Team dynamics (part II)

In the first part of this mini-series about Team Dynamics, I wrote about the absence of trust and psychological safety. Topic for the second part is the next dynamic dysfunction from Patrick Lencioni’s pyramid of team dysfunctions – Fear of Conflict.

What is a healthy conflict or a team member challenge?

Healthy conflict or a challenge within a team should be an open, honest, respectful exchange of opinions, experiences, and perspectives, regarding the working task, issue, process, or ways of collaboration, without challenging members’ personality, meaning personal characteristics or core beliefs.

Fear of Conflict

To continue where we left off last time, once teams lack trust, they are not willing to be vulnerable with each other. This causes an absence of healthy challenges with each other, avoidance of difficult conversations, and a preference for artificial harmony over productive disagreement. The root cause behind fear of conflict is, in most cases, fear of interpersonal risk-taking and fear of consequences, which are direct results of low trust and poor psychological safety. 

Team members do not feel safe to share different perspectives and feelings, or challenge each other, because they fear there might be a „punishment“ in the sense of humiliation, judgment, rejection, or worse, like losing a status, reputation, role, job, etc. Agreements are being made on a surface level, team members accept them in theory, but do not commit to them in reality.

To assess the issue with trust and psychological safety we should ask ourselves:

1. Do team members feel comfortable admitting mistakes, weaknesses, and fears to their colleagues and their leader? 
2. Are team members raising isues & openly sharing their opinions and ideas?
3. Do team members have enough time to get to know & better understand each other?

To recognize Fear of Conflict dysfucntion in early stage, ask these additionally:

1. Are disussions on meetings passive and full of silence or dynamic and chalenging?
2. Do team members fear giving a different opinion or respectful disagreement?
3. When decisions are made do members challenge it or just accept with silent agreement? 
4. Are issues being resolved or they have the tendency to be forgotten?

Lacking healthy conflict can lead to toxic communication and behaviours. 

Instead of open honest disagreement frustration is expressed through various negative chanals

1. Passive-agressive behaviours: blame-shifting, stone-walling, interrupting, gossipng, public shaming, personal atacks, constant criticism or negativity, mushroom communication, contempt, ultimatums, playing the victim, intimidation, defensiveness, 
2. Suppressed innovation: Without difficult conversations, open and honest disagreements, challenges, or debates, new ideas are rarely brought to light, let alone tried and tested. This leads to stalling and stagnation
3. Unresolved issues: Problems remain hidden , unrecognized, untracked, unmeasured, unresolved, which causes further delays in communication, collaboration, work, more errors and more frustration and resentment
4. Poor decision making: When there is disagreement or silence in the team, nobody will take responsibility, nor challenge each other, and they will usually just accept someone else’s decision, as they are prevented from „Groupthink“ for a better solution

The importance of healthy Conflict:

• Open, honest, clean communication helps bring more different perspectives, opinions, and experiences to surface, which leads to a better understanding and organic harmony, which means stronger interpersonal relationships based on vulnerability and trust
• Healthy conflict encourages critical thinking, higher engagement and better decision making, which then leads to more productive meetings and creating better solutions 
• Clear expectations and boundaries mean also shared understanding and less stress
• Having open honest communication helps collaboration in the team, which further supports efectiveness, delivery, accelerated innovation and prevents stagnation

How to encourage healthy conflict within a team?

• Model vulnerability: Express doubts, fears and invite constructive criticism
• Encourage open communication: Give honest feedback on work or action, not the person
• Work on emotional intelligence: Train teams in Conflict resolution skills
• Respond constructively to conflict: Mediate dissagrements and lead reflective sessions
• Encourage psychological safety: Every voice should be heard!
• Create opportunities for a healthy challenge: set clear expectations and norms, make shared agreements and rules, allow time and safe space for a heatlhy debate

After covering Absence of Trust and Fear of Conflict, next stop will be Lack of Commitment. Stay tuned, this will be continued…