group fightingI’m leery of happy teams. Don’t get me wrong.  I like positive situations and working with happy people, however, in my experience, the happy teams are the ones that produce mediocre results or, they don’t produce at all.

Give me a group of people that show up to do battle on the issues versus the team that strives for peace and harmony, any day.

Just as “being liked” isn’t required to be effective as a leader, neither is maintaining peace and harmony on the team required for success. What is required is the ability to push the envelope on creativity, talk openly and freely about problems and shortcomings, and to cry foul when someone violates the group’s norms for performance, behavior and accountability.

For many people, conflict in the team environment feels wrong.  It’s uncomfortable.  Conflict breeds personal stress and group tension, and sometimes creates a hue and cry for “getting along.”  While an aversion to conflict is understandable if it is personal in nature, task and process conflict are important factors in propelling high-performance teams forward.

5 Reasons a Dose of Conflict Might Be Healthy For Your Team:

1. Elephants aren’t allowed to hide in the room.  The big issues and tough topics are uncovered quickly and dispatched without worrying about personal interests and political boundaries.

2. Social loafing is squashed. Hanging out and working at less than full tilt becomes painfully obvious in environments where the group is challenging itself to move together through the jungle.  People pull their weight or they are left behind.

3. Decisions are held to a higher standard. While the potential pitfalls of group decision-making are well known, teams that challenge themselves and each other in pursuit of achievement tend to have higher standards for the quality of their decisions.  Instead of a rush-to-decide or a drive-to-consensus culture found on more collegial teams, task-focused groups search for answers that pass the filters for both quality and speed.  In my experience, they challenge assumptions, seek the right or at least better data and assess risks and implications much more effectively than the “let’s all get along” teams.

4. Leadership skills are challenged and strengthened. High task conflict teams are leadership laboratories.  One of the “elephants in the room” of my argument here is that leading these teams is not for the faint of heart.  Team leaders must learn to manage the flow and energy of the conflict to ensure that it doesn’t move into personal territory.  They also need to be adept at helping maneuver the team from the heat of robust dialogue to a decision and implementation.  These are clearly non-trivial leadership challenges and remarkable learning opportunities for all involved.

5. Standards for performance are enhanced. Participants refuse to settle for anything other than success, and success is often defined as either exceeding or obliterating targets or, innovating in some meaningful fashion.  The task conflict pushes people higher and harder.  Along the way, these high performance teams raise the bar for everyone in the organization.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I suspect that I’m skating on the thin-ice of a great number of people that find conflict distressing and destructive.  Keep in mind that my context is task or process conflict, and not anything personal in nature.  It takes an emotionally intelligent group to pull this off and not let good and tough discussion over the right issues reduce to squabbling and paralysis. It’s hard work to find and foster this type of a team and environment.  But who said that producing high performance was easy work?  It’s most definitely not.