CHAPTER

6

TAKE COMFORT IN DISCOMFORT

Tell Me Something I Don’t Want to Hear¹

Alibaba was founded almost two decades ago by a charismatic, some would say eccentric, leader named Jack Ma. He enlisted 17 of his friends to pursue an audacious goal—Ma wanted to dominate the emerging Chinese e-commerce marketplace and then expand globally. Alibaba initially focused on promoting business-to-business transactions between international buyers and Chinese manufacturers. Its goal was to help small- and medium-sized businesses in China gain access to global markets. After several years of strong growth, Alibaba opened a second Internet site serving retail customers in China. In so doing, it saw itself as going to war with a much larger and more well-established competitor—eBay. Alibaba did this because Ma believed that eBay would eventually come after his firm’s business-to-business customers. Alibaba decided that the best defense was a strong offense.

Ma didn’t launch a massive company-wide effort to develop a competitive consumer website. Instead, he selected six of his people to work on the secret project—an assignment that they could not share with anyone in the company or even with their families. They were then “quarantined,” working, and often living, in the original apartment in which Alibaba had been born just a few years earlier. The team’s mandate was to develop an Internet auction site that better met the needs and preferences of Chinese consumers and, in so doing, displace eBay—then the most successful e-commerce firm in the world. Ma liked the idea of his small team going into battle against eBay—framing it as David versus Goliath. He was placing his firm’s future in the hands of six dedicated people striving to achieve an audacious goal.² His faith was well placed.³ Several years later, after spending $250 million and putting its reputation on the line, eBay pulled out of China.⁴ The rise of Alibaba captured people’s attention—an unknown startup in Communist China had found a way to defeat a Silicon Valley icon that had more money, better technology, and a clear plan of action.⁵

Alibaba pushed forward and expanded into a number of adjacent businesses, such as Alipay, which provides PayPal-like financial services customized to the Chinese market, and AliCloud, which provides Amazon-like cloud computing services. The company now has 25 business units, 38,000 employees, and over 370 million active customers—more customers than people living in the United States. It is China’s largest retailer, offering almost anything a consumer could want—from clothing, to groceries, to automobiles.⁶ It is the source of more than 60 percent of the packages shipped through the Chinese postal system.⁷ The next step for Alibaba, using the capital from its recent public offering, is accelerating its push into new geographical markets such as India and Brazil.⁸

The extraordinary success of Alibaba couldn’t have happened without a number of strategic and operational wins. The Chinese government, for example, supported Alibaba’s growth by giving it exclusive rights in areas such as Alipay (which allowed the company to offer financial services that were critical in building customer trust and loyalty). The mistakes of its primary competitor also helped. eBay had a short-term focus on being a public company, facing pressure to justify its massive investment in the Chinese market. eBay was also hindered by its desire to replicate what worked in the United States in the Chinese market. For example, eBay wanted its Chinese operation to operate from the same technology platform as its legacy U.S. group. Once that change occurred, it was reported that it took nine weeks to change even one word on the Chinese eBay website due to the resulting bureaucracy. At Alibaba, such changes could be made in just hours, which allowed it to more effectively respond to changing customer and market conditions.⁹ Beyond these factors, we must still ask, how did Alibaba achieve such extraordinary results?

One factor in Alibaba’s success was hiring the right people. It sought out those with an entrepreneurial streak who act with “fire in the belly” and “never give up on doing what they believe is right.”¹⁰ The company, like many startups, looked for those who were similar in temperament to its founding members. Jack Ma believes such people are valuable because they had to struggle for their success in life—they have a few nicks and scars. He hired people who were one or two levels below the best students in their universities. He thinks those at the top of their classes would not have the resilience needed to withstand the setbacks that come with operating in a tough marketplace like China, where failure is common. Ma also believes that people with impressive resumes often have problems bonding with others because they feel superior given their success. As a result, they often fail to work in a collaborative manner with their colleagues, which comprises the spirit of teamwork within the company. Ma is fond of saying that a good team, one with a clear focus and operating as a cohesive family, can defeat a competitor 10 times its size.

