Two Signs Your Team Isn't Engaging in Healthy Conflict
Harmony feels good. Artificial harmony, on the other hand, is one of the clearest signs something is wrong.
It’s easy to conflate “everyone getting along” with team functionality. Meetings feel smooth, consensus is easy, and decisions are moving fast. It seems healthy. But, looks can be deceiving.
Put different people with different backgrounds, different personality types, and different perspectives in a room, and you should drum up some friction. When you don’t, when there’s agreement at all times, that's usually not genuine harmony. It’s artificial. Most of the time, it indicates that people don’t feel safe enough to push back.
The healthiest, fastest-moving organizations operate as an idea meritocracy. They want the best idea to win, regardless of who it came from. That only happens when people are willing to speak up. When they’re not, you get groupthink. The room just acquiesces to whoever has the most seniority or the loudest voice, and the best idea rarely makes it to the top.
Patrick Lencioni writes about this well in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: healthy conflict, centered around debating ideas rather than debating each other, is one of the foundations on which an effective team is built.
So, how do you know if your team actually has it?
Sign One: The Meeting After the Meeting
You’ve sat through a meeting. It ends. Five minutes later, your phone rings. Or, you find that one person on the team you trust most, and that’s where the real conversation happens.
This is an incredibly common pattern in organizations, and it’s a direct signal of low trust. You trust the person you called, but you didn’t trust the room.
(Not to mention, it’s inefficient.) If that perspective had been shared in the meeting, everyone could have worked off the same information and had an honest, real-time debate. Instead, those handful of side conversations that happened after the fact suck up time and energy and deepen fractures amongst the group.
Sign Two: How Boring Your Meetings Are
If you walk out of meetings and they are consistently flat, nothing is debated, and if nobody pushes on anything or challenges suggestions, that’s not alignment. That’s a sign nobody felt free to disagree.
And, important to note, conflict doesn’t mean brawling. It should feel more akin to sparring. Somebody shares a take, someone else weighs in, people ask real questions, and engage with each other’s thinking. When decisions actually matter, that exchange should be energizing, not tense.
I was in a team practice this week, and someone described their team’s meetings as entertaining. That’s exactly it. That back and forth, and the absence of it, is one of the best indicators you have of whether ideological conflict is happening.
So What Do You Do About It
My personal favorite lever here is simple: flip the script on what conflict means to your team.
People often stay quiet for one of two reasons. They don’t want to be a burden, or they don’t trust they’ll actually be heard. The fix starts with inviting the pushback directly and making it lightweight rather than heavy.
A few questions that work well:
Who can poke a hole in this?
What are two ways this might not be as easy to execute as we think?
If you had to play devil’s advocate against this idea, what would you say?
These questions change what it means to have a contradictory perspective.
Before being asked a question like this, playing devil’s advocate may have felt unwelcome. Now, sharing that same perspective actually becomes a favor. It’s exactly what the team is asking for.
And the moment people start leaning in is when your job becomes the most important. As an Elevater, you have to be genuinely receptive to their positions. Remember, their perspective is a gift. Show gratitude.
How we show up in those moments is one crucial element that ultimately develops trust and safety.
