Sean Glaze explains how leaders can build better teams by inviting disagreement in meetings. He suggests treating silence as dissent and assigning someone to deliberately poke holes in proposals, creating psychological safety and more productive discussions.
So how do you get your team meetings to include more disagreements and conflict? Well, as a young leader, you may think that that's not healthy, and certainly disrespect is unhealthy, but the best teams, the most exceptional cultures, include disagreement and have healthy conflict, and that helps the team be more productive than otherwise they would be when people are biting their tongues because they don't feel safe to share dissenting opinions. And there's two ways that you can make your team meetings more effective by inviting disagreement. The first way is to make sure that you set a new paradigm for every meeting and explain to your team that silence is dissent instead of consent. And if you haven't heard from them, you're going to assume that they disagree, and you're going to invite them to share their perspective to make sure that everybody's had a chance to share their opinion. Another way you can do that is to have one person that you designate in every meeting as the Negative Nancy, as the person that shares ideas that would follow follow the "but" type of response, and when somebody shares an idea, their job is to try and poke holes in that balloon because they have been designated as that person for that particular meeting. Establishing that level of safety where people feel okay to risk sharing their opinion is a huge part of building an exceptional team culture. I'm Sean Glaze. That's what effective leaders do.