Ma’s defining leadership trait is his passion—he operates with a high level of enthusiasm and resolve. He expects the same from members of his teams. The result is a demanding work environment where people work long and passionate hours. In particular, Alibaba encourages intense debate among colleagues, viewing conflict as inevitable and productive. Its leaders have no problem if shouting matches break out during company meetings. In fact, Alibaba views combative behavior, what it calls quarrelling, among team members as a sign that they want to “excel from the bottom of their heart” and achieve “critical execution.”¹¹ An insider who worked in the firm writes about its culture, “Alibaba is not a group of civilised gentlemen, or men who nicely play by the rules. They are reckless with ambition, they are radical and aggressive. Everyone walks out of a meeting room beet-red from shouting, that’s how we held meetings—with our voices raised. It’s very intense.”¹² This doesn’t mean that anything goes at Alibaba—people can’t attack others on a personal level. But they are expected to aggressively attack their ideas if there is a better idea. Ma believes that most large companies stumble because they develop what he calls a “little white rabbit” culture. In these firms, people get along well but don’t challenge each other. As a result, performance suffers and the firm slowly declines.

Alibaba’s approach to teamwork differs from what is found in many corporations—where people view intense conflict, especially in meetings, as a sign of trouble. These firms fear that conflict will inhibit people’s ability to develop a solution that everyone can support and effectively execute. As a result, the emphasis is people behaving in a highly collaborative, even polite, manner. Conflicts are addressed through one-on-one discussions outside of the team meetings or through lobbying efforts to the team’s leader (who then weighs competing arguments and makes a decision for the group). While this approach is sometimes appropriate, it becomes dysfunctional when conflicts can’t be openly surfaced, discussed, and resolved in a team setting. In cutting-edge groups, a good meeting is one where a healthy fight results in a healthy outcome. In more conventional firms, a good meeting is one where people get along and everyone agrees on the best path forward. Conflict is viewed as a sign that the team is not working well. This is not to say that outcomes don’t matter in more traditional firms, but the ability of people to work as a cohesive team, the willingness of people to be team players, can take priority over everything else—including results.

Irving Goffman, a sociologist, examined the informal rules that dominate social interactions. One of the most powerful determinants of people’s behavior is what he calls face saving.¹³ Goffman uses the term face to indicate how people in every culture create roles for themselves, particularly when in a public or group setting. Some people, for instance, want to be seen as the technical experts while others want to be seen as the most creative individuals on their teams. Goffman suggests that people become emotionally invested in these roles and look for support from others to affirm how they want to view themselves. Challenges to a person’s role produce anxiety in that person and, in many cases, larger problems for the group due to the resulting interpersonal tensions. To avoid this, people will often act in ways that support another’s self-perceptions and, more generally, their standing within a company or team. This often takes the form of polite norms of behavior, with the goal that everyone can “save face” when interacting with others. The unspoken norm is that I will reinforce the role you want to play if you reinforce the role that I want to play.

We can extrapolate from Goffman’s idea and see that the most basic role, one that cuts across more specific roles, is that of being a valued team member. Being a member of a group matters a great deal to most people, and, inversely, they fear being ostracized by the group. In a business setting, being accepted means that one’s ideas and actions are seen as helpful and contributing to the team’s success. Face saving, in this more general sense, is the feeling of being valued by others as a team member.

Team members who are honest in expressing their views run the risk of breaking the face-saving norm. By challenging others, they risk exposing the flaws in others’ thinking and, more generally, undermining their standing as respected members of the team. The more direct and assertive challenges can be felt as personal attacks by other team members, jeopardizing interpersonal relationship as well as the esprit de corps within the group. I have worked with teams where people hold grudges, in some cases for years, against those who publicly challenged them in a group setting. The downside of face-saving behavior is that people are less direct regarding their views on issues critical to the team’s success. One could argue that face saving, while understandable, creates more harm than good because team members avoid saying what needs to be said.

