Why More Conflict Among Your Team Will Improve Performance

Most business leaders are conflict avoiders when to comes to their staff. This has become worse in recent years with a lot of anger and fear driven conflict in the world.

This avoidance can hurt a company because without communicating different points of view, growth can be stopped. How do you encourage people to have critical conversations and healthy conflict? This is even more difficult today with so many topics in the news that people have differences in opinion without instigating toxic tendencies.

On The Small Business Radio Show, I talk with Gabe Karp about his successful strategies for healthy conflict. He spent the first ten years of his career as a trial lawyer. Gabe later joined a small technology startup as one of the key executives who grew ePrize (now Merkle) into one of the top digital promotions companies in the world. He then entered the world of venture capital and currently sits on the boards of several companies in the Detroit Venture Partners and Lightbank portfolios. Gabe has negotiated business and finance deals in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and frequently speaks on embracing healthy conflict.

He has a new book out called “Don’t Get Mad at Penguins”.

We discussed:

• How do you encourage people to have critical conversations without instigating toxic tendencies?
• How toxicity seems to grow within social media. How can we avoid social media comments that are considered toxic?
• How do you encourage people to have critical conversations especially today with so many topics in the news that people have differences in opinion without instigating toxic tendencies?
• Why too many leaders think that the key to better performance and ‘synergy’ is reducing conflict, when the truth is that many teams would benefit from more conflict on a daily basis.
• What does healthy conflict look like, how do you cultivate it, and how can it lead to breathtaking and sustainable results?

Listen to the entire interview on The Small Business Radio Show.

Image: gabekarp

This article, "Why More Conflict Among Your Team Will Improve Performance" was first published on Small Business Trends