Great meetings are full of great conflict. I often ask, “why have a meeting if there’s no conflict?” But there’s a big difference between meetings with great conflict and those with unhealthy conflict that slows everything down.
So how do you manage conflict in meetings to get more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff?
Healthy vs. Unhealthy Conflict
First, let’s consider the difference between good and healthy conflict and unhealthy conflict.
I see good conflict as tension. For example, someone might challenge you to consider an issue from a different direction or perspective. It’s uncomfortable and not how you want to think about it, but it stretches you and helps you see things more comprehensively, which, in turn, helps the team arrive at better decisions.
Tension is an awkward but healthy form of conflict. The opposite is friction, where conflict feels personal—like you’re grinding on the same issue without progressing. To manage conflict in your meeting, aim to dial up the amount of tension while minimizing the amount of negative friction. How do you do that?
Let’s start by dialing up the good parts. The key is understanding that conflict is a feature, not a flaw, in teams. It brings out different perspectives, helping us address trade-offs and solve problems when resources are limited to achieve the best possible outcome.
Understand the Problem
Understanding that deliberations in meetings are about optimizing scarce resources among various parties is essential. If that’s the case, start by ensuring everyone understands the problem you’re trying to solve. Even if it’s not your agenda item, you can say, “I just want to make sure we all agree on what we’re solving for here.” You can ask the meeting chair or the person who introduced the item. If no one responds, you can say, “I sense that this is what we’re solving for,” and proceed from there.
Solicit Perspectives
Next, you can solicit diverse perspectives in the room. Unhealthy conflict erupts when people don’t feel they have a forum to share things that matter to them. Making sure everyone has a chance to be heard and share their unique take on the problem will promote positive conflict and stop you from getting into negative friction.
Ask for input directly. For example, “Hey, Frank, you’re the only person from the field. We’re building this program, but I’m not sure it will work in the hectic field environment. Can you share your thoughts from your perspective?” Seek their diverse input.
Hear Everyone
In fostering positive conflict, someone may say something that annoys everyone else. For example, you’re launching a new performance management system, and the head office has designed a brilliant, best-in-class, leading system that will take an hour per person to work through.
Frank might say, “There’s no way my team can spend an hour off the road, not selling or helping customers, to fill out this performance appraisal form. It’s just not feasible.”
Everyone in the room might insist, “But this is the best form.” To manage this conflict, address the concerns directly. You could say, “I hear you saying an hour is too long. Can you share how much time you can devote, how often we should do this, and any other suggestions?”
You’re giving Frank an opportunity to share his diverse input and helping everyone in the room understand the reasoning behind his opinion or point of view. After he responds, you can add value by saying, “What I understand from you is that it’s not the hour itself that’s the problem, but rather having to dedicate a whole hour at once. Splitting it into smaller interactions might be beneficial since field staff have monthly touch points.”
You’ve ensured that Frank feels heard and understood, preventing any misunderstandings about his request from floating around in the room.
Add Your Truth
Adding your or somebody else’s truth is perfectly acceptable. When you do that, you’re saying, “Okay, Frank, we understand that long chunks of time won’t work due to the wide spans of control in the field. But, you like the idea of having performance conversations in short stints.”
You can add, “Here’s my perspective on this situation. I’m focusing less on the duration and more on the quality of interaction, ensuring ample time for discussion and exchange. That’s what I’m prioritizing.”
In that case, you’ve acknowledged Frank’s truth and made him feel it matters, but you’ve added your own piece of the puzzle. And now you want to address the broader picture by saying, “We need to address all these things. We need a system that supports our compensation and promotion system. It needs to be in bite-sized pieces to make sense in the field. It doesn’t need to be formulaic, but it needs to be based on great dialogue. What can we do with the proposal to get us closer to that?”
By doing that, you become someone who helps define problems and challenges to solve, shifting away from adversarial conflicts. This is a powerful technique.
Frame the Problem to Solve
These are the things you can do to promote productive conflict:
- Make sure everyone in the room knows what they’re solving for
- Invite diversity of thought and differences of opinion, but make sure individuals feel heard and that everyone in the room understands the things that matter to them
- Add your own insights to that and then reframe it as collaborative problem-solving, not fighting
These steps foster positive engagement, but how do you reduce the friction?
How to Reduce Friction
1. Broker Conversations
Effective listening is often lacking, leading to misunderstandings. People who don’t listen well miss each other’s points and may wrongly perceive disagreement. Sometimes, they express the same idea differently, while other times, their viewpoints seem contradictory. They’re not necessarily conflicting, just viewed from different angles.
If you can be the person who helps them hear each other better by saying, “I’m not sure you’re disagreeing. Are you saying this, and you saying this?” You can broker conversations, which reduces friction.
Additionally, suppose someone in the room becomes emotional because they feel unheard or their points aren’t respected. In that case, you can loan your credibility and your space in the meeting to help them feel heard and understood.
2. Help People Translate Their Emotions
When someone does get emotional, you can help them clarify their feelings. For instance, if they say, “We can’t do anything in 15 minutes; that’s too rushed,” you can ask, “When you say rushed, what part concerns you? Is it the feedback section?” Addressing specific concerns can ease tensions and facilitate a calmer discussion, which is very helpful.
3. Loan Your Credibility
You can also loan your credibility to a minority voice in the conversation, someone you feel isn’t being heard. For example, you could say, “Hey, we need to return to what Sally was saying. I think that was valuable, and I think we need to listen.” This is a worthwhile thing you can do.
4. Stick to the Landing
The last thing you can do is help your team stick to the landing. One of the big problems in managing conflict in meetings is that we don’t close the conversation effectively because we’re trying to cram one more thing into a short meeting agenda or running off in different directions. But when we don’t close the meeting effectively, people walk off without clarity about who will do what, and then they get frustrated and mad at each other, thinking that they didn’t deliver when that’s not the case.
Before everybody leaves, say, “Let’s just be clear: what did we say we’re doing? Who are we communicating to? When is the deadline? Who is on point for this?” These questions manage the conflict by sticking the landing with a good ending.
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Meetings should be, and are supposed to be, all about having productive conflict. There are things you can do to dial that up. Still, it’s also important to keep negative, unhealthy conflict to a minimum and then wrap it all up by sticking the landing with clarity about who’s committing what to whom, for whom, by when, and all those things. That’s how you manage conflict to have a great meeting.
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