Ursula Burns, on becoming the CEO of Xerox, knew that revenue growth was the key priority for her company, one that had only recently flirted with bankruptcy. To achieve this goal, she believed her firm’s culture had to change. In particular, Burns wanted people to be less patient with each other and more direct in expressing their views. She described the problem as one of “terminal niceness,” where those who had worked together for decades were loath to criticize each another, even if it involved an important strategic or operational threat. Burns, talking about the closeness of what she calls the Xerox family, wants her people to be more like what she views as a real family—one where people are direct and even tough because they care so much about each other.¹⁴ She notes, “When we’re in the family, you don’t have to be as nice as when you’re outside of the family . . . I want us to stay civil and kind, but we have to be frank—and the reason we can be frank is because we are all in the same family.”¹⁵ She goes even further in saying that people in Xerox need be aggressive and even rude if needed to produce a better outcome for the company. This was especially important to Burns in relation to what was occurring in her leadership team meetings, where people often had concerns about what was being presented or recommended—but rather than surface those concerns in the meeting, they came to her in private and shared their views. The sobering fact is that Burns, after years of pushing for a more open and direct exchange of views within Xerox, still saw signs that the culture had not changed as much as needed.

Some people also avoid conflict for fear of embarrassing themselves if they are proven wrong, or fail to win support, after putting forward their ideas. Consequently, they remain silent or express themselves in such subtle ways that others misread their intent. In more extreme cases, people will wait to see where others stand on an issue before voicing their ideas. Some go one step further and say what they think their team leader, or those in the dominant coalition within their group, want to hear or will support. The team dynamic, in these situations, becomes one where people will say they value debate but also believe that the honest expression of one’s views is risky to them. Richard Holbrook commented on this tendency in many of the teams he observed over his long career:

[You want] . . . an open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy is decided you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often . . . the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don’t air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.¹⁶

Leaders sometimes contribute to this dysfunctional pattern of behavior by stating that they want open dialogue when, in reality, they want their teams to agree with their own points of view and preferred plans of action. As a result, team members will often go through the motions of debating various points of view when they know the decisions will eventually come back to what their leaders want. The entire decision-making process, then, becomes a charade, where people appear to debate options but know that the decision has already been made by their group’s leader.

There are teams, however, where the leader sincerely desires an open exchange of ideas but it simply doesn’t happen. At Xerox, Burns believed this was the result of long-standing relationships within the firm, which resulted in an aversion to challenging others, particularly in-group meetings. Another reason that a team leader will not get an open expression of ideas is the personality of those on the team. Team members can bring a set of negative experiences from their past teams, when they were open and were punished for it. This influences how they view an open expression of ideas and a direct approach to conflict in their current teams. They may, for example, have spent time at a firm that was highly political and learned to be indirect or even secretive in expressing their views. More generally, they learned to distrust others and reveal as little as possible regarding their own views on key topics. Brad Bird, who has directed several Pixar firms, believes that these types of people destroy the ability of a team to function at a higher level—regardless of what a leader wants. These are people who don’t deal openly with their peers, and some even go one step further and undermine what the team is striving to accomplish. Bird believes that people with this personality type will not change their behavior, even when he makes an effort to create an open and healthy team culture. He notes, “Passive-aggressive people—people who don’t show their colors in the group but then get behind the scenes and peck away—are poisonous. I can usually spot those people fairly soon and I weed them out.”¹⁷

Managing conflict within a team, however, is more complicated than removing those who can’t operate in an open and intense environment. Team members are often on the receiving end of two messages regarding what is expected of them. These messages are conveyed in a variety of ways, sometimes subtle, from a team leader, peers, or even the organization in which they work. They are as follows:

1. You must put forward your honest point of view on the decisions we face as a group and offer clear recommendations that help move us forward. If you fail to do so, you are not adding value as a team member and are increasing the likelihood that we will fail to achieve our goals.

2. You must operate in a highly collaborative manner and support your peers. If you fail to do so, you are not being a team player and are undermining our ability to work together as a group to achieve our goals.

If a team member fails to do either of the above, he or she is less valued as a team member and can even be rejected by the group or the group’s leader. In the social sciences, there is a well-known concept called the double-bind.¹⁸ In its purest form, a double-bind occurs when people experience two conflicting messages that are inherently at odds with each other. These messages create confusion in those receiving them because responding to one of the messages will result in a negative outcome in the other. That is, acting on either message triggers a negative outcome—thus, there is no completely problem-free way to respond. Moreover, the contradiction in the two messages is not acknowledged as being a contradiction, and the person receiving the message can’t remove himself or herself from the dilemma that it creates. Most people, when confronted with a double-bind, freeze and do nothing—as this feels like the safest thing to do given the situation in which they find themselves.

