Diversity, Interdependence, and Reasonable Conflict
Many times, when we talk about teams and organizations, we think alignment, trust, and the absence of conflict and politics are signals of effectiveness. In Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book, Managing with Power, he presents survey data, in which 55% of people said “politics in organizations are detrimental to efficiency.” The data was from 1980, but I suspect most people would say the same today.
The problem with this view is that in organizations of any complexity, there will be inevitable conflict.
The Finance folks will have different professional training, analytical frameworks, and goals than the folks in Manufacturing. Same for those in the Safety and Risk Management functions relative to those in the Innovation and Growth functions. And no one understands what those artists in the Design function are talking about. :)
Yet, the organization needs all of them to succeed. This is what John Kotter, in his book Power and Influence, calls diversity and interdependence. When both are present, the only way to manage the “natural” conflicts and get things done is with the use of politics.
In fact, when we assume that there shouldn’t be any conflict or when we assume that those who see things differently from us are wrong, ill-informed, obstinate, lazy (or all four!), we increase the likelihood of failure in our attempts to implement change.
One difficulty in accepting that we must be political actors is that reaching this acceptance sometimes requires ignoring some of what we’re taught about leading organizations. On this, Kotter writes:
“I have in front of me a stack of books that is nearly as tall as I am. These are textbooks on finance, accounting, decision analysis, management, statistics for business, economics, marketing, organizational behavior, operations research, management information systems, business policy, and personnel. […] I have just gone through the table of contents and index of each of these books looking for terms like power struggle, parochial politics, and bureaucratic infighting. [...]There are only a few pages that come close to addressing them explicitly. A few pages out of a total of about 19,000.”
Making a mindset shift may also mean unlearning what we were taught as kids. As Pfeffer writes, “The first lesson [we learn] is that life is a matter of individual effort, ability, and achievement. […] The second lesson we learn in school, which may be even more difficult to unlearn, is that there are right and wrong answers. We are taught how to solve problems, and for each problem, that there is a right answer, or at least one approach that is more correct than another.”
The point isn’t that we should abandon efforts to find the “right” answers. Rather, the implication is that leaders should spend far more of their time solving the interpersonal and political challenges that implementing the right answer requires.