Is Your Team Too Quiet? How to Encourage Disagreement

Brief 

If your office is too harmonious, that could be a sign of conformity which means your team may be afraid to disagree with the status quo or offer their new ideas, writes Liz Kislik. “Disharmony can actually be fruitful: not only can we learn from disagreements but sometimes they even offer overlooked opportunity,” Kislik writes.

Insight

In our workplace culture, most of us have been trained—or at least prefer—to believe that if we don’t hear any disagreement, there probably isn’t any.

And we think that’s a good thing! Most of us tend to prefer harmonious rather than acrimonious behavior, and given that in our current social polarization, circumstances constantly arise in which people very forcefully disagree, it’s a relief when we manage to avoid the anger and indignation these disagreements can trigger.

The problem is that we can misperceive quiet as harmony.

Of course we all need some harmony: when people don’t like each other or can’t work together, then lack of progress and unnecessary turnover can result.

But it’s short-sighted to require—or even expect—consensus or harmony. What looks calm and smooth on the surface sometimes hides bitterness or resentment underneath. And disharmony can actually be fruitful: not only can we learn from disagreements but sometimes they even offer overlooked opportunity.

When Harmony Doesn’t Ring True

Too much apparent harmony—or norms that prize consensus over collaboration—suggests that there’s not enough truth being shared. Instead, you might notice various organizational workarounds: holding a meeting before a scheduled meeting to discuss how difficult the actual meeting will be; people texting or chatting to each other during a meeting about how it’s just like every other failed meeting; and debriefing and complaining after the meeting, out in the hall, someone’s office, or even the parking lot.