A previous blog discussed the topic of ‘trust’ as being the foundational building block to working through Patrick Lencioni’s model of The Five Behaviours.
Once a team has begun with the foundational behaviour of building trust, the next dysfunction to tackle is ‘Conflict’. When Patrick Lencioni discusses conflict, he is talking about ‘productive conflict’. This is passionate, unfiltered debate that can help resolve issues not create them and allows the team to be more honest and open to problem solving, without causing destruction based on competition, politics or pride.
Conflict can be uncomfortable
This open dialogue will allow everyone to be heard and their views considered, which provides quicker solutions to these issues – without the need for back stabbing and gossiping in the corridors.
However, things are not that simple! Even with truly trustworthy teams, things can get awkward and people believe they are under a personal attack. This is necessary for a team to make the best decisions for an organisation by challenging their peers.
Employees will not generally be as manipulative to directly attack their colleagues to make them feel deliberately uncomfortable. The biggest fear is that productive conflict is not initiated or promoted enough within organisations, to benefit from its true value. Patrick Lencioni measures the level of conflict within an organisation through his conflict continuum, as explained in the video below.
If you’d like to find out more about building cohesive teams in your organisation or with your clients, get in touch and we’ll talk you through how The Five Behaviours could help.
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Artificial harmony vs harsh conflict
The biggest issue is moving people along the continuum, from artificial harmony – where they pretend everything is ok and don’t raise issues in order not to ‘rock the boat’ – to somewhere just to the left of the middle of the continuum where personal attacks are far from encouraged.
At this point, teams are engaging in constructive conflict without stepping over the line to become destructive. Even the best teams will find it difficult to maintain this balance all of the time.
If they do step over the line, recovery is possible and in fact may benefit the team to instill long term trust if the issue is resolved.
How to develop a conflict culture
Start by assessing the level of conflict evident within a team and each individuals’ comfort levels to deal with it. This is where the profiling element of The Five Behaviours: Team programme provides valuable evidence.
The profile results are shared, discussed and a conflict culture that everyone agrees to is worked on. Individual teams then decide what that culture depicts as acceptable behaviour for engaging with one another, with a leader overseeing and managing the process if required. This means the team are more likely to each be accountable to abiding by the culture developed.
No more boring meetings
Mastering conflict can be particularly important in an area of much discomfort to organisations, boring, unproductive meetings!
This ethos can be corrected by the leader nurturing good conflict from the start of a meeting, giving the team members a reason to become engaged and commit to accomplishing a resolution, no matter how hard.
The team leader is then responsible for seeking out opportunities for productive conflict, in order to continue to keep that spark of passion alive, reinforcing the new culture as part of their strategy, in order to work further towards becoming a cohesive team.
