Talking about your disagreements why is it important?

Did you say disagreements are annoying?

    Recently, a senior leader of a big humanitarian organization lamented that conflicts at the workplace were mainly due to difficult personalities and that they were “annoying and not very interesting” for a leader in his position; Nevertheless, he shared also that they were impacting the good functioning and efficacity of the organization.

If this leader had little awareness of the value of understanding roots, dynamics, types and mechanisms of the conflicts in his organization, he rightly pointed some of the impacts those can have on it.

Part of the problem of the organizations, teams, units, managers, employees, is that they have not been taught how to productively manage conflicts and tensions at the workplace. Small or bigger conflicts and disagreements are too often ignored and yet have long term implications.

There are seen as not only “annoying” such as this senior leader, but moreover as a possible threat to the well-functioning of the organization.  

If escalation of conflicts can definitely become a threat to the well-functioning of an organization, what this leader did not capture was that by opening a healthy dialogue and shaping an organizational culture around expressing and understanding the tensions & disagreements at an early stage fully honors and promotes the employees as the organization. Moreover, it helps building the essential psychological safety where employees and management can have a safe space to share their different perspectives and opinion on how to practice their tasks and jobs in order to feel they can be agents of change.

So now, try looking at the mountain with a different angle and maybe you will see something different…