One can, of course, argue that the two messages noted above are not mutually exclusive—that each can be achieved without undermining the other. That is, people can be both assertive and cooperative and, in fact, this is what is needed for them to be effective.¹⁹ In other words, the most effective team members can put forward a contrary point of view but do so in a manner that does not alienate others or undermine the collaborative ethos within the team. That is clearly the goal, and some individuals and teams manage this much better than others. But the conflict double-bind is always a constant threat hanging over a team.

The first task in creating a conflict-friendly culture, and overcoming the double-bind, is redefining what it means to be comfortable. In many groups, comfort implies a lack of conflict or tension among team members. Everyone gets along, and decisions are reached in a highly collaborative manner. In cutting-edge teams, this definition of comfort is turned on its head—rejected in favor of surfacing or even creating tension among team members. These teams don’t want their members to be too comfortable because that means that they have settled for the status quo. It means that they are not pushing themselves to achieve a higher level of performance and innovation. Comfort, then, is redefined as accepting the need to be uncomfortable. A new director to Pixar was surprised when the firm hired him to produce a film soon after he suffered a highly visible failure in another studio. He noted that the leadership of Pixar told him,

The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency—feeling like we have it all figured out. We want you to come shake things up. We will give you a good argument if we think what you’re doing doesn’t make sense, but if you can convince us, we’ll do things a different way.²⁰

Cutting-edge firms, then, are committed to deliberately creating conflict to produce better outcomes. Most people, when asked, will say that they are open to conflict and understand the role it plays in producing better decisions. But that statement is quite different from being willing to suffer the pain that comes with conflict. Talking about the benefits of productive conflict doesn’t mitigate the discomfort that accompanies it in most situations. It is not a stretch to say that many team members don’t want to experience the pain of conflict even when they know it may be in their group’s best interest. Knowing something and acting on it are two different things.

Cutting-edge firms understand the challenge of getting people to move toward conflict and not away from it. One way to describe this is increasing the level of discomfort that people in the team can tolerate—creating an environment that has a higher pain threshold than what is found in most conventional groups. They raise the level of “heat” in their interactions when needed in order to fully understand the complex dynamics and potential tradeoffs in the decisions they are making. Another way of saying this is that people in cutting-edge firms create the conditions that help people be comfortable with the discomfort that comes with conflict. Airbnb provides an example of a company that strives to create a positive work environment but one that values honest dialogue. When an internal survey suggested that they needed to improve in this area, one of the firm’s leaders came up with a phrase to encourage more open conversations. He described it as the need to surface the “elephants, dead fish and vomit.” In his mind, elephants are the “undiscussables” that everyone recognizes but doesn’t talk about (at least in a public forum). Dead fish are the things that happened in the past that some people come back to over and over again. The vomit is an issue or concern that people want to get out of their systems. As you might imagine, classifying each type of communication might result in a difference of opinion within Airbnb—an elephant to one person can be a dead fish to another! However, the intent is clear—get to the issues on the table and, if possible, even inject a bit of humor into the process of doing so.²¹

Another approach to help people surface uncomfortable truths is to separate ideas from people. This is the notion that people are not their ideas and an attack on an idea is about the work and not about them.²² Making a distinction between ideas and the person proposing those ideas helps people be less defensive when others find fault in their proposals or come forward with a better proposal. The distinction allows conflict to escalate to a higher level of intensity and be “pressure tested” and, in so doing, increases the likelihood of generating better ideas and solutions. The problem, of course, is that most people do identify with their ideas. In real life, ideas are always personal. This is particularly true when a team is comprised of passionate or even obsessive people. That said, the goal in cutting-edge groups is to direct people’s passion toward creating the best work product—and away from defending themselves or their groups against what some may see as critics. The CEO of Pixar emphasizes the need for this in any creative enterprise:

