Workplace teams often strive to avoid friction by always agreeing, which can lead to poor decision-making and stifle a team’s potential.
Harvard Business Review shows the following ways you can teach and encourage your team to challenge ideas and disagree respectfully and productively.
- Set ground rules. As a team, make a commitment to and clearly define expectations for respectful debate by prohibiting personal attacks, ensuring equal participation and prioritizing sincere engagement.
- Follow a four-step process. Generate ideas, clarify assumptions, introduce friction through challenges and move forward with the best ideas.
- Recognize innovation often happens through disagreement. Breakthroughs often occur where different disciplines meet and sometimes disagree. Collaborating across disciplines can generate new ideas and creative solutions.
- Build trust. Strengthen team relationships through structured conversations and informal interactions so people feel more comfortable speaking up.
- Assign dissenting roles. To keep disagreement from being personal, you can give each team member time to be in a position where they must challenge ideas or advocate for views with which they may not agree.
- Lead with inquiry. Rather than directly contradicting people and creating defensiveness, encourage your team to ask thoughtful questions to help guide conversations.
- Model the behavior. You set the tone for how your team engages and handles disagreements. Be the first to propose ideas and the last to critique them.
