Conflict in the workplace might sound like a recipe for disaster. But if managed correctly, it can actually be the source of incredible team collaboration. Healthy conflict and respectful disagreements promote a culture that values differing opinions and can ultimately lead to stronger project ideas.
By having the freedom to lay any disputes out on the table, every member of a team is given the equal opportunity to feel heard and interact with a new perspective. But in order to achieve the full benefits from embracing healthy conflict, leaders must clearly establish a space that promotes curiosity. One way to do so? Guarantee transparency at weekly leadership and team meetings, and allow everyone to confidently commit to the future goals at hand.
Another way? Clearly define it within your company’s core values.
“Our goal is to build a company that attracts and retains the very best talent,” Sean Nathaniel, chief operating officer at DISCO, said. “A culture of healthy conflict ensures the varied opinions of our great talent are encouraged, heard and respected.”
Built In sat down with Nathaniel and two other local tech leaders to gain insight into how their teams frequently address healthy conflict in the workplace and keep their intentions aligned to produce the most innovative end products.
DISCO aims to provide companies and law firms tools to improve investigations, case management, compliance issues and more through tech like AI and cloud computing. Nathaniel said that by conducting formal product reviews and taking time to provide factual context, employees can better engage in healthy debates and avoid making preconceived conclusions.
What does healthy conflict look like on your team?
To foster healthy conflict, you first need to build a culture that values varied opinions, delivered and received respectfully. Specifically, assertiveness and conviction are okay, while aggressiveness and attacks are not – they foster a defensive culture, or worse, a culture that discourages the sharing of new ideas. We encourage attacking problems, not people, and believe data and facts are foundational to healthy debate. We also take time to ensure context is provided to eliminate conclusions that are made without all of the facts.
Our goal is to build a company that attracts and retains the very best talent. A culture of healthy conflict ensures the varied opinions of our talent are encouraged, heard and respected. In fact, on our senior leadership team, many of our top strategic decisions are made after healthy debate: varying viewpoints are heard, a decision is made, we commit as a team to effectively execute the decision, and cascade it down through the organization.
How has your team, company culture or product benefited from healthy conflict?
As a legal technology company that employs many former litigators, healthy debate is in our DNA. Our philosophy of strong opinions held loosely exhibits a mindset that while we encourage strong positions, people are open to being moved by data and facts that support an alternate point of view.
Many of our product innovations have benefited from healthy conflict. We have a process called Law Review, where legal experts and software engineers come together to review new product features and enhancements before they are released. At these formal reviews, we assess whether we understand the problem we are solving for our users, whether our designs are appropriate and intuitive, whether our software built prior to release is appropriate and intuitive, whether our go-to-market and customer enablement plans are likely to drive customer adoption and customer value, and finally, whether a product release has actually resulted in customer satisfaction and real customer value. Law Review brings varying opinions together and encourages a healthy debate on the issues.
We encourage attacking problems, not people.”
What have you done to create a culture where healthy conflict can occur?
To have a healthy and productive culture, it is critical to have clearly defined core values. Core values are deeply ingrained principles that guide all of a company’s actions, and should be reflected with every decision each person makes in the organization. At DISCO, we have our “M.A.G.I.C.” values, two of which directly impact healthy conflict: “All-in” and “Grit and Grace”.
All-In: We are all-in to win as a team. We have ambitious goals but humble methods. We invite participation, value different perspectives, and welcome challenges to our ideas. We look at situations from all angles, ensuring we are building bridges across teams and projects. When a decision is made, we are all in and committed together to achieve great results.
Grit and Grace: We have the courage and conviction to pursue new and better ways. We are resilient and adaptable; we change quickly in response to new insights and new data. We balance our grit with empathy, giving grace and respect to our colleagues, customers and partners while assuming positive intent.
Place Technology puts financial forecasting, modeling and budgeting tools in the hands of small and medium-sized service and technology businesses. Metcalf said that by factoring in time for topical debate and “radical candor” during weekly meetings, leadership can tackle relevant issues while also building trust within the team.
What does healthy conflict look like on your team?
At Place, we recognize that healthy conflict or debate is critical to our success. With this, we like to create a safe space for these types of conversations to happen. For example, in order to help foster this type of environment we have it baked into our leadership and team meetings.
