What Makes Conflict Beautiful?
No one likes conflict. Not even us.
Most people weren’t trained in it nor provided good models growing up.
Most people think conflict is painful and an impediment to work, so they make choices to avoid, manage, or defuse it by choosing to either overpower the situation to end and win an argument or go silent to keep the peace.
This seems like a good idea at an individual level. After all, who wants to experience the discomfort, other people’s reactions, or the tension of conflict?
When leaders and teams avoid, manage, or defuse conflict, they wind up mired in politics, gossip, and back-channel maneuvering. Team meetings are boring as people defer to the leader or the loudest member. Team members are uninspired, or worse disengaged, and their performance is mediocre at best. Ultimately, turnover increases because no one wants to stay on the team that’s so dysfunctional.
Sound familiar?
If it does, you are not alone. In a 2014 Gallup survey of employee engagement, only 31.5 percent of employees were engaged (psychologically committed and making positive contributions at work), 51 percent of employees were disengaged, and 17.5 percent were actively disengaged.1 We believe there’s a direct correlation between employee engagement and the degree to which people embrace and use conflict.
This is not another book with formulas for addressing conflict because it’s a good team-management strategy. Rather, approached right, conflict is a gift that every member of your team can bring to the table. We say, “Use it! Don’t defuse it!”
In this book, we provide you with simple, practical tools that you can apply with your team—or in any relationship—to make a positive impact using the natural energy of conflict to create innovative, profitable, and beautiful results. You’ll get both big-picture concepts to help you get your team to look at conflict differently, and detailed tools for how to work with and through the tension that comes up when you and your team begin embracing conflict. Throughout this book, we will demonstrate the tools with plenty of real-life business examples from our 15+ years of working with Fortune 100 companies to start-ups, illustrating what works and what doesn’t.
THE CHANGE
Imagine looking forward to your next team meeting. Imagine experiencing tension and conflict in the room and thinking, “This is going to lead to a great and innovative outcome—we just don’t know what it is yet!”
When you as a leader strive to produce a cohesive and aligned team, embracing and using conflict will help you harness the team’s potential by accessing creative breakthroughs, driving the team’s competitive advantage.
Your team, rather than deferring to the leader’s or loudest member’s opinion, will come up with creative breakthroughs together. You’ll arrive at ideas that none of you considered before walking into the room. Team momentum increases because people are inspired and engaged. No longer does one person have to pull the team along; they’re pushing ahead together.
We will walk you through our revolutionary approach to embracing conflict, our Path to Collective Creativity Team Performance Model. It takes you from your vision to that critical oh, sh*t! moment and choice point.
An oh, sh*t! moment is literally the potential power source for creative solutions. It is a rally cry for shared creativity, should you choose to listen and accept the call. Each one of these moments, if handled well, creates the possibility for an innovative, creative, and profitable result.
We’ll uncover how teams have undermined team performance by habitually opting out of conflict, using their individual communication styles to manage, avoid, or defuse conflict. We’ll introduce you to three key areas that are crucial for achieving extraordinary results by opting in and using conflict to make your team great: the ME, the WE, and the BUSINESS.
We start with the ME because how you are with yourself in the midst of conflict is central for your capacity to be present and engage effectively during conflict.
Next, we focus on the WE because that’s where conflict shows up.
Once the ME and the WE are aligned, we focus on the BUSINESS.
In our work with hundreds of leaders and their teams, we have run, walked, and stumbled through this path from oh, sh*t! to collective creativity many, many times. We will give you the concepts, tools, and tips to turn around your team in an instant when you get stuck and how to reap the rewards to come up with an innovative business solution to your toughest problems. We will also give you key business tools to maintain the positive results going forward on your team.
USING THIS BOOK
We patterned this book after the books we enjoy reading, such as All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten and Rework. We’ve provided you with short pieces that you can read quickly and get a practical tip, nugget of inspiration, or to provide you with a new way of thinking.
We will tell stories to help you relate to the situations, stories based on the team experiences of our clients. While the stories are true, we have taken liberties with the actual names and industries, and we have combined details and client characteristics to better illustrate the learning principles.
We’ve outlined our approach to conflict in six sections that follow our Path to Collective Creativity Team Performance Model. You can read the sections in order or just open the book to any old section, read it, and walk away with an insight that will help you create a more successful team!
The power of people working together, aka: teamwork, is our greatest unlimited and, frankly, wildly untapped potential. However, until we fully recognize that conflict is the energetic engine for transformation, innovation, and creativity, we won’t opt in! Conflict is NOT comfortable, nor does any sane person go looking for conflict.
Any time people gather, conflict naturally emerges because no two people are alike. Therein lies the potential: When we embrace and engage with our different points of view, our oh, sh*t! moments take us not to right or wrong, but to places no one has gone before! Conflict is the source of amazing transformation.
Read on to learn how you can turn your source of pain into a source of creativity on your team! Won’t that be beautiful?