118: Healthy and Unhealthy Debate in Your Company - How to Know the Difference

So, are your teams having unhealthy debate or healthy conversations in your organization? In this episode, we find out the difference. Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Reality Based Leadership Podcast. I'm Alex Dorr, CEO at Reality Based Leadership, and on this podcast we teach you how to lead without drama, Build alignment in your teams and call those you lead to greatness. And in this episode, I'm so excited to dive into a topic that came up recently on a client call, and it was all about maybe having a conversation on what is healthy, good debate and dialogue in meetings, in conversations when we're trying to wrestle through ideas, and what is more of an unhealthy dynamic that might be shining through. And this all came from an organization that we're looking at doing some leadership development in, that has a ton of innovation, maybe some of the most innovation that I've seen. They are very fast-moving, they are founder-led, they have a lot of moments where they love to just slam ideas together, get experts in the room, and really not fight it out, but go back and forth on what will be best for their customers, what will be best for these designs, what will be best for their products and how they're innovating. But in that, they've noticed at times, depending on Some of the past dynamics of the relationship or when pressure is really high, sometimes the debate seems to get to an unhealthy area or it goes a little over the top or out of hand. And so on the call, they said maybe part of the session, it might be good from a reality-based leadership perspective to talk about what is the difference between healthy, solid debate and, you know, holding the center while good ideas get hashed out versus what could be tipping into some unhealthy and not so productive— Debates. Conversations. And so, as I was thinking through that past the call, walking with it a bit, I thought for the podcast, I just put out my initial ideas that came to me. And I came up with 5 ways to tell in your organization if we're having good debate, good conversation, where ideas have the ability to thrive and the type of civil dialogue that can really be helpful to get to the best idea, or if you're starting to have what I would call some drama-filled debate. Coming through the creeks here. And so, with that, let's dive into the first one. So, what always comes to me first when it comes to healthy debate is really around decisions. And one of the most common ones is when people are really debating the what or a strategy or a decision when the real focus from their space or their role in the organization should be debating on how to get there. the best ideas, given the risks or the circumstances, to succeed in spite of those circumstances, or to use their expertise and their experience and their technical skills to get us there, given the risks they're concerned about? So, really, to shorten that, it is, are we debating the what we're doing, the kind of the highest-level decision, the strategy, or are we having a good debate on the how to best get there? And it really is that simple. And what happens too often is maybe in years previous, someone would be called in to be what I would call more of a consultant. Like, given this idea, you know, what are the best ways to get there? I want your consulting to lay out the best ways to get towards that goal and serve up the options and some of your perspectives, and then we'll decide from there. Or maybe even some groups muddied the waters, and when someone was asked to be a consultant and to set up some ideas, They got to step in a little bit as decision maker and get to consensus, so they're used to that. And then now, for whatever reason or whatever the situation is, they're not really asked to decide, or they're maybe not pulled in to consult in that way. So now they're frustrated about it, and so then they use that frustration to keep trying to fight for input and debate on the what. Like, why are we even doing this? Or why wasn't I consulted? Or you know. What the heck does this have to do with our strategy? When they're no longer that decision maker. And so, a big, I guess, initial spot I see a lot of this unhealthy debate happening is when you can tell people are playing the wrong role for what the situation merits. And I've been saying in every single venue I can, podcast I can, conversation I'm in, you will not find more suffering than someone that's playing the wrong role for what the situation merits at work. And again, real quick, what I mean by that is there's 3 main roles that I've noticed in my life and with clients I work with is there's decision makers that are about the top 1% of an organization. They have the ability to say yes and/or no to overall what or strategy, and they really set that strategy, and they can start and stop things pretty quickly. Sometimes it's a small group, sometimes in smaller companies it is like CEO, you know, the decision maker. And then if you're not that, you might be asked to be that role of consultant. And consultants don't get to tell people what to do. They let people know what they could do given their goals and where they want to get to, and then the cost-benefit with each approach. And the, you know, then they wait. And the moment a decision's made, they can't say, oh, well, I kind of like number 3, and I was leaning you that way, and you went with 1, so that's— You know, why'd you ask to consult me when you didn't go with what I think was best? See, now they're out of their