If you and your colleagues “get on well”, with no strong emotions or disagreement, then you have a bad relationship, not a good one!
A CFO I met this week described his peers as the “nicest group of people”—but went on to detail terrible results, with tech unable to deliver on customer commitments and salespeople left dangling, unable to close big deals. There is a connection between these two observations! A low-conflict relationship in the workplace is one that isn’t working, likely hiding low trust and misalignment behind a “nice” façade. With another client this past week, I worked for weeks to bring conflict between the CTO and the CEO into the open, and when we did, nobody felt great but we got immediate progress. What “good” relationship do you have—with the Head of Product, say, or a tech lead, or the VP for customer service—that isn’t really working? How could you create productive conflict there, today?
This first appeared in my weekly Squirrel Squadron email, which goes out every Monday, and was originally posted on 25 April 2022. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/