Our leadership team has high trust socially, but we suffer from artificial harmony during IDS because people are afraid of hurting feelings or damaging friendships. How do we transition from polite consensus to the unfiltered, healthy conflict needed to solve our biggest business issues?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Social harmony is not the same as high trust. When a leadership team is overly polite during the IDS portion of your Level 10 Meeting, they are engaging in artificial harmony. This is a common symptom of a lack of vulnerability-based trust. People are holding back their true opinions because they fear conflict or do not want to damage their personal relationships.

To break through this barrier, you must actively mine for conflict. As the leader, when you sense that team members are quietly disagreeing or holding back during a discussion, call it out. Push them to share their real thoughts. You can use a physical or verbal prompt to remind everyone that healthy conflict is necessary to get to the root of our issues. Another effective technique is to establish ground rules for debate. Remind the team that challenging an idea is not a personal attack on the person who proposed it.

The goal of IDS is to smoke out the truth so you can make the best decision for the company. Once a decision is reached after a healthy debate, require every team member to actively support it outside the room. This is the essence of building a cohesive and functional leadership team. If you allow polite silence in the meeting to turn into passive-aggressive resistance later, you will destroy your team's execution speed.