role. And then the third role is just a good person to be informed of an organizational decision. And you can imagine, if you've ever been there, when you're just informed of a decision and you're really struggling to accept that, especially when it's not illegal, immoral, unethical, it's just a decision that was either made because of external factors or there's a new regulation or maybe there's just a quick pivot we have to make, and I'm struggling to accept that role of, okay, not my favorite, but I see where you're going, so I'm in, and I'm going to use my expertise to keep this least disruptive to our business. This is all beautiful debate about how to make it least disruptive to the business, and you're part of the business. But if I'm debating on, well, why didn't I get pulled in to consult, and why didn't I get to be a part of that decision, and why don't they ask the people closest to the work? This is probably going to start to get really unhealthy really quickly for me, the individual fighting for the wrong role, and then eventually for the whole organization who has to somehow tell me like, that's not your role. Or in the worst cases, they keep people believing they have a role about a consultant or a decision maker that they don't really have, and that's awkward as well. And so the first place is really noticing when those roles are off. And so that's what I wanted to start with here, the first thing that came to mind. Obviously, if decisions are illegal, immoral, unethical, and you see it, like, put a flag on the field. Like, what are we doing here? Don't you know that that's just, like, unsafe? That's not what I'm talking about for some of this unhealthy debate. Similar to that is whether we are debating something pre-decision or pre-kind of baked strategy or post-decision. Meaning, like, strategy set, we got to now move forward. This is where it can get really unhealthy. When we need as an organization to move into execution and we need your, again, best ideas to make it work given the risks and the circumstances. So, we need you to really lean in and try and figure it out with us and be resilient. But you're still back debating, you know, why we're even doing this in the first place. Or back to those roles again. And so, having that radar of, are we stuck in a pre-decision fight when it's already been decided? That's so common right now, is people fighting about the first part, like acting as if it's pre-decision, when the organization's saying, we have to have this executed, we need to be moving. And so that can be a really, really challenging piece. And so one of my favorite tools, and I'll link this in the podcast notes, is a client used this so well that I was working with called negative brainstorming. And for those of you that have been around Reality-Based Leadership for a long time, this is probably one of our top 4 tools. It's one of my favorite tools that's in my new book, How We Could, that's coming in September. And I give a bunch of case studies on how to use this tool of negative brainstorming. But if you're using it pre-decision, good healthy debate, I would say, involves that tool. And think of this tool as doing a negative impact brainstorm On what could happen if we tried that given strategy. And so, what I like to do if it's pre-decision, we're deciding if we want to do this or not, is you get some people that really know about the different parts of the business or the situation, stakeholders in the room, and you say, if we were to do a strategy like this, this particular strategy, and explain it as best you can, what could go wrong? Like a year from now, 6 months from now, what are the landmines? What are we not thinking of? What is the negative impact if we did this? If we implemented this new process, this new software, tried this new system, whatever it is. And then with all those stakeholders in the room, you write down all the issues, all the unspoken worries, all the concern as a brain dump. And then there's 2 columns. What's the probability each of those will happen? And then what's the negative impact on the business? So, probability, high, medium, or low. Impact on the business negatively, High, medium, or low? And then we all have a conversation about what's the true probability and impact. And what happens when you do that, why it's healthy, is someone will throw out there who's got a lot of fear and it really impacts their preferences, or their— maybe it's their baby they built, or the process was really something they created 10 years ago and now this would really change that. So they have a little bit of guilt, like it wasn't a good process for those 10 years and they're getting kind of called out. Which usually isn't the case, it's just it's time to modernize. So, all that fear's in there. So, we just have an honest, objective conversation on what's the probability that this new approach will be negative. And let's say it's my baby, we're going through a process that I created, I'm like, high, like you don't understand. And then someone else on the team or a couple of others say it's low impact. So, now we're all in the same reality. I realize I may be missing something because I'm freaking out, they're not so worried about it. So, now we just have a healthy discussion about, well, why are you low probability that that's going to be a big issue? And they share their data, their inputs, their expertise, their experience, what they don't know or what they know that I don't. Or the other way, I share why they don't understand due to my data and inputs and expertise that it will be a big