Every Tuesday morning we have our weekly leadership meeting. In this meeting, we spend the first hour talking about updates on customer love, employee success, departmental highlights, and KPIs. We then spend the remaining 30-45 minutes debating a topic that someone brings up.
We do this as it provides dedicated time as a leadership team to tackle a significant issue facing the business and gives everyone around the table the opportunity to contribute, challenge and ultimately agree on a game plan. This not only helps us move forward on solving issues, but more importantly, it builds trust with the team. Some of our best ideas and strategies come from this debate.
How has your team, company culture or product benefited from healthy conflict?
The benefits from this type of transparency and candor not only focus on solving the issues we are discussing but more importantly it is foundational for our culture. We are intentionally making it normal to offer different points of view, to challenge what is being said, and ultimately giving everyone a voice.
By doing this we are also building a deeper level of trust because not only do we need to feel comfortable challenging, but we also need to ensure we are not taking the feedback personally and we are caring about the person we are saying it to.
We are intentionally making it normal to offer different points of view, to challenge what is being said.”
What have you done to create a culture where healthy conflict can occur?
We feel so strongly about healthy debate that one of our core values is radical candor. We define radical candor as caring personally and challenging directly at the same time. In other words, we give feedback while also caring about the person we are giving it to.
With radical candor being one of our six core values, it creates a sense of transparency and confidence that you can speak openly and have a debate. It also reinforces the behavior of doing so in a supportive way. Carefully watch that the feedback doesn’t turn into fingerprinting.
These debates or conversations should not result in blaming someone else either directly or indirectly. This is bound to happen from time to time and when it does, it is immediately called out. Letting these types of interactions go unchecked breaks down trust, creates resentment and ultimately will destroy the culture.
Karros Technologies is a transportation company that focuses on getting students to school safely and on time through route optimization, GPS tracking and predictive machine learning. Nguyen said that without embracing healthy conflict, his teams would not have been able to solve interesting problems or produce stronger products for their customers.
What does healthy conflict look like on your team?
Healthy conflict is the healthy sharing of ideas. It is balanced between the two extremes of false harmony, in which no one is really speaking with each other to open war, or everyone is talking at each other. Healthy debate happens all the time at Karros. We are here to solve difficult technical problems. And no single person has the answer to everything, so we have to put our minds together and work out solutions as a team.
While this is constantly happening, there are definitely times where this sort of conflict results in something exceptionally rewarding. That is when we, as a team, have come together and packaged a difficult and interesting problem into a product that we have shipped to our clients. Finishing something, especially something that is challenging, is cathartic.
How has your team, company culture or product benefited from healthy conflict?
Both the team and product have benefited from healthy conflict because it introduces new ideas. This is especially true for a company such as ours, which has been dedicated to school bus transportation for decades. Innovation has to be introduced by those from other industries. Software development methodology has changed so drastically over the years, and while we can read about it and implement it ourselves, we have always had the greatest success when we bring in an agent of change from outside. It is never smooth, and always disruptive, but that is what healthy conflict looks like here.
Without this sort of healthy conflict, we would never have been able to work our way through the newer architecture patterns that empower us to solve problems we were not able to solve before. Streaming is a great example. And it’s not that healthy conflict somehow made the selection of streaming technology obvious for us. Rather it is the healthy conflict of experimenting, adopting best practices, and creating our own processes that truly allowed us to integrate streaming as a major component of our platform.
A team that can conduct a healthy debate is a team that can work together.”
What have you done to create a culture where healthy conflict can occur?
First, building a proper team is critical. A team that can conduct a healthy debate is a team that can work together, and that means that how we decide who to add to the team is important. Technical ability is of course important, but for a small team like ours, team fit is just as important as well. There has to be a healthy respect amongst team members. Part of the vetting process really focuses not just on how a candidate solves problems but on how they interact with others when they are working through that problem. There are a lot of personalities out there; some mesh well with Karros and some do not. We are careful to not ignore that.
Alignment is the other important tool for ensuring debates are healthy and constructive. Healthy debate and conflict is almost always about a storming of ideas regarding different ways to solve a problem. As long as we remember that we are trying to solve the same problem – building quality software that helps kids get to school – our discussions are constructive. It is when we are not solving the same problem that things quickly fall apart.
