How to Think Like a Futurist
Why Power is Everyone’s Business
Creativity in the Virtual Age
PAGE 20
PAGE 26
PAGE 60
The Magazine of the Rotman School of Management UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
FALL 2021
THE SOCIALLY-CONSCIOUS BUSINESS PAGES 6, 32, 108
MANAGEMENT
Now What?
POINT OF VIEW
Andrew Atkins, Practice Leader, BTS and Workplace Trust Expert
The Upside of Positive Disharmony IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT an organizational team is like an orchestra, with each member playing a role in creating the melody. This metaphor is not new — but nor is it true. Working in perfect harmony is not what makes a team great. It is actually productive disharmony that leaders should seek. As with the yin and yang of so many things in life, not all harmony is good, and not all disharmony is bad. While many of us aspire to create a positive and productive team culture and environment, striving to maintain congeniality at the expense of exploration and exploiting differences only serves to undercut the value of being a team with diverse views. When team members ‘go along to get along,’ that’s when a team experiences negative harmony — and it almost always translates into poor results. My colleagues and I define a high performing team as one that sets free the collective genius of its members to create something extraordinary together — and that genius consists of the unique contributions that each team member can bring to the mix. Sometimes the mixing of individual contributions can feel messy, but that discomfort is necessary for a team to experience positive disharmony. Contrasting views and spirited debate make a team stronger, even while discord is part of the experience. The critical requirement for achieving good disharmony is alignment. Teamwork is not a time for ‘agreeing to disagree’. Instead, high-performing teams work through areas 118 / Rotman Management Fall 2021
of disagreement in the context of their alignment with an overall direction, purpose and strategy. When teams strive to think strategically together, the surest path to success is to explore diverse perspectives and scenarios. This can feel uncomfortable to those who fail to distinguish between contrasting perspectives and interpersonal conflict. Innovation thrives on positive disharmony. Teams that innovate respect the tension of competing viewpoints and recognize their necessity for creating breakthroughs. Our past research on the qualities of successful innovation leaders (“So, You Think You Can Innovate,” Rotman Management, Fall 2016) and recent research and consulting with senior leadership teams show that preserving harmony at the expense of positive disharmony is a mistake. Here’s a disguised example from a recent client interaction. Harvey Trent led a major division of MarconiSys, a global software company. He and his leadership team struggled to steer their division to a productive growth path. The team members were focused on their individual unit results, rather than division success. They didn’t discuss or even collectively acknowledge troubling information and rarely problem-solved together. In a survey, team members and their direct reports said the leadership team acted as congenial individuals, but didn’t really function as a team. Using a 360-degree assessment (the Bates Leadership Team Performance Index), we found that the team members’ highest-rated qualities were their commitment to the
All too often, teams stifle disharmony to preserve the appearance of harmony.
team, their mutual trust and a shared sense of belonging. On the other hand, their lowest-rated qualities were their candour with each other, their courage and willingness to speak up and their ability to make difficult decisions. While they held positive views of one another, they avoided surfacing areas of disagreement, even if these differences might have been critical to their success. Shortly after we collected this data, Harvey was reassigned and the division and remaining leadership team members were consolidated into another division. Our experience with this client shows that all too often, teams stifle disharmony to preserve the appearance of harmony. Team members avoid raising issues because they want to be seen ‘good team players’. The result? What appears on the surface to be a psychologically safe environment actually isn’t, because team members cannot engage in constructive conflict. Were they truly as mutually supportive as they professed to be, they could rely on that connection to create a safe environment for constructive debate and decision-making. Their reported trust in each other would have formed a solid foundation on which to work through differences and hammer out better outcomes. Instead, this team — like so many others—treated their trust as fragile and avoided any stressors to it for fear of doing damage to team spirit. Four Elements of Highly Effective Teams
In our research drawing from hundreds of team assessment responses, we found that four factors distinguish effective teams. The first two are external factors: how the team demonstrates awareness of the needs and interests of its stakeholders, and whether the team makes decisions based on the best interests of the enterprise or only the interests of the team. The other two factors are internal. The first is whether or not the team has what Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson defines as ‘psychological safety,’ which includes the qualities of commitment, trust and belonging noted in the MarconiSys example. Teams skilled in these