issue. So, we get to discuss and go back and forth with others listening that can add in as well. So, we have a A bigger shared pool of meaning and more data points to get to the facts and stay objective. So, it's not me versus you in a fight between like 2 of us and going back and forth for preferences. So, you do this throughout the whole situation. And by the end of it, you've really looked at, if we did do this, how bad could it actually be? And I find 9 times out of 10, it's a lot of fears and As people talk through it, we realize we have a lot more expertise, we have a lot more preparation for it, we have a lot more capability than we thought, and a lot of those worries start to simmer down and we're able to move forward. Now, you can also do that same negative brainstorm if it's post-decision and maybe it wasn't my preference and it wasn't what I would have chosen and I'm struggling because I'm like, oh, they should have brought me in, Why didn't they ask the people closest to the work? Why weren't we involved earlier? That whole drama. So, I'm playing the wrong role. What they need me to do is, given it's decided, try to make it work to the best of my ability and make sure my team's all in to do what it takes to mitigate the risks and navigate to get towards the goal and then come back with feedback to do it even better. That's another opportunity for negative brainstorm where I don't just keep railing against the decision, And having this unhealthy debate and this critique and this, you know, just basically BMW driving, bitchy moaning and whining. I am now saying, okay, there's 7 things that I have concerns about. I'm still in with the what, but on the how, I have these 7 concerns. Can we do a negative brainstorm on how to navigate these risks? See how healthy that is? And I bring others in and then we have a plan to still move forward given The concerns. This would all be healthy. Now, I guess sprinkled in there, I shared the unhealthy alongside it, and that's the difference. Now, you'll notice underneath both of these situations where it's a pre-decision debate or a post-decision debate, the negative brainstorm is a visual tool. It is a written down, whether it's on a flip chart, whether it's a PowerPoint, whether it's an Excel spreadsheet, This is out beyond ego. So now it's all of us versus the problem, all of us versus the reality. So we're on the same team. It's not me versus you really having kind of duking it out in the meeting. This is a bad dynamic. That's where it's us versus them, that's where it's a lot of verbal dialogue, there's a lot of opinions going out there. This is all not good. So you'll notice the negative brainstorm. I'm only on point number 2 of this podcast. I'm getting into a visual tool from our toolkit to get the ego simmered down, to move beyond ego, get out beyond the drama so we're all on the same team working through a tool intentionally. And this is a key feature of healthy debate is through a tool, not through verbal gymnastics and opinions and who's more charismatic. Usually all of that is going to, you know, lead to unhealthy dynamics. And so, those are the first couple of things. The example I want to give with this is I had a client that called it actually a break-it session. So, going back to, hey, we're thinking about implementing this. Let's do a negative brainstorm and have a healthy debate about this. What was going on in their organization is in a consolidation, they were taking a part of the business that had 6 or 7 legacy systems That functioned locally on their own okay with a lot of manual workarounds, but then as other groups came in, it was a real mess. There was no standardization, a lot of inefficiencies. And so the idea with the change management team was to put in one point of truth, one system that would consolidate all 6 or 7 of these so everybody followed one standardized process and software. So then we had good input in, we had good data, and and everyone was able to support in a very efficient way. And as they started to announce they were gonna do this, tons of pushback from each of the real local stakeholders of their legacy system. So what they did is they took the negative brainstorm tool that I just explained, went to the key engineers at each of those legacy systems and said, hey, here's a pilot of what we believe best practice would be with one point of truth. So really, here's the decision, the change. And they piloted it, they showed it, they demoed it, said, that's what it would look like. Now, in the next hour of this meeting, I want you to get good and negative. What would that create a nightmare for, for you? What would you lose as far as capabilities? Who's that going to tick off with who you work with most? Like, what's your team going to respond with? Just get good and negative. And the group was game and played along, and they just started to say, here's some potential negative impact issues with this? And they started to make a list. Maybe it was 8 to 10 things. And then this group that was facilitating change management said, well, what's the true probability that that capability or that feature will be lost? And they'd say high, medium, or low. And what's the real impact on the business and the potential of the business if it does happen? And this is where, to this group's credit, these engineers got honest and said, actually, I know I sound like I was freaking out, But that's more of a low-risk thing. And there's some backup safety nets if that does happen, so it's actually even lower than I'm saying. And then what's the probability? It's probably