The film—not the filmmaker—is under the microscope. This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when challenged. Andrew Stanton, who has been on the giving or the receiving end of almost every Braintrust meeting we’ve had, likes to say that if Pixar were a hospital and the movies its patients, then the Braintrust is made up of trusted doctors. It’s important to remember that the movie’s director and producer are “doctors” too. It’s as if they’ve gathered a panel of consulting experts to help find an accurate diagnosis for an extremely confounding case.²³

A second task in effectively raising the level of discomfort within a team is setting bold, even audacious, goals. These goals are not designed to produce conflict, but conflict is almost always the result. Imagine being named the director of a new film at Pixar, a studio that has produced one blockbuster after another, one creative success after another. As a new director, you can take some comfort in the fact that the studio has developed a set of innovative technologies and processes that set it apart from other studios (such as providing feedback in a variety of well-established forums). But the creative element of making a Pixar film, which can take up to four years, is inevitably a journey into the unknown. A recent film, Inside Out, is a good example. It is based on the experiences of an 11-year-old girl name Riley as her family moves across the country to a new home. The larger intent is to explore human emotions. In the film, emotions such as anger and joy take the form of different characters, each struggling to control what Riley feels at any given moment. Making a film that portrays emotions is both exciting and daunting. Pixar believes that people working on such ambitious projects will eventually get lost in the creative process and be unsure about the best path forward.²⁴ This is particularly true in regard to their film’s storyline, which evolves over time and results in many dead ends—narratives and characters that simply don’t work and need to be discarded. This creates discomfort not only for the film’s director but also for his or her team and even the studio at large. Large sums of money and the firm’s hard-earned reputation are at stake. Directors realize that they are at risk of failing if they can’t overcome the challenges they face. As noted in the introduction, a number of successful Pixar films—including Toy Story 2, Ratatouille, and The Good Dinosaur, were halted midproduction because they couldn’t find their way. Pixar leadership did the same at Disney Animation once it took control of the studio, with the most visible example being replacing the director of the film Brave because of “creative differences.” The directors of these films were removed from their roles (in essence, fired), and much of their existing work was discarded. Their teams were also rechartered as needed once the directors were removed. Each film team at Pixar knows that it will be given time, helpful feedback, and support as its film progresses. But it also knows what will happen if it doesn’t eventually produce something that meets the high standards of the studio. This pressure, in itself, results in conflict as team members work to find the best solutions to the tests that inevitably arise in the pursuit of their goal.

The third task, after setting audacioius goals and accepting and even embracing the upside of conflict, is to focus the team’s efforts on the areas that will make the greatest difference. In other words, not all conflict is equal. Many teams engage in a good fight, but they do so over the matters not worth fighting about. In these cases, people waste their energy on less important issues, often involving mundane operational concerns or interpersonal differences, that don’t impact the group’s performance. A team that engages in lower-level conflicts spends valuable time and energy on issues that distract the group from the most critical challenges it faces—the challenges that will make a difference in the success of its project or company. One reason this occurs is because higher-level conflicts are usually more difficult and threatening than lower-level conflicts. Ironically, teams under the most stress will sometimes focus on less important issues rather than the truly critical issues. I worked, for example, with a team that faced a range of threats, including the loss of market share to a new, highly agile, competitor. Instead of dealing with this challenge, members of the team wanted to talk about one individual whose behavior was disruptive but not so extreme as to warrant removing that person from the group. In essence, the team’s business model was under attack, but its members wanted to talk about the interpersonal shortcomings of a fellow team member.²⁵ The behavior of this individual would be important if it prevented the team from addressing the key challenge it faced or was so egregious that it violated the firm’s values. Instead, the focus on his behavior was simply draining attention away from more important concerns. One of the most important tasks of a team leader is to focus his or her team on the “vital few” issues and not let the group be distracted by less important issues.²⁶

Productive conflict in teams, then, requires the following:

1. An understanding that the discomfort that comes with conflict is necessary and productive. The enemy of high performance is not conflict—it’s complacency.

2. Accountability for pursuing audacious goals that generate a healthy level of tension within a team.

3. An ability to focus the team’s conflict on the “vital few” areas that will make the most difference in the achievements of its goals.

