The conflict quadrants

When I sit in leadership meetings that lack conflict, I get suspicious. Like, really suspicious. The conflict is there, whether we talk about it or not.

Identifying and effectively resolving conflict is, in many ways, the job of leadership. High-functioning teams are great at productive conflict. They’re great at identifying it, they’re great at prioritizing it, and they’re great at resolving it.

I’ve started to pay much closer attention to conflict’s presence or absence. In any given discussion, I listen closely and try to map the group dynamic to one of the four squares below:

No team is fully in alignment. So if you don’t see any friction in the group dynamic, there’s almost certainly some sort of latent conflict lurking below the surface. Depending on how important that latent conflict is, it might be a very dangerous state for a team to stay in.

There are two useful extensions of my little 2x2. The first is that each square has an ideal direction to move the conversation. If the team is squabbling, focus on reinforcing the underlying alignment to move the team back to the alignment square. If the team is experiencing latent conflict, focus on how to bring the issue to the surface and resolve it through active conflict. If the team is active conflict, focus on addressing the underlying substance and moving to alignment. (Needless to say, how to execute each of these moves is a post for another day.)

The second extension of this grid is that you can zoom one level further out and think about the state of each issue, and prioritize latent and active conflicts. One way of thinking about how to prioritize a leadership team’s time is to say, “We should spend most of our time working through our highest-ranked priorities.” But a more effective way to put it is, “We should spend most of our time working through our highest-ranked priorities that are conflicted.” Resolving conflict and pushing that resolution through an organization is what leadership teams should spend much of their time doing.

Closing recommendation

Few things make me happier than going to the movies alone. A couple weeks ago I went to see the black and white cut of Godzilla Minus One on a huge screen downtown and cannot recommend it enough. Stunning visuals, a really compelling love story, and an absolutely gripping climactic sequence.