more like medium. So that went from being a key deal-breaker to doing this new standardised, efficient new system. They were saying deal-breaker, to after a little bit of the negative brainstorm, the break-it session, would this break it? They're like, ah, it's actually probably not a big deal. And they did this for about 25 minutes. And I kid you not, at the end of it, just from hearing them out, that group of key stakeholders was like, thank you for doing this. We feel like we've been heard. We are in, and we have a couple concerns to still talk about as we get going, but this is gonna be great, good enough. We're in to help you mitigate the risk and move into post-decision. So the Break It session led to some really good, healthy debate. It showed the willingness to engage from the change management team. Opened up the let's play this out scenario. I always say, let's play this out. As if it goes 6 months, 12 months from now, a disaster, I want you to dump your ideas, your fears onto this tool, and then let's talk through them intentionally. Not just guessing, not just speculating, but really thinking through it. It only took about 25 or 30 minutes. Breakthrough, buy-in, they're on to post-decision execution. And so this Break It session was a key breakthrough From this client to be able to do that, and that became part of their habits whenever they were implementing change moving forward. Healthy debate. Unhealthy debate is just saying, our way or the highway, we're changing all your systems, we're going in there, you guys figure it out, you must buy in. There's times some situations feel like that, and reality-based leadership can still help move that resistance into buy-in, but adding a pre-decision breakout— a break it negative brainstorm tool— Fascinating exercise, 20 to 25 minutes, will probably save you 2 years of drama. And so that was an example I wanted to share with you for those of you that are in those types of unhealthy debates where you know you're stuck. The next one is— learned this from another client as well— is just making sure you do have some sort of shared language or shared leadership framework. If you don't, to be able to Call out or maybe even prime the pump when you're about to push on something that could trigger the ego or drama. And all of us know when that's happening, and I guess some of you might call it, you know, about to have a crucial conversation or a hard conversation, and you know it's going to push on someone's either passion project, or it might get someone defensive, or it might, you know, start to lead to a challenging conversation. One of the clients I worked with had this way that they would say, so in the spirit of, and then they had their really solid core values. Now, these, to their credit, were communicated at the front when you started, when you onboarded. They reinforced these often throughout their meetings. Like, this really was a part of their culture. It wasn't just a slogan on the wall. But they had these great core convictions, they called it, or core values, and they could say, in the spirit of this core value, and then they would maybe bring up the harder thing to bring up about a project, a task, or something that wasn't going well. So, an example of that would be with our shared language that we encourage at Reality-Based Leadership and try to live in our organization is, you know, I might go to Laura on my team and say, Hey, you know, in the spirit of stop judging, start helping, we're in this meeting doing a bit of judging about that recent client and how their, you know, workshop went. And Laura would probably never do this, but let's say that's the example. And so we've been talking about that for 10 or 15 minutes. So if we weren't judging this client, what could we do to help them to be a little better in our next session with them? Or what could you do to help them to get past that type of behavior moving forward? And so, I can use that in the spirit of a core value. I want to bring this up and move us towards how we could or less judging and more helping. And this prepping the conversation, that's verbally. Where they saw it really effective was in emails. Is in the spirit of... and then they list one of their core convictions. I think one of theirs that I loved was crawl, walk, but never run. Someone could call out if they feel like someone's just Going too fast, missing some details, not getting all stakeholders involved in a decision that need to be involved or need to be, you know, connected with. They could call that out and say, let's take a couple deep breaths here. We're moving fast. In the spirit of— and they were a fast-moving company, but they called it crawl, walk, but never run. Let's slow down a bit. Let's think through our process. Let's get into our decision-making model to make sure we're making a good decision at this key point Of the project. And so that in the spirit of language is magnificent if you can add it into what you do. That will set up a healthier debate or healthier conversation as opposed to unhealthy, which might be just shooting it from the hip, just hoping that someone has kind of that emotional regulation to be no drama or reality-based. So that means I can just shoot without intention, you know, feedback or some critical feedback or some— You know, really direct feedback about their work and just kind of slap on there that you shouldn't be, you know, so reactive to the facts. That would be more unhealthy debate, especially from a reality-based leadership perspective. And so, one more, I think I'm at 3, maybe 4, that I want to