4. The group having the temperament and skill needed to have a productive fight.

Fields of Conflict

The next step in promoting conflict is to develop approaches that allow for a team to have a healthy debate or, more directly, a good fight.²⁷ How people go about fighting is second in importance only to what they fight about. The goal is to get team members to be direct in expressing their views but at the same time collaborative in being willing to take into account others’ points of view and support the best solution even if it is not their idea.²⁸ This is meant to avoid the double-bind, where people feel they are caught in a dilemma that can’t be resolved. The combination of being assertive and collaborative is difficult to achieve, but it is the sweet spot when it comes to fighting in a productive manner.

Some groups embrace techniques that encourage all team members to contribute ideas in a nonthreatening manner. In the softest form, these techniques involve some type of brainstorming (with the goal of generating more ideas than would surface in a normal team discussion). Other teams use a related technique involving “rounds,” where people take turns expressing their views on a particular strategy or recommendation. Team members can’t comment, other than to clarify what is being suggested, until everyone in the group has had a chance to speak. A third technique is to have everyone in the group consider before their meeting what they would recommend in regard to an important topic. They are asked to summarize their points of view in writing prior to the meeting.²⁹ In the meeting, each member presents his or her preconsidered view, which is then discussed as a group. This approach generates a more robust set of alternatives and, in most cases, results in a better solution.³⁰ These techniques for generating ideas are useful because everyone provides input into decisions, increasingly the likelihood that everyone will have a more or less equal voice within a group. The best teams are those that benefit from the collective knowledge of the group’s members. A more egalitarian approach stands in contrast to what occurs in many teams where just a few people, often the team’s leader or those in the most powerful positions, dominate discussions—with other members sitting on the sidelines as observers to the team dynamic. The techniques suggested earlier work against this tendency.

Benefiting from the team members’ collective knowledge, however, requires more than generating new ideas. Debate, and conflict, is needed to test, prioritize, and improve on those ideas. Charlan Nemeth and his team at University of California, Berkeley examined the relative merits of brainstorming versus debate in producing good ideas.³¹ They asked people in their study to generate potential solutions to the same question, which was how to reduce traffic congestion in the San Francisco Bay area. One group was given this question and no further guidance other than to generate as many solutions as possible. A second group was told to use conventional brainstorming techniques, including a restriction on judging the ideas of others. A third group was told to debate and even challenge the ideas of others as they were presented. Brainstorming, as anticipated, resulted in more ideas being generated in each group. But those in the study’s “debate” condition, where people were encouraged to challenge each other, generated 25 percent more ideas, on average, than those in the other two groups. The authors of this study observed, “Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.”³²

Pixar is notable in its ability to manage debate and criticism—all with the intent of making films that initially “suck” (in the words of the firm’s president) into great successes. Three of the firm’s techniques are noteworthy. First, the company has daily reviews of what individual animators have created to bring to life a small scene within the film. In particular, the animators detail the motion and features of each character. As noted in Chapter 4, during reviews called dailies, feedback and suggestions are offered in a team setting. For the animators at Pixar, conflict is part of their daily routine. Each morning, typically at 9 a.m., the film team reviews the recent shots of its animators to talk about what works and what needs to change. The feedback can be tough, to the point that some refer to it as “shredding.” A second team review takes place once necessary changes are made. An observer of the process noted,

No detail is too small to critique and no one is prohibited from arguing against the work of someone else. Everything from the angle of the lighting to the timing of certain sound effects is brought up and fought over. This intense process, sometimes called “shredding,” can be draining, but the Pixar teams know that the process is vital to their ability to release quality work again and again.³³

The primary benefit of Pixar’s dailies is to help those receiving the feedback improve their work and thus the quality of the film. But the process also helps others attending the meeting who benefit from observing the group’s feedback—extracting lessons that they can apply to their own work moving forward.

