Candor and conflict

- By nature, I avoid conflict. I'm kind of a peace maker. My strengths are things like connectedness, include or in positivity. So when I learned that healthy conflict is an essential ingredient of a succesful team, I really struggled. I mean, shouldn't we all just get along? Here's the problem of just getting along. It masks major issues and allows resentment to fester. People will just go along saying everything is fine. But there are underlying problems that wreak havoc if left uncovered. Part of building an agile culture is creating an environment where people can be candid, disagree and debate. So here are three resources to help you think about healthy conflict and how you can incorporate it on your team. Kim Scott's book, "Radical Candor" was such and important resource to me as I navigated my own relationship with conflict. In her framework, there are two different axes, the care Care personally axis, which she also refers to as the Give a Damn axis, and Challenge directly, which she also calls the Willing to Tick People Off axis. The goal is to lead from a place where you both care personally and challenge directly. When we operate outside of the sweet spot of "Radical Candor", we wind up in what she defines as Ruinous empathy, Obnoxious aggression, or Manipulative insincerity. All traits that do not cultivate and agile culture. I also encourage you to check out her keynote from Agile 2018. I've linked to the video in the exercise files, and it's worth watching to learn more about communicating effectively on an Agile team. Another resource is Patrick Lencioni's book, "Five Dysfunctions of a Team". In his framework, traits are laid out by order of importance, similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Now the foundational dysfunction is an Absence of Trust. But just above that is Fear of Conflict. So here's how Lencioni describes it. It is important to distinguish productive, ideological conflict from destructive fighting and interpersonal politics. Passion is still a huge part of healthy conflict. But we want to make sure that we're focused on concepts and ideas. We're not criticizing people's personalities or just being mean. Finally, Dr. Brene Brown developed a framework of Reckoning, Rumble and Revolution where we take ownership of a situation, grapple with it and then come out on the other side better. Now that middle section, the Rumble, is where the conflict is necessary. Brown describes how we are wired to make up stories in the absence of data. And this causes us to leap to judgment, name call people, back channel and other vices that definitely don't foster an agile culture in her book, "Dare to Lead", she outlines a framework she calls the story rumble. And it consists of 15 questions that help teams wade through difficult conversations and come out through better and stronger because of it. All of that trust and that psychological safety that we've worked so hard to build, it is the foundation for us to have these open and honest, and often really difficult conversations. Agile is not about hiding our feelings and opinions so that we project this appearance of all getting along. It's about getting to the heart of what is hard so that we can continuously improve. And in this sense, healthy conflict is an important aspect of a strong, agile culture.