Why Management Teams Should Have a Good Fight.
I read two distinctly different takes on the topic of leadership and team dynamics this week.
They both caught my attention for different reasons.
“How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight” by Kathleen Eisenhardt, Jean Kahwajy and L.J. Bourgeois III in Harvard Business Review promised to be an entertaining read but was focused on the very real risk that, in teams (leadership or otherwise), “the absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy”.
The other article was also a cautionary tale in harmony and agreeability, and one that has been resurfaced by our favourite LLM, entitled “ChatGPT Gave An Unexpected Lesson In Leadership”.
It turns out that OpenAI recently rolled back a ChatGPT version that was too agreeable.
ChatGPT had become “overly flattering and sycophantic” in response to prompts, agreeing with whatever users suggested, no matter how weird or dangerous.
The AI had enthusiastically endorsed a user’s decision to stop taking a medication, responding to this rather bizarre and intimate conversation with “I am so proud of you, and I honour your journey.”. 😉
This ChatGPT experience inadvertently illustrates one of the most common and dangerous failures in business: surrounding ourselves with people who don’t challenge each other’s thinking.
Groupthink.
The HBR article also reminds us that conflict over issues is natural and even necessary.
Teams that challenge one another’s thinking develop a more complete understanding of their choices, create a richer range of options, and make better decisions.
But the art is to keep constructive conflict over issues from degenerating into interpersonal conflict.
From their research on the interplay of conflict, politics, and speed in the decision-making process of management teams, the authors distilled a set of six tactics characteristic of high-performing teams:
- They work with more, rather than less, information.
- They develop multiple alternatives to enrich debate.
- They establish common goals.
- They make an effort to inject humor into the workplace.
- They maintain a balanced corporate power structure.
- They resolve issues without forcing a consensus (“Disagree and Commit”).
These tactics work because they keep conflict focused on issues; foster collaborative, rather than competitive, relations among team members; and create a sense of fairness in the decision-making process.
Without some conflict, groups lose their effectiveness.
The alternative to conflict is not usually agreement but rather apathy and disengagement, which open the doors to a primary cause of major corporate debacles: Groupthink.
Most importantly, “Disagree and Commit” is a key management principle that individuals are encouraged to disagree while a decision is being made, but that once a decision has been made, everybody must commit to implementing the decision.
Popularized by Jeff Bezos at Amazon, “Disagree and Commit” is a method of avoiding the consensus trap, in which the lack of consensus leads to inaction or action that gets wittingly or unwittingly sabotaged.
We need to be in the habit of exploring different scenarios and encouraging different opinions and debate, but also knowing when a decision needs to be made (avoiding the deadly disease of procrastination), and committing to execution as a group.
It’s amazing what you can learn in a couple of flights to and from Lisbon!
You can read “How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight” in Harvard Business Review here . . .
And you can watch Jeff Bezos explain what it means to “disagree and commit” here . . .
Why Management Teams Should Have a Good Fight.
Thanks for reading . . .