Pixar also has what it calls Notes, sessions where a small group of senior group leaders watches an in-progress cut of a film and offers detailed suggestions on how to make it better.³⁴ The focus in these sessions is primarily on the film’s storyline and characters. Specific suggestions are made on how to improve the film, which is then the responsibility of the director and his or her team to assess and incorporate as they think appropriate. These suggestions surface a range of potential improvements, including what is missing from the story or what doesn’t make sense. Those providing feedback need to be direct but can’t simply take a film apart. People need to build on the work of others and strive to make it better. Pixar calls this plussing, a term indicating that those suggesting that something needs to change are also expected to contribute specific ideas on how to make it better. You can’t simply say something is wrong—you need to suggest how to make what is wrong right. This may be impossible in some cases (if an idea or work product is fundamentally flawed), but the intent is for team members to suggest ways to improve on another’s idea or work product.³⁵ The expectation is that every team member is responsible for pointing out when something is flawed and, just as importantly, suggesting ways to make it better. Plussing is an attempt to help the process of reviewing another’s work be a positive exchange versus a series of attacks and counterattacks.

A third technique used by Pixar to surface productive conflict involves postmortems, which occur after a film is completed in hopes of extracting lessons learned on what went well and what needs to change in the making of the studio’s next film. The postmortem after one of its films, for example, indicated that the production crew felt they were treated as being less important than the creative staff on the project. The production staff at Pixar manages a film’s logistics, schedules, staffing, and money, with the goal of getting the film done on time and on budget. The perceived second-class status of the production staff occurred even though the senior leadership of the studio believed that everyone assigned to a film should be respected and invited to offer an opinion in any area of the project. The senior leadership of the studio was surprised by this finding because it was so at odds with what they believed was important and what they believed was occurring. After the postmortem, changes were made in how the groups operate to ensure that the production staff are full and valued members of the team.

In teams, people need to have the emotional and social skills that minimize the downsides of conflict and, in particular, the damage that it can cause to relationships when managed poorly. The best teams are comprised of people with more effective social skills. That is, these teams have people who are better at assessing their impact on others and are able to modify their behavior as needed to manage conflict productively. Teams needs people who are tough, who can take feedback without becoming defensive, but they also need people who can give feedback and deal with conflict in a competent manner. One study, for example, examined the factors that contribute to team effectiveness. The researchers, at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT, found that the best small groups (defined as the groups that performed better at a number of problem-solving tasks) have several similar traits.³⁶ One of those traits was the ability of the team members to read the emotions of others (based on what is called a social perception test).³⁷ Those groups with higher levels of social sensitivity, in general, scored higher on a diverse set of problem-solving tasks. The explanation for this finding was that more-socially-skilled people are better able to work together to solve the problems they face. Their social skills result in a greater ability to tap into the knowledge and experience of each member and collectively arrive at the best solution.

Effective group decision-making centers on creating what some call psychological safety. That concept, advanced most prominently by Professor Amy Edmondson,suggests that innovative groups are better at creating an environment where people feel safe expressing who they are and what they believe.³⁸ In these groups, people feel that others both understand and respect their experiences, emotions, and points of view. Edmondson noted that there is “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”³⁹ The result is a team where it is safe for people to take risks, try new things, and ask for help. These are teams where people can admit and learn from their mistakes. Google, in a study that examined the effectiveness of hundreds of its own work teams, found psychological safety to be the single most important variable in determining a team’s success.⁴⁰ The teams at Google where people feel safe are those that achieve the best results. Google is now providing its managers with training on how to foster better team results, with an emphasis on creating a necessary level of psychological safety.⁴¹

The point to remember, one that Edmondson reinforces in her research findings, is that psychological safety does not operate in opposition to the achievement of ambitious goals. High-performing teams set demanding goals and create a safe environment in which to pursue those goals. That said, the tendency of some is to view psychological safety as an end in itself. In extreme teams, safety always exists in combination with a strong emphasis on outcomes. This becomes particularly important when dealing with conflict. Most people intellectually understand that conflict, between individuals and within a team, can be productive. They know that growth and comfort don’t always coexist. People will be uncomfortable when there is conflict, as they challenge each other in the pursuit of something significant. Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, argues that companies need to deliberately stress themselves if they are to remain vital.⁴² He believes his own firm has performed best when facing a daunting challenge or threat—even those he produced as CEO. The art of productive conflict is creating the right mix of comfort and discomfort—or, more accurately, helping people become comfortable with being uncomfortable. In these teams, people know that comfort is overrated.⁴³

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