leave you with here is— oh, this is a big one, is— and it's almost 2 of them because they're similar, is When I— am I disagreeing with an idea and not the person? And so, I know the person's there, but it's like, am I going at the idea and not the person? But really, when I'm disagreeing with an idea, am I doing it with expertise or data or hopefully more the facts, or is it opinions? And many of you that have been around Reality-Based Leadership for a long time, or if you're new to the podcast, is Opinions just don't add that much value anymore. We joke that people with the most opinions usually have the least amount of expertise, and opinions are usually gut feelings, but not like those good gut feelings based on a lot of knowledge, expertise, and staying relevant. It's a lot of preferences, sometimes it's biases, where expertise is really, you know, evidence-based. It's experience-based, but really in the trenches. It's based on best practices. It's what our data and our analytics are saying internally with our systems as they get smarter. And it's all of that. So, am I disagreeing with an idea and coming forward with expertise and not opinions? And another element for healthy debate is most opinions focus on why something won't work or why it's a bad idea or why it's a dumb idea. And expertise is really on how it could work. Or what are some of the risks that you see? And it's that, yes, I see where you're going, unless it's totally off, I'd say no. But it's like, yes, I see where you're going, but here's some concerns we need to think about, and here's my expertise to help us think about that. And so that— it's a subtle difference, but if you sit on the difference between opinions and expertise, you'll find so many people are disagreeing On opinions and not expertise. Now, a challenge, you know, expertise, data, facts. Now, a challenge in there that I've seen recently from a reality-based leadership perspective for all of us to keep in mind here, listeners, is that if someone didn't use logic or facts to get to their stance or their, you know, their perspective in this conversation, debate, this disagreement, or this— Argument. You know, brainstorming session, they didn't use logic and facts to get there, then logic and facts won't get them out of it. So, that's a little bit of a caveat is if you're just trying to hit with more facts someone that's very reactionary and doesn't really have much backing in the facts, usually that's not going to go anywhere. And that's where sometimes when you're in that case and it's one-on-one, the best feedback is oftentimes not from maybe you directly, it's from other peers. It's from other data not coming from what you're saying, but maybe it's from the market, it's from customer feedback, patient feedback, it's from the data, it's from other leaders that have experienced this individual. So then you're not going one-on-one, it's this, you know, expanded peer feedback or market feedback. And that's an element of waking someone up to where they're into a lot of reactivity that is not just one-to-one direct. And that can be another way to have somewhat healthier debate is if we have, again, a tool that's facilitating more discussion like the negative brainstorm around something someone hasn't got to their defense or their position with logic, then the negative brainstorm and some extra discussion from others from different perspectives can maybe wake them up that they are not seeing reality clearly. Now, it doesn't always work that way. It's not as simple as many of you know, but that's where at the very least, am I bringing my perspective in with expertise, data, facts, evidence, best practices, proven case studies, methodologies, models, and I'm trying to speak through that? Or is it just opinions, gut feelings, things like that? And some people ask like, well, How do I get that? Well, there's so many ways that— are you, you know, connected in your associations, your industry, you're going to conferences, webinars? Are you reading whatever it is you do, the latest papers, evidence, thought leaders, podcasts? All of that can help you add in this type of input. If not, you're really going to be tied down to your local perspective, and a lot of times we're pretty siloed. Especially if we're not doing a lot of that wider reading, wider listening, wider perspective. So those are some initial thoughts, just to shoot 4, maybe 5 there, of ways that I see healthy debate versus unhealthy debate. I probably missed 100 of these, but I just wanted to get 'em started in this podcast, and maybe I'll do a follow-up later. Let me know in some of the comments, maybe on social, or as this comes out in the newsletter, If you're not on our newsletter, I'll link that below. Please get on our newsletter. And I'd love to hear what are some other ways that you know right away that that's an unhealthy conversation versus a better debate where we're making some progress. Would love to hear your ways to get beyond the drama on that. If you love this podcast, please give it a 5-star review. Give us some feedback on why that is. It helps others find it. And we are grateful for you as a listener, for you as a reality-based leadership practitioner out there. Thank you. For someone out there ditching the drama and helping others do the same. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. I'll see you on the next episode. Remember, as always, keep loving your people up, validating their experiences when they're struggling, but don't forget to call them up to greatness. You got this. I'll see you on the next episode. Thank you.