How Your Team Can Master Productive Conflict

Before we begin, I want to acknowledge the inherent challenge in writing about anything advanced or nuanced these days. People want short, tactical, practical, examples-driven (and purely entertaining) content. It feels like most advice has heard this hunger and it’s all about simplifying things. But what if we embraced a different philosophy about advice? One where we try harder. Where we want to actually think better and more clearly. Where we actually understand things more deeply.

That advice wouldn’t be terribly popular, but it would be very differentiating. It would make those who learned it think and perform at a much higher level than those craving simplicity. And that’s my favorite stuff to dive into. Because this is the stuff that makes people and teams elite.

Today’s topic is going to challenge the alarming naïveté of conventional wisdom and mantra. Continuing on the theme of having the best meetings of your life, let’s start unearthing a few of the advanced skills. Have you read that post already? This will make a lot more sense if you have.

Remember from the last post, there are 9 realities about having the best meetings of your life:

1. It’s never a quantity problem…it’s always a quality problem

2. You need 9 totally separate meeting skills to handle different types of discussions

3. Most attendees score 3/10 on the attendee quality scale. Good meetings start when people are at least 7/10.

4. If you skip priming, your meeting is probably DOA

5. The middle of the meeting is about platforms (permission to say and ask the things that cause the topic to go best). You’ll know it if you have them, and you’ll know it if you don’t.

6. We need to end meetings correctly, not imply that the next step is another meeting.

So, let’s dive a layer deeper by covering:

1. How to manage (and think about) conflict

2. How to “push” people

3. How culture can be a powerful meeting tool

4. How big meetings can actually save time

This is the advanced toolkit, and it’s all about you being the most masterful and productive team you can be. Let’s accept that in almost all cases, groups of humans need some help managing their instincts and reactions, keeping things in sync, remembering why they are there, saying and hearing things best (instead of misinterpreting or contorting things), and more.

While this might sound a little untrusting and pessimistic, remember that we are building a toolkit and a level of preparedness for reality here, building competence and intentionality instead of relying on hope and magic. Our toolkit needs to be ready for what the world might throw at us. And yes, maybe there will be days where we won’t need some of these tools and things will go really well automatically. But what’s more likely is that you will need some or all of the tools we’re covering, and you’ll need them in every single meeting.

Advanced Tool 1: Conflict

If you’ve covered the basics already, the next thing you’re going to face is the deeply-misunderstood topic of conflict.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that managing conflict is where we kick this advanced abilities post off. Meetings are conflict-prone settings, especially if we’re making important decisions, handling nuance, and hearing from very different viewpoints and competencies…like we usually are.

Let’s get the necessary bits over with and make sure we’re all working with the same definition of the word conflict:

And here is the etymology of the word, just to drive home where this word comes from.

It is surprisingly-popular for people to invent their own definition for this word, especially if it suits their penchant for jumping into conflict. But words do have actual definitions. You don’t just get to say, “What I mean when I say conflict is to have dialogue,” because that would be like saying, “What I mean when I say stab is actually to share a warm hug.”

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