More information is better - if the data are objective and up-to-date because it encourages people to focus on issues, not personalities. In the absence of good data, executives waste time in pointless debates over opinions. More opinion is better. There is a direct link between reliance on facts and low levels of interpersonal conflict. Facts, (such as sales, market shares, R|D expenses and competitors behaviour) depersonalise the discussion because they are not someones fantasies, guesses or self-serving desires. In the absence of facts, individuals motives are likely to become suspect. Building decisions on facts creates a culture that emphasises issues instead of personalities.
Second, multiply the alternatives. Sometimes one or two alternatives may not suffice. Deliberately developing multiple alternatives to promote debate - like introducing and shaping options may help in enhancing teamwork - such as combining elements of different options.
Third, framing strategic choices as collaboration rather than competitive exercises. This, in spite of the fact about executives share or stake in the companys performance, yet their personal ambitions may make them rivals for power. One solution to this is by creating a common goal which the team could rally. Such goals do not imply homogenous thinking, but they do require everyone to share a vision. Care needs to be taken where a team may respond to a particular instance of poor performance, thereby trying to pin the blame on one another. Hence, sharing a common goal would imply viewing a crisis not as a threat but as an opportunity to be fully prepared for an impending competitive battle.
Fourth, using humour too handle conflict - however construed the humour - can relieve tension and at the same time promote a collaborative atmosphere and can make teams business fun. Humour works as a defense mechanism to protect people from stressful and threatening situations that commonly arise in the course of making strategic decisions. Speakers can say in jest things that might otherwise give offense because the message is serious and not serious at the same time. The recipient is allowed to save face by receiving the serious message while appearing not to do so. The result is communication of difficult information in a more tactful and less personally threatening way.
A fifth tactic for taming inter-personal conflict is to create a sense of fairness by balancing power within the management team. Research suggests that autocratic leaders often tend to generate high levels of inter-personal friction. Weak leaders also engender inter-personal conflict because the power vacuum at the top encourages managers to jockey for position.
Inter-personal conflict is lowest in balanced power structures, those in which the CEO is more powerful than the other members of the top management team, but the members do wield substantial power especially in their own well-defined areas of responsibility. In balanced power structure, all executives participate in strategic decisions.
Sixth, seek consensus with qualification. Balancing power is one tactic for building a sense of fairness. Finding an appropriate way to resolve conflict over issues is another and more crucial. Research has shown that the teams that managed conflict effectively used the same approach in resolving substantive conflict. It is a two-step process that is called consensus with qualification. It works like this: executives talk over an issue and try to reach consensus. If they can, the decision is made. If they cant, the most relevant senior manager makes the decision, guided by the input from the rest of the group.
K M Eisenhardt et al have suggested five approaches that help generate constructive disagreement within a team. They are:
1. Assemble a heterogeneous team, including diverse ages, genders, functional backgrounds and industry experience.
2. Meet together as a team regularly and often.
3. Encourage team members to assume rules beyond their obvious product, geographic or functional responsibilities.
4. Apply multiple mind-sets to any issue (e.g. role playing, war games, putting yourself in your competitors shoes). Actively manage conflict.
Creative abrasion
According to Dorothy Leonard and Susaan Straus (1997), conflict or creative abrasion, can be productive. According to them, managers have two responses to conflict: Firstly, managers who dislike conflict actively avoid the clash of ideas. They hire and reward people of a particular stripe, usually people like themselves. Their organisations fall victims to what they call comfortable clone syndrome: co-workers share similar interests and training; everyone thinks alike. The end result is that such a group will struggle to innovate, often in vain.
Secondly, managers who have employees with a variety of thinking styles frequently dont understand how to manage them. They overlook the fact that people with different styles often dont understand or respect one another, and that such differences can fuel personal differences.
The manager, successful at fostering innovation, figures out how to get different approaches to grate against one another in a productive process called creative abrasion. Such a manager understands that different people have different thinking styles: analytical or intuitive, conceptual or experiential, social or independent, logical or values driven.
According to Leonard and Straus (1997), cognitive differences (or varying approaches to perceiving and assimilating data, making decisions, solving problems and relating to other people) are preferences (not to be confused with skills or abilities). For instance, you may prefer to approach problems intuitively but in fact may be better trained to approach them analytically. The most widely recognised cognitive distinction is between left-brained and right-brained ways of thinking. An analytical, logical and sequential approach to problem framing and solving (left-brained thinking) clearly differs from an intuitive, value-based, and non-linear one (right-brained thinking).
The best way for managers to assess the thinking styles of the people they are responsible for is to use an established diagnostic instrument as an assessment tool; such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI). A well-treated tool is both more objective and more thorough than the impressions of even the most sensitive and observant of managers. The managerial challenge is to use the insights that these instruments offer to create new processes and encourage new barriers that will help innovation efforts succeed.
Leonard and Straus (1997), make some suggestions such as:
(a) Understand yourself - and identify your style;
(b) Forget the golden rule - regardless of how you personally would prefer to deliver the message, you will be more persuasive and better understood if you formulate messages to appeal to the particular thinking style of your listener.
(c) Create "whole-brained" teams - complete homogeneity in an organisations cognitive approach can be very efficient. But, no matter how brilliant the group of individuals, their contribution to innovative problem solving are enhanced by coming up against totally different perspectives.
(d) Manage the creative process - one, by classifying your companys goals in front of the group; two, making your operating guidelines explicit; and three, set up an agenda ahead of time that explicitly provides enough time for both divergent discussions to uncover imaginative alternatives and convergent discussion to select an option and plan its implementation.
Do you feel doing all this will take much time and energy? Perhaps you prefer to waste time negotiating day-to-day truces between individuals and groups? Perhaps youd rather just keep the status quo and muddle through. The choice is yours.
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