Enabling Constructive Debates in Teams
Good decision-making in teams requires diversity of ideas and possible action choices. As a team leader, you have to enable the team to consciously put in the effort to debate those ideas to understand the implications of the choices on the table. A good debate is where issues are defined and constructively challenged and where alternative paths are generated.
Essential to this process are
- Consideration and deliberation on both majority and minority views
- Fostering reasonable disagreements about the task at hand while avoiding disagreements as personal attacks.
In my research, I found that teams made better decisions and showed higher performance when there was a single contrarian (“devil’s advocate”) present. The research showed that an ideal condition for a healthy debate was created when divergent ideas were presented in a non-confrontational way, and members did not see differing opinions as conflict.
Some ways to avoid emotional escalation and prevent disagreements in meetings from turning into personal conflicts:
- Create openness to feedback by asking the team member if they are looking for feedback and willing to hear a contrarian view. Once people publicly affirm their openness, they are often more likely to listen to alternative ideas and utilize feedback.
- Frame disagreements as questions – this can signal openness to be challenged and is a more nuanced way to disagree with the majority decision.
- Another way is for a team member to ask if his/her interpretations or understanding of the other’s view is accurate and, if not, what is missing. This often helps to reduce the emotional escalation of conflicts that emerge from misaligned assumptions.