Last week, I wrote about trust. Trust is the foundation of any relationship or team, and without it you can't work together.
Trust is not a goal in itself, and you can't just have trust and expect everything to be great. Trust must be used in an effort to have healthy conflict.
The absence of trust is the foremost dysfunction of a team, and it is the first thing that must be addressed. But, once trust is established, your team must go another step further to avoid the next dysfunction: the fear of conflict.
What is healthy conflict?
Most people hear conflict and think of a shouting match or a fist fight. That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the ability to have a passionate conversation about an idea without it becoming personal. You and your teammates must be collectively working towards the best solution to a problem, and that requires a lot of different ideas and perspectives.
I hope it is obvious how healthy conflict can never be had without the trust that I talked about last week. If you don't trust your teammates, you will be afraid to speak up, and you will be afraid to be wrong always trying to play it safe. There will be artificial harmony.
How do you have healthy conflict?
My teammate, Tim, described it in a way that I found very compelling. Whenever he is bringing his idea to the team, he pictures the idea as a physical object. He pulls it out of his pocket and places it on the table. Then, he invites everyone to look at it, turn it around, and see it from all angles. If someone has a problem with it, they can point it out, and he will take it back and work on the idea some more or toss it if the problem is too big or someone else has a better idea.
Imagine each person on your team doing that with their ideas. They are not their ideas, and they are not their work. They are just presenting ideas to the team, and the team is working together to make them better.
Regardless of how much you trust your teammates, this process requires a degree of courage paired with a healthy amount of healthy shame and humility. You must also always be working together in good faith. There is no room to assume anyone has bad intentions with your ideas, and there is no room to have bad intentions with anyone else's ideas.
To put it in a nutshell, you must remember that you are all working towards the same goal. Your success is their success, and their success is your success. The same goes for failure.
The dangers of not having healthy conflict
Without healthy conflict, you can't have commitment. If you don't have a say in the decision-making process, you can't truly commit to the decision. If the idea succeeds, it wan't something you helped produce, and if it fails, you can't be blamed for it. You will be indifferent to the outcome, and either consciously or subconsciously, you will not work as hard to make it succeed.
Conclusion
Without trust, you can't have healthy conflict. Without healthy conflict, you can't have commitment. Healthy conflict requires courage and humility on top of trust, and it is the only way to get the best ideas out of your team. If your team is experiencing artificial harmony, you may be suffering from the fear of conflict and must address it to see the results you want.