It might not sound intuitive, but the best thing you can do about contention is throw fuel on the flames. You heard it right. One of the oddly inspiring ActionStyles of enduringly successful people is that contention is something they actually seek out. We’re talking here about gloves-off, brutally frank dialog. It’s what some pundits call naked conversations.

Many entrepreneurs light up when you raise the topic. It’s something they look forward to, and many said their team saw contentious meetings as a “perk” for working with them.

If this sounds like an episode of Jerry Springer, it isn’t. Here’s the difference: These naked conversations are not intended to be personally abusive (although you still may need a thick skin). The focus is on issues, not people. What Builders ignite is actually a sort of controlled burn where you set the fire with a match in one hand and hold a hose in the other. The purpose is to encourage contention in a very precise way to draw out the best, most passionate, and creative ideas from their teams.

Why is this so important? Former Chairman and CEO Mike McGavick of Safeco presided over the insurance giant’s recovery from a near-billion-dollar loss when he took the role in 2001 to posting record earnings for the company a few years later. McGavick thinks creative contention is necessary insurance against corporate politics that often cripple productivity and growth.

“In the old Safeco [culture], I think it’s fair to say that people kind of kissed up and kicked down. What you were told to do by your boss, you did without daring to question it,” McGavick said. “And if someone were to say ‘I don’t think so,’ that was an act of disrespect.” While orchestrating the turnaround, McGavick wanted “everybody who has an opinion to voice that opinion and be involved in discussion. We then want to come to agreement, conclude and move on, and act with discipline. And getting to the right balance