admin teams to sit down and show him how to do it. And it transformed the practice.

[00:12:00] Now, if it had been able to raise that in the meeting, They could have sorted it out there and then. But when we are too nice, when we are worried about upsetting people, so we don’t raise stuff, we all say yes, we don’t challenge people, we put our heads down on me to do our job, that is a dysfunctional team, even though on the surface of it, it looks wonderful and it looks nice.

[00:12:22] Now, is conflicting and disagreeing, always easy? No, of course it’s not, it’s really not and I know that. I really fear challenging people and I really fair raising difficult stuff or, or disagreeing, but there are ways to do it in a good way. There are ways to do it which maintain psychological safety.

[00:12:39] And actually, even before we get to that, trust is a major issue. Now you can’t build trust just by having a team meeting about trust. You build trust by getting to know people, by getting to know them on a personal level, by those informal interactions that happen every single day at work, having a cup of tea, asking people how their kids are or remembering that that person’s mum is unwell so asking her how she is.

[00:13:03] They say that trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback. You need some model trust. You need to model these informal connections with everybody and show your team it’s okay to do that and take a coffee break and have lunch with each other. You need to give opportunities for the teams to really get to know each other. And you need some model being vulnerable. You need some model fessing up and saying when you’ve failed, when you’ve mucked up in a situation. You need to apologize to people and say I’m sorry. If I was snappy then, I’d had a really bad day. So that it gets to be the norm within your organization. So that it’s the norm that we don’t blame people for mistakes, we don’t blame people for failure, we’ve vulnerable ourselves, we say, when we’re struggling. So if you get that trust right, then all the other dysfunctions will get better. Trust is the major one at the bottom. So if you can get trust rights, then you can conflict better.

[00:13:56] There are also techniques you can use to conflict better. I’ve already mentioned that you’d go around and you ask people like, where am I wrong? What am I missing here? You give people a chance to disagree in a really safe way. It might mean that you give people the idea before the meeting so they can think about it, and then maybe feed back on an email form or in a document or something so that they don’t feel so vulnerable within the group, but it needs to be surfaced. Stuff needs to be surfaced.

[00:14:21] And if you are the team leader, the worst thing you can do is try and dump down the conflict and squash it down and go and rescue everybody and say, look, let’s not have conflict, I’ll have a word in our thoughts out. But encourage people to solve their own problems, go to each other. And have conversation.

[00:14:36] Now you might need to facilitate those conversations to make sure that they are safe, but make sure that people are able to say what’s happening rather than sweeping it under the carpet, because it will emerge somewhere else. We know that conflict, it will just leak out in other much, much more toxic ways than a heated discussion or heated debate.

[00:14:54] So if we avoid conflict, then we’re simply not going to get the outcomes that we want. We need to increase the trust within our teams. We need to maximize healthy conflict in any way that we can think of. And we need to stop rescuing and trying to smooth everything over. And instead, let people know that it’s okay to be a bit uncomfortable. It’s okay to have these heated discussions, because at the end of the day, unless we do, unless we increase the honesty and the trust within our teams, we’re going to be frustrated, we’re going to carry on being stressed, and work is going to be a massive chore.

[00:15:30] Now, the great news about this is actually, if you increase the vulnerability based trust, you’ll enjoy your work more because you’ll have more friends at work. You’ll get to know each other better. You’ll feel much more empathy towards each other. So how about today, just go talk to someone you wouldn’t normally chat to? Just ask them how they are. And maybe disclose something slightly personal so that they feel like you’re a human being. And find out about them so the next time you see them, you can have a conversation about something that’s going on in their lives.

[00:15:56] Because this stuff, it seems like that the soft skills, but actually these are the hard skills that get results. So read the book, have those conversations, let me know how things are going. And one of the ways that we support professionals and leaders in health care and other organizations is in the Shapes Academy where we talk about this stuff all the time, we give you the tools to have the conversations. And we run deep dive master classes. We give you team building activities that will help with all of this. So if you’re interested, Click on the link in the show notes to find out a little bit more.

[00:16:29] So today, have a conversation with someone you wouldn’t normally have. Think about in a meeting how’s the surface or the hidden conflict that might be there. And make sure that you don’t sacrifice honesty and vulnerability for keeping the peace. I’ll see you in the next quick dip.