Avoiding internal team conflict isn’t the way

Here’s a quote from the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team that I think will resonate with a lot of experienced coaches.

Ironically, teams that avoid ideological conflict often do so in order to avoid hurting team members’ feelings, and then end up encouraging dangerous tension. When team members do not openly debate and disagree about important ideas, they often turn to back-channel personal attacks, which are far nastier and more harmful than any heated argument over issues.

If you’ve coached for a while, you likely will have had at least one team, if not many, that have had issues with this sort of thing. I know I’ve been involved with several!

We often think that a good team dynamic is one where there’s no conflict. As the quote above suggests, however, that can be far from the through. There will always be conflicts within a team. Sometimes they’re minor. Sometimes they’re more significant. It’s not about suppressing that conflict. It’s about using it to make the team stronger and more effective.

And sometimes trying to squash a minor conflict between players really backfires. We end up taking a small issue and making it a big deal. Pretty counter-productive, right? Better to have left it alone.

I’m not a conflict-oriented person. Never have been. I learned a number of years ago, though, that sometimes you even need to stimulate conflict. It helps issues bubbling under the surface come to light. Only when you do that can you hope to work things out.