Why Senior Teams Avoid Conflict, and How Everything Changes When You're a Crew on a Mission

Almost every senior leadership team I’ve coached with is avoiding conflict by ducking the same handful of conversations. And lots of them have unconsciously decided that just being ‘almost okay’ as a team is better than risking the wheels coming off by aiming higher.

Here’s the kind of conflicts they work so hard to avoid getting into:

the way that decisions are really made (not by consent in the meeting, but often elsewhere, in a corridor, in a WhatsApp)
that one or two members of the team often seem to be pulling in a different direction, with their own agendas
that the real priorities, the problems that the team should be solving, or the opportunities that they should be grasping, are somehow never properly explored
that the team’s own functioning is often just okay, and not something to write home about. And definitely not as well-functioning as they’d want other teams in the organisation to be.

And this isn’t just my experience.

Back in 1986 Chris Argyris described senior executives who had become genuinely skilled at avoiding conflict with each other. He called it ‘skilled incompetence’, because the very adeptness is what does the damage.(1)

Why Teams Avoid Those Conversations

What stops those conversations from happening, is that they are genuinely risky to have.

Senior leadership teams are under high-levels of pressure. And the unconscious calculation they seem to make is that ‘nearly okay functioning’, is better than the total dysfunction they fear might happen if someone opened the can of worms.

Here are some of the key reasons for playing it safe that I often uncover in my coaching with leadership teams:

Worrying that everybody is already under so much pressure. People ask themselves, “Can I say that my colleague isn’t delivering on one element of something, when they are already carrying so much else; would the wheels come off if I say it?”
Believing that they are personally at risk of being called out for something in return. If I say “Hey, we made this decision last month, why are we revisiting it now?”, is someone going to turn around and say something to me like, “Well Nick, if you’d delivered everything that was tasked to you, we wouldn’t have to be looking at it again.”
Depending on someone’s goodwill for your own functioning. For example, if I point out that a colleague’s actions don’t really seem to be consistent with the priorities we’ve agreed, will they take their ball home, withdraw co-operation with my department, and so cause my own work to degrade?
Looking to the Leader. People naturally defer to the team leader. If the leader isn’t naming an avoided conflict it becomes much harder for anyone else to name it. But leaders are cautious because they’ve been taught never to call someone out in public. Plus they know that naming it in the meeting also risks everybody swerving onto it, giving it too much attention, instead of none at all.

These reasons are part of the dreaded ‘psychological safety’, which has become something of a stick to beat leaders with recently.

But why it seems like a stick and not a solution is that the risks I describe above are not trivial. They genuinely might happen. And, if they do, they are likely to have big and out-of-proportion impacts. Psychological safety as a concept is only useful if we can find a way to be safe – and that can be very elusive.

The Cost

There is a cost to this, and it goes way beyond the leadership team. Allen Amason’s research with top management teams found that the ones who avoid task-focused disagreement, the honest argument about the work itself, make measurably poorer strategic decisions than the ones who have it out. And those are the decisions the whole organisation then has to live with, sometimes for years.(2)

I’ve spent a long time working with teams on how to overcome this. How do you stop avoiding the kind of conflict that might actually help really raise your team’s game?

The Usual Answer

The usual answer is to reach for a process. And there are some well-respected books about having difficult conversations, including Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton and Heen, and Crucial Conversations by Grenny and colleagues.

These are most useful, in my experience, in beginning a dialogue about the need to not dance around conflict. And less useful for actually addressing it. Because the risks of saying “There’s conflict that we are avoiding” are themselves not always addressed. But if your team hasn’t done much work on this yet, take a look, and draw from them whichever aspects you feel are useful to your team and the situation you are all facing.

How to Sneak Up On it

My own approach is to come at it obliquely, with a rhythm that starts slowly before it builds.

I start by talking generally about what conflict avoidance costs. What it costs organisations, in performance and ROI. And what it costs team members, in their own day-to-day experience and the satisfaction they miss from not being part of a team that is genuinely flying along.

Then I ask people to relate that to their own experience. But not on this team. Elsewhere, in teams they volunteer with, or teams they used to work in. Anything that brings the lived experience into the room without the risks and threats.

And then I really cheat, which is where the rhythm picks up.

First, I cheat with time. I jump ahead. I’ll say, “Of course, all teams face these kind of challenges. I want you to imagine that here, we’ve already solved them. We’ve found the answer.”

And then I use a number of techniques to have people imagine, to feel, to see, what it might be like when they are really performing as team. If the things underneath that conflict, the decisions that kept getting circled back, the accountability that slips all the time, when they are gone, what will it be like around here?

That first cheat is a way to open the doors to safely consider a different, better way of operating. But it’s a simple cheat compared to the next one.

Bypass the Risks and Fears Altogether

Here’s one really powerful way to stop mucking about, stop tiptoeing around potential conflict, and stop leaving the important work and benefits on the table.

I want to say first that I don’t think this is the only way to do it. That’s partly because I’m a ‘never say never’ kind of person, and partly because I haven’t tried all the other ways yet.

My experience has been that if you really want to stop avoiding the kind of conflict that contains the seeds of truly great team performance, an exceptionally powerful way to do that is to work on who you are as a team and what mission you are on together.

Crew on a Mission

I have seen teams come alive like never before when they rehearse why they exist and explore who they serve. And I’ve heard a whole team gasp out loud in delight when I asked them to consider the legacy they wanted to leave behind.

When you start to believe in yourselves as a crew on a mission, something happens to those reasons for avoiding conflict. They don’t disappear. You still need your colleague’s co-operation next week. They can still call you out for the thing youdidn’t deliver.

But what changes is that none of it matters so much anymore. When you feel like a tight crew, and there’s something you’re all genuinely for, it changes things. The mission and who you are as a crew in pursuit of it becomes more valuable than any one of your individual positions. When you positively challenge a colleague, it reads as service to that crew on a mission, rather than as an attack on that person. And being challenged yourself costs you far less, because your own standing and your own ego isn’t really what’s at stake – it’s the tightness of the crew and the mission itself.

I grew up watching Star Trek, and part of that never left me. That crew on the bridge of the Enterprise never avoided conflict with each other. They had something they jointly stood for, their famous ‘five year mission’, and it was bigger than any one of them so they had to be a team.

Star Trek is fiction, of course. But it makes such a difference when senior teams seriously ask what they are jointly for. Not what each of them is accountable for. What they are for, and who they are together. When you’re ready to explore that question, then you can start really flying boldly.

More Support and Resources

I’m Nick Robinson. I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together. My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation is clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership, and better performance.

Why Senior Teams Avoid Conflict, and How Everything Changes When You’re a Crew on a Mission