Excerpted from The Bonfire Moment: Bring Your Team Together to Solve the Hardest Problems Startups Face by Martin Gonzalez and Joshua Yellin. Copyright © 2024 by Martin Gonzalez and Joshua Yellin. Reprinted courtesy of Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Leaders need to invite disagreement, not just expect it. When the invitation to offer their opinion is not clear, teams will assume you don’t want it. Leaders often don’t realize that their status can unconsciously silence dissent. No matter how often leaders stress that no one will be punished for disagreeing, their own zeal, conviction, intelligence, and energy can be intimidating.
The classic American “open-door policy” isn’t enough to draw out dissenters. Leaders need to create conditions that empower their teams to speak up. When it has been the cultural norm to be deferential to power, or when disagreeing has been conflated with being disagreeable, leaders need to work even harder to change the norm.
One leader we worked with in Singapore, Mei Chen, developed a creative way of drawing out her people’s best ideas, even when they contradicted her own. Mei had received some bracing feedback during her Bonfire Moment. Her team said that she always responded to objections with defensiveness. We could see that she was brilliant but very measured in how she shared ideas. As we discussed these issues, Mei realized that some of the behaviors that had made her effective in her prior job as an analyst were now hurting her ability to lead. She would take a few days to develop any new proposal before bringing it to the team. She had so much of herself invested in her ideas that when they got any pushback, it felt like a personal attack on her capabilities.
Mei recognized that she needed to change before the most talented people on her team quit in frustration, and she found two tactics that worked very well. First, she committed to come to meetings less prepared, despite her perfectionist instincts. She found that when she put less prep work into her own ideas, it didn’t sting as much when people raised questions and outright disagreed. Second, to further encourage honest exchanges, she started having more one-on-one conversations. In private with a single team member, she would lay out her idea and the reasoning behind it. Then she’d say: “I’m pretty sure I’m missing out on important things here. What’s missing? What don’t I see?”
Mei’s approach aligns with the conclusions of researchers from Singapore Management University and UC Berkeley. Their study suggests that when leaders frame conflicting ideas as expressing disagreement, team members assume the leader isn’t really open to dissenting opinions. This assumption tends to shorten conversations and reduce the exchange of important information. But when the leader frames a conflict as a debate, with fair treatment for all sides, people assume that dissenting opinions are wanted and expected. In the study, the amount of shared information increased fourfold when the leader simply changed their language.
The good news is that it really is possible to escape the trap of the inner circle. Anil Sabharwal, who led the team that built Google Photos into a multibillion-user app, describes his approach this way: “Debate. Argue. Get into it. The best results come from passionate, constructive, positive contention. Encourage it. Even force it. But know it requires a foundation of trust, honesty and respect. If you don’t have that, you just get pure contention, and that ain’t good.”
Improving the quality of your disagreements
Tech pioneer Bob Taylor, who built one of the dream teams of the computing revolution, was a master at fostering productive disagreement. In the late 1960s, he played a key role at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (popularly known as DARPA), which launched the earliest version of the internet, connecting computers at the Pentagon, MIT, UC Berkeley, and a research lab in Santa Monica. Then in the 1970s, he led the team that invented the world’s first personal computer at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt observed, “Bob Taylor invented almost everything in one form or another that we use today in the office and at home.”
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