How do you Help Your Team Feel More Comfortable with Conflict? How do you support constructive conflict and candour on your team?

How do you Help Your Team Feel More Comfortable with Conflict? How do you support constructive conflict and candour on your team? “Candor must be supported by two other attributes: a deep commitment to the well-being of the team and the individual, and an in depth appreciation of how to work with emotions. With these in the mix, and with a commitment to learning, candor becomes a vital force for growth.” - Marion Langford How do you practice Candour? Leaders and teams have found that seeing reality clearly is essential to being successful. ▶ In order to see reality clearly, leaders and organizations need everyone to be truthful and not lie about, or withhold, information. They need candor. ▶ Candor is the revealing of all thoughts, feelings, and sensations in an honest, open, and aware way. ▶ Speaking candidly increases the probability that leaders and teams can collectively see reality more clearly. The ability to get issues on the table and work through them constructively is critical to having a healthy culture. Exercise: Managers can normalize productive conflict on your team by using an exercise to map out the unique value of each role and the tensions that should exist among them. Draw a circle and divide that circle into enough wedges to represent each role on your team. For each role, ask: 1️⃣What is the unique value of this role on this team? 2️⃣On which stakeholders is this role focused? 3️⃣What is the most common tension this role puts on team discussions? Answer those questions for each member of the team, filling in the wedges with the answers. As you go, emphasize how the different roles are supposed to be in tension with one another. With heightened awareness and a shared language, your team will start to realize that much of what they have been interpreting as interpersonal friction has actually been perfectly healthy role-based tension. Acknowledgments: Source: HBR article “An Exercise to Help Your Team Feel More Comfortable with Conflict by Liane Davey and source material on “candour” from The Conscious Leadership Group. Infographic by Tanmay Vora #humanresources #management #leadershipdevelopment #leadership #teameffectiveness #ceo