qualities are able to rely on each other to produce high quality work, behave ethically, avoid hidden agendas and not just accept each other’s differences, but value those differences. The second internal factor is whether the team can engage in constructive conflict and navigate differences, which includes qualities like candour, courage and decision-making prowess. Team members skilled in these qualities are able to say what they really think — even to those with more power or deeply held contrarian views. They can also give and receive feedback, solve problems efficiently, and stick to decisions without endlessly revisiting them. In addition to measuring perceptions of these qualities by team members and others who interacted with the team, we also studied the perceived productivity of the team and its relation to team effectiveness, and we discovered a powerful relationship: If raters assessed the team as being at least ‘average’ in internally-focused factors of psychological safety and constructive conflict, there was an 83 per cent likelihood that they rated the team as effective. If the team rating on the internal factors reached the top quartile, the likelihood of the team being rated as ‘effective’ increased to 94 per cent. And, if the team rating was in the top quartile for the internal factors of psychological safety and constructive conflict and also for the external factors of stakeholder awareness and enterprise-based decision making, the effectiveness rating moved up to 96 per cent. The bottom line is this: Operating with internal and external alignment is a very strong predictor of team effectiveness. Absent constructive conflict, teams fall prey to serious problems. My colleagues and I have seen three in particular emerge time and time again. PROBLEM 1: LESS INNOVATION. Innovation is creativity put to productive use. The distinction between innovation and creativity is one of economic usefulness, in the broadest sense of the word ‘economic’. Entre- or intrapreneurs differ from artists in being able to apply what they’ve created to create more than aesthetic value. Creativity entails a break with what has been previously accepted, and as a result, rotmanmagazine.ca / 119
The best-performing teams are always tough on ideas, but kind to people.
innovation inherently demands a departure from the status quo. As indicated, that can feel uncomfortable or wrong to members of a team who are deeply invested in ‘what has been.’ When innovation is the goal, positive disharmony is the required path. RECOMMENDATION: Teach your team how to swim upstream. The spark of innovation can only happen when differing ideas come together to create friction, and intentionally seeking out different viewpoints to contrast with the status quo accelerates that process. Lateral-thinking exercises are useful because they help surface other perspectives. The simplest way to get started is to get people to go against the flow of conventional wisdom, to swim upstream and explore the opposite set of assumptions or perspectives and search for the elements of truth in that point of view. One of the team qualities assessed in the team-performance index we used in the MarconiSys example is ‘both/and thinking’ — a team’s ability to hold contrasting views and benefit from the truth within each, to create win-win outcomes without making unnecessary and limiting either/or choices. PROBLEM 2: GROUPTHINK. One of the casualties of not having enough positive disharmony is the loss of independent thought. Team members become attuned to faint early signs of an emerging sentiment and quickly line up behind it so they can be seen as good team players. Unfortunately, those early faint signals may be nothing more than someone sending up a trial balloon, or some half-formed musing. Regardless, once a consensus begins to form, voicing a contrasting perspective becomes increasingly daunting. RECOMMENDATION: Before resigning your team to an absence of contrasting viewpoints, consider proactively designating a Devil’s Advocate for your next discussion. This practice dates back hundreds of years to a practice at the Vatican of designating an individual to draw up a list of arguments against beatification or canonization. Similarly, your team’s Devil’s Advocate can give voice to opposing and diverse 120 / Rotman Management Fall 2021
viewpoints — either their own or those solicited from others on the team — to ensure ideas get challenged and the team avoids groupthink. Pro tip: Make the role of playing the Devil’s Advocate a rotating responsibility, so everyone gets practice in this role and no one gets saddled with the reputation of being reflexively contrarian. PROBLEM 3: LIMITED INFORMATION ACCESS. Team members are often reluctant to present disappointing results or negative information. Sometimes the concern is that someone will ‘shoot the messenger’ or that a difficult conversation will ensue. As a result, the team makes decisions with inadequate or incomplete information, with adverse consequences. RECOMMENDATION: Practice team introspection to discover whether team members believe they might not be getting the full picture or the quality or quantity of information they need. It’s also important for these team members to consider how they may be contributing to the problem. Ask and discuss how team members may be discouraging others from sharing what they know in a timely or useful manner. Better yet, obtain individual, anonymous and confidential 360-degree feedback about how open team members are to tough news or why some people might be reluctant to say what’s really going on.
In closing
The healthiest and best-performing teams are always tough on ideas, but kind to people. In the end, teams will get better at achieving positive disharmony in the same way as that old punchline to the question about ‘how to get to Carnegie Hall’: practice, practice, practice.
Andrew Atkins is Vice President and Practice Leader at BTS, a global
professional services firm based in Stockholm, Sweden, that focuses on the human side of strategy.
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