Why the Best Teams Fight (And How It Makes Them Stronger)

Fight for performance, not to prove a point. This is something that my team adopted with Built to Lead, that we had built enough trust amongst each other that we could fight, debate about everything that we were up against and challenged with as a company and as a team, and we could fight, and then we can align with whatever decision we made and then move forward. So I wanted to create a safe environment where people could trust that they weren't going to get fired if they spoke their mind. They were free to be themselves and free to say what they wanted to say. So we opened up those discussions and let people fight as long as they weren't fighting to prove their point. Because we didn't care who was right and who was wrong. We cared about performance, and we wanted to create a culture of high performers. And the only way to do that is to allow other people outside of the leader or the person at the top to be the one who's making all the decisions and the one who is passionately going after things that they believe in. And when I opened that up and really started to build that type of flow within our practices in our meetings, I realized really quickly that a lot more people have had that fight in them. And by not letting it get out, you stifle them and you have them walking away, shaking their head and saying things like, he just doesn't understand. He has no clue. And the truth is that if you lead anything, you don't have a clue. You're the last to be told everything. You are lied to more than anyone and everyone else around you knows more and has more information and has access to everything that you don't have access to. And if you don't have that trust and you instill fear instead of creating a safe environment, well, then you lose out on so many big wins that could happen if you just let your guard down and let people be themselves and encourage them to speak their mind and to fight for performance and to call it out when people are proven a point and make sure that you don't model the way trying to always be right. And again, ironically, leadership is a contradiction. When you can admit you're wrong and you can let people give their best and fight for what they believe in and then recognize when they're right and you're wrong and then use what they've come up with, what they shared. Boy, there is. There is no better way to build trust than to let people not only be themselves, but then carry through and follow through with whatever solution, whatever strategy and whatever they're working on. You know, to solve problems so that you're not doing everything and that you don't feel like you have to solve all the problems in your on your team. So fight for performance. Learn how to fight with grace. And understand that every person that you have on your team, you have to know them in order to be able to fight with them. And someone that's been with you for a long time, you can fight with hard. And somebody brand new, not so much. And so you just have to. You have to have some emotional intelligence to understand who you're with when you're fighting.