November 17, 2020 Steve Freishtat Business
In prior articles, I shared my experience when providing for a qualified individuality that allowed emerging self-organization within my company. That individuality (within boundaries) resulted in more authenticity – and this authenticity and the resultant engagement, morale, and creativity served the company well. An effect of more individuality within an organization is emerging conflict. A process of conflict emergence and conflict resolution, repeating itself, is essential to self-organization and the path to authenticity. In this regard, I viewed conflict emergence and resolution as consistent with a broader theme of integration – which is also a pathway to authenticity and general health – whether that health is emotional or organizational.
In my later years of stewardship, the organization’s strength and excellent leadership team gave me the luxury of time and objectivity. I used the time to work on both self and organizational improvement. I tried to self-improve by reading more and by being more deliberate in my selection of reading materials. I was introduced to the writings of Dr. Dan Siegel, adolescent and family psychiatrist and the Executive Director of the ‘Mindsight Institute’ at UCLA. Dr. Siegel suggested a model for emotional health that incorporated the concept of repeated and ongoing ‘differentiation’ and ‘linking.’ In this model, as we effectively integrate the components of the mind or the functional centers of the brain through repeatedly differentiating and then linking, we move toward better emotional health by centering on a continuum between chaos and rigidity.
When I read the concept, it seemed intuitive that there could be a broader application of the principle. And I thought about conflict emergence and conflict resolution within an organization in the same way. That a repeated cycle of integration through resolution of emerging conflict could contribute to moving an organization toward organizational health. This would occur in a way that is similar to how a repeated process of integration through differentiation and linking moves an individual toward emotional health. However, I recognized an essential distinction in objectives between the individual and the organization. Contentedness is an objective for the individual model and perhaps optimizes in the center between rigidity and chaos. Dynamism is an objective for the organizational model and maybe best exists at the ‘edge of chaos.’[1] It is from the edge of chaos that conflict emanates. With order or contentedness, we lose the opportunity for conflict.
As I thought more about this, two things were apparent: First, if we foster chaos through the individuality that I believe is essential, we will have more conflict in our organizations. Second, there is a difference between healthy and unhealthy conflict, and moving an organization toward chaos only pays dividends if the conflict it produces is ‘healthy conflict.’ I started thinking about the differences between healthy and unhealthy conflict in our organizations.
Thinking positively of Patrick Lencioni and ‘The Table Group,’ and having had a transformative experience with them in my company, I revisited his writings on conflict. Lencioni points out that healthy conflict requires ‘trust’ and ‘commonality of purpose.’ Individuals in an organization, and especially on a leadership team, must trust each other. In the Lencioni model, we build trust through transparency and vulnerability exercises and a sharing and understanding of personality assessments. There is a specific plan and prescription for meetings – and they are critical. When the meeting prescription is followed, meetings facilitate ongoing discovery of higher purpose, and active discovery of purpose improves their effectiveness. A commonality of purpose lends itself to conflict resolution. This commonality of purpose happens through a clear understanding and cascading communication of the organization’s ‘higher purpose’ (it’s reason for existing) and its associated values. When individuals trust each other, and at the same time, are linked by this commonality of purpose and shared values, conflicts are resolved without hard feelings and are sans-hangover. Our experience was that this combination of trust and linking to purpose and values lent itself to efficient resolution of a current conflict, and cleared the path to an arising of the next one. And with each new cycle of conflict and its resolution, the company self-organized and moved forward, fulfilling its potential and improving its organizational health.
The process of fostering and resolving conflict is only progressive if the conflict is ‘healthy conflict.’ With conflict as applied to the integration model, the differentiating feature is its emergence, and the linking element is its resolution. The word that Dr. Siegel uses to describe the benefit of integration in an individual is “harmony.” He states that “integration allows harmony to emerge.” It seems that this is what happens with repeated conflict emergence and resolution, in an organization or on a leadership team. The team is increasingly harmonious in their perspective and pursuit of – and their compliance with – purpose and values. Rather than the word ‘harmony,’ we used the word ‘alignment.’ We learned that healthy conflict, by nature, lends itself to resolution. Unhealthy conflict is mostly unresolvable. Resolvability may define the type of conflict as much as it is its outcome. The un-resolvability of unhealthy conflict would preclude harmony and alignment.
The pursuit of harmony and alignment may incorrectly appear contradictory to the desired emanation of conflict through individuality and a move toward chaos. It is essential to recognize that this prescription is a quest for alignment with organizational purpose and values and not a quashing of individuality. The alignment we experienced was a response to, rather than a preclusion of the chaos that arises from individuality. It ‘responsively’ motivated the conversion of conflict from unhealthy to healthy, and in doing so, enabled individuality by checking against the risk of individualism. Healthy conflict emanates from and enables individuality. Unhealthy conflict does the same for individualism.
