Your team is in the midst of conflict. You’ve bumped into an oh, sh*t! moment. At this point, most people go on automatic pilot, choosing safe, habitual responses. We encourage you to wake up and notice this moment, because it’s a crucial choice point for you and your team.
Do you opt in, or do you opt out?
Opting in creates a container in which differences can be used not as points of contention, but as invitations to more creative solutions. Opting in means stepping into the conflict, rather than avoiding it. Choosing to engage with conflict is counterintuitive and demands a tremendous amount of courage, backbone, and heart on the part of everyone involved.
So why do it? Because you and your team will reap amazingly creative, innovate, and profitable collective results!
To opt in, you must be willing to show up with vulnerability, let down your guard, and relinquish the control that makes you feel safe. You must also choose curiosity and be willing to share your opinion and express genuine interest in different perspectives. While these two ingredients aren’t natural in business, especially for leaders, they are learnable skills. Consistent application of vulnerability and curiosity creates a container for innovation and creativity.
When you and your team opt in and use the natural energy of conflict, you each become healthier, more engaged, and significantly more creative. Individuals start to speak up, share different points of view, express disagreement with one another—even with you, the leader—and think more creatively. Trust, connection, and curiosity grow; and everyone becomes more resilient. The team’s willingness, ability, and capacity to deal with differences improve. As a result, the team finds clarity in the problem and expands the playing field of possibilities.
Rather than deferring to the leader’s or loudest member’s opinion, team members come up with creative solutions together. They arrive at ideas none of them considered before walking into the room. Momentum increases because people are inspired and engaged. No longer does one person have to pull the team along; they’re pushing ahead together.
In this section, we provide the concepts, tools, and tips to support your choice to opt in to conflict in order to encourage clarity and collective creativity on your team. We will set the context for the following three sections: the ME, the WE, and the BUSINESS.
Read on to find out what learning to ski has to do with opting in.