How to make conflicts healthy

September 30, 2022

You want to learn how to make conflicts healthy and boost your team’s culture and outcome? Awesome!
I will tell you why you should have conflicts, how to create healthy conflicts and what are the results when you introduced healthy conflicts.

So you hate conflicts or you try to avoid them? That’s normal because most of us don’t like conflict because they create discomfort, anxiety and uncertainty. It activates our fight or flight mode and fear of conflict is actually one of the five dysfunctions of a team – by Patrick Lencioni. So often we see conflict as negative but what about healthy conflicts? They will help your team to thrive and create better outcomes and better team culture. But how do you create healthy conflicts?

Conflicts are healthy when they aim to improve the outcome for the team. Second, if they are respectful and not personal. And then third, it’s about making it transparent so everyone from the team can contribute to a solution, so it must be visible. And to create an environment where this is possible, have a look also onto my video “Five simple steps for effective and productive retrospectives”. I have in my head one picture which pretty much describes to have on the one hand unhealthy conflicts and on the other hand the healthy conflicts. So let’s have a look on them.

We all know too good the unhealthy conflicts. It’s when you and me are finger-pointing at each other and saying you are the problem, you are the problem.

So let’s have a look on healthy conflicts. Here you and me are on one side and we are looking at the problem and thinking about a solution together, because we believe that everyone gave their best, given the situation at hand, their skills, their resources.

Have also a look to the link “The two basic rules for retrospectives”. And i love this overview, so whenever you are in a conflict think about: are we at the moment in an unhealthy conflict situation or are we in a healthy conflict situation and if you are in the unhealthy conflict situation what are now measures to get you into the healthy conflict situation.

What are now the results when you have healthy conflicts? Well first of all it creates an environment of psychological safety and trust and we need trust because this will enable the engagement of the team members to come up with ideas and solutions maybe no one else was thinking about and so we find better solutions. We are also making bottlenecks more transparent because now they can emerge because everyone knows it’s not against them as a person, it’s regarding finding solutions to those bottlenecks.

It also helps us to improve our communication skills because now we are not shy away from our problems but we put them in the center and we figure out a solution for for them. It builds commitment because now everyone wants to work on the big challenges and pro problems and bottlenecks we are facing in the team and we work together on them to win our champions league. So what do you think is this hack something you want to try out to create an environment where healthy conflicts become possible?

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