In addition to the distinction between ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy conflict,’ there is an essential distinction between ‘healthy conflict’ and ‘no conflict’ or minimizing conflict within the organization. I sometimes hear business leaders proudly boast of having ‘no conflict’ or minimizing conflict in their organizations or on their leadership teams – thinking this is a measure of organizational health. I suspect these would be mostly rules-based, orderly organizations that quash individuality, and in doing so, preclude creativity and engagement. They would be primarily stagnant. This ‘non-conflict’ or minimal conflict is very different than healthy conflict that arises from an encouragement of individuality, checked within a culture of values and purpose, instead of rules and instruction. Organizational leaders should be encouraging conflict, not discouraging it – with the caveat that the cultural infrastructure is in place for this conflict to be healthy. The encouragement of conflict arises from the instigation of individuality and the resulting move toward chaos. The conversion to ‘healthy’ stems from the clear communication of organizational purpose and values, combined with individual humility and trust.
The distinction between ‘healthy conflict’ and ‘unhealthy conflict’ is the presence of trust, purpose, and values. Conflict that is not anchored to an organization’s higher purpose and shared values and is instead rooted in ‘self-gain’ or ‘self-service’ is ‘unhealthy conflict.’ Here, we can see that individual ‘ego’ is problematic and an obstacle to healthy conflict. If healthy conflict is essential to a dynamic and healthy organization, and ego is problematic for healthy conflict, then ego is inappropriate for a vibrant and healthy organization. Moving a team or team members from ego to humility is necessary to transition conflict from unhealthy to healthy. Ryan Holiday, in his book, ‘The Ego is the Enemy,’ states, “When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes – but rock-hard humility and confidence… It’s the difference between potent and poisonous.” This quote sounds like the authenticity that is necessary for healthy conflict. This authenticity is an outgrowth of individuality. Ego is perhaps a difference between individuality and individualism.
Replacing ego with humility at the individual level was essential to replacing unhealthy conflict with healthy conflict in our organization. Linking to higher purpose and organizational values requires self-subordination, which requires humility. Ego should not be mistaken for self-confidence, and humility should not be confused with its lessening. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
If the journey toward healthy conflict among team members requires a shift from ego to humility, there would be two paths to achieve this. One would be to have a right-of-passage that requires team members to be relatively devoid of ego. The other is to have institutional programs that dissuade ego and encourage humility. As team members’ ability to work well together is more important than individual talent, humility should transcend talent, in general terms. We found that choosing team members who were humble enough to subordinate themselves to the organization’s higher purpose and values was essential. At the same time, institutional programs that fostered a breaking of ego and nurtured humility were also necessary to move from unhealthy to healthy conflict.
Ego is ‘self-directed’ and an obstacle for the individual to attach to a higher purpose, while trust is ‘other-directed,’ and its absence is an obstacle to team members working together toward realizing or fulfilling a higher purpose. Trust and humility are not unrelated, as the individuals on a team need to trust each other’s motives, and that these motives are not ego-based or self-directed. But building trust in our organization required more than this. Building trust required not only the humility that was necessary for a collective attachment to the organization’s purpose – but also the ability to recognize this attachment in each other and to understand behavioral differences – and how these differences manifested themselves in the attachment to ‘purpose.’ Transparency and vulnerability were useful in building trust. As transparency and vulnerability inwardly humble – and outwardly build trust between team members, there is a receding of the obstacles to a collective benevolence to a higher purpose and its associated values.
By viewing ‘healthy conflict’ as being dependent on personal humility, mutual trust, and collective benevolence to purpose and values, and viewing ‘unhealthy conflict’ as being a product of ego, mistrust, and self-service, we were able to take steps to transform culture by creating the best opportunity for incompliant or antipathetic individuals to progress.
Closing
When we improved our organizations’ dynamism through the encouragement of individuality, we also cultivated conflict. As this dynamism is essential, it is equally vital that conflict is of the ‘healthy’ variety. The collective embracing of purpose and values necessary to mitigate the chaos resulting from individuality is wholly dependent on this transitioning from unhealthy to healthy conflict. The humility and trust that are endemic to healthy conflict enabled this embracing of purpose and values. Inward humility lends itself to outward trust. Humility allows an ‘individual’ benevolence to a higher purpose and its corresponding values. Trust allows this same benevolence to manifest ‘collectively.’ Simultaneously, effective communication of higher purpose (and corresponding values) fosters humility and trust. The cyclical interplay between humility and trust, and linking to higher purpose and values, was our foundation for healthy conflict.
[1] Danah Zohar, The Quantum Leader
