The problem with polite leadership

Executive teams often stay in passive peace, avoiding dissent because they value respect and fear stepping out of their lane will seem unhelpful or slow progress down.

Why debate matters

Research shows task conflict among senior leaders, debate over ideas and decisions, improves firm performance, particularly early in a team's life. Teams that don't debate risk missing the best path forward.

Rising stakes, rising reluctance

Rapid change is raising the stakes of executive-team decisions even as uncertainty, job insecurity, and pressure to move quickly make leaders more reluctant to challenge one another.

A private equity case study

After a major acquisition, a private equity-backed company's newly combined executive team stayed conspicuously polite.

Why they held back

Interviews revealed that leaders respected their new colleagues but didn't yet trust them enough to risk overstepping, even though they needed to debate how best to integrate the businesses and realize the value of the…

Changing the dynamic

Facilitated sessions helped the team focus on what they needed to achieve together. They reshaped meeting agendas, worked on how they related to each other, and coached the CEO to encourage more candid debate.

The result

As members challenged one another more openly, they found new opportunities for collaboration and took a more integrated approach to leading the business.

Four practices for productive conflict

CEOs can build teams that embrace productive conflict by establishing executive team purpose together, replacing update meetings with question meetings, fast-tracking interpersonal trust, and normalizing direct peer feedback.

Establish shared purpose first

Begin by debating and agreeing why the executive team exists before establishing ground rules. This explicit purpose makes it easier to embrace disagreement because it reminds leaders what they're ultimately trying to achieve together.

Seven executive team purposes

Purposes defined across client teams include collaboratively defining strategy and priorities, shaping culture and values, creating vision and leading change, managing stakeholder expectations, identifying market opportunities, succession planning, and rapid centralized decision-making in crisis.

A UK tech firm finds unity

A UK-headquartered tech firm with three new executive team members clarified their purpose as establishing and leading a new strategic change initiative.

Replace updates with questions

Leadership team meetings should focus on debating difficult questions rather than operational updates about siloed activities. Updates can be shared asynchronously. Shape agendas around questions and assign owners to invite critical thinking and challenge.

Questions that encourage dissent

Ask: What are different ways of seeing this?What's the challenge we're trying to address?What are our blind spots?Where are cross-functional opportunities?In what ways might this not be the right direction?Are we leading with integrity?

An energy company transforms meetings

An energy company's monthly meeting spent half a day on updates with little meaningful discussion. After a workshop, they reduced prereading, began with challenges and questions, and found lively debate, systemic thinking, and meaningful collaboration.

Build interpersonal trust

Productive conflict requires interpersonal trust: confidence in one another's intentions and willingness to be honest, direct, and vulnerable. Use team profiling to help members understand how they differ and interpret each other's behavior more accurately.

Address unspoken tensions directly

When team members don't address interpersonal frustrations directly, tension brews under the surface and comes out sideways.

Reframe feedback as kindness

Reframe the team's cultural goal as being kind rather than nice.A useful mantra is clear is kind, which normalizes tough feedback.

“clear is kind”

Norms for peer feedback

Those giving feedback should share their intention and how it relates to team purpose, state clearly the impact the behavior has had, and be curious and open to what they themselves could do differently.

Culture cascades through the organization

When CEOs create and normalize productive conflict in their senior teams, leaders throughout the organization begin to apply these principles within their own teams, yielding better results at every level.