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Foreign. Welcome to Leading Organizations that Matter, a podcast about leadership and how we find impact, meaning and joy in our work. I'm Ray Spadoni and today's topic is the Importance of disagreeing. Well, in my book, Saving Organizations that Matter, I discuss the perils of conflict avoidance and the fact that more harm comes from avoidance than from the conflict itself. Unfortunately, there are many leaders who draw from their own personality tendencies and who would rather sweep conflict under the rug than deal with it head on. Those leaders then tend to either build or or reinforce a culture that does the same. Avoidance becomes the norm and when that happens, problems linger, resolutions delayed, and organizational performance suffers. Furthermore, this leads to an erosion of trust. Better people will get fed up and leave and toxic behaviors will form, often as either a coping mechanism or or as a way of filling the leadership void. As I said, I go into all this in my book. I believe that better organizations and their leaders learn how to disagree. Well, that is to say, they don't run from disagreements, they deal with them. You could say the exact same thing about personal relationships. So let's say you are a leader or an aspiring leader and you believe you are conflict avoidant or you work in an organizational culture where conflict avoidance is the norm. This describes a lot of the work that I do with management teams, boards of directors and executives. So I often walk through a seven part framework to help create a shift in thinking. Here are the basics. First, reframe the fundamental belief that disagreement is a problem and reposition it as a gift, that it's not a threat, it's more information by which decisions can be made, and more information is never a bad thing. I help this reframing by looking for places where disagreement, respectfully offered of course, can be seen as a contribution rather than a disruption. Second, it's critical to separate the person from the perspective instead of the language of you're wrong, it's repositioned. As I see this differently, language matters when conflict is in the air. Third, disagreeing prevents false harmony. Now, I might do an entire episode at some point on the notion of false harmony because I see it all the time and it is bad to the bone. Fourth, when teams disagree, they need to talk it through, build consensus and that can be a heavy intellectual and emotional lift. It's not easy, but teams that do this sort of thing get better, sharper and essentially become a higher performing team. Fifth, building off of the last one, number four, teams that work through disagreements, get closer and have more trust. Conflict avoidant leaders fear that the conflict will cause tension and disruption. The exact opposite is true. Sixth, dealing with conflict helps teams and individuals learn to put the mission of the organization before their own egos. Mission orientation is a learned behavior and finally seventh, disagreeing well is a discipline. The more you do it, the better at it you get and you learn how to do things like name the underlying tension, slow the pace when needed, focus on the issue at hand and again return to the mission. This isn't necessarily a natural response, it's something that teams, especially newly forming or reforming ones, must do deliberately. I hope this framework helps reach out if you'd like to think this through for you or your team. Thanks for listening. Leaving a positive review and letting others know about this podcast will help a great deal. My mission is to help empower organizations that matter by supporting those who lead them. I offer coaching, mentoring and consulting services. You can learn more about me and my work@racetedoni.com SA.