Why You Shouldn’t Avoid Conflict in a Team
It’s important that you understand that, in any team, conflict will happen.
You see, conflict is not necessarily a sign that things are wrong in a team.
Now, too much conflict can be a bad thing. For sure. But conflict itself is not necessarily a bad thing.
Think about a marriage. All married couples get into conflicts. They get into arguments. They get into fights.
Now, obviously, we don’t want a married couple that’s suffering from domestic violence or mental abuse, but we also don’t want a marriage where the two partners never talk to each other because they don’t see the point anymore. That can be just as bad, at least in terms of the success of the marriage.
The same thing is true of a team.
Never fighting can be just as bad as always fighting.
When you bring together two or more individuals that are both entrepreneurial, that are both capable, that are both licensed professionals, and you bring them all together into this joint effort, there’s going to be some big egos that get in the way of consensus.
There’s going to be some differences of opinions. There’s going to be some conflict.
But when it comes to making decisions about how to get the team moving in that direction, this is where you’re going to run into differences of opinions. And this is where you’re going to really have to pay attention to what’s happening in terms of conflict.
Conflict is a healthy, natural way to develop your team, culture, & business.
Because if conflict is happening where each individual feels heard, each individual feels like they’ve made a contribution to the discussion, even though some individuals are not going to be completely happy with the result of the decision that gets made, they’re all going to understand that they were part of the process involved in reaching that decision.
And that is when your team culture is an effective one.
Disagreement should be seen as an opportunity to improve processes, to explore new possibilities, to allow teammates to have more buy-in into those processes, into those possibilities, into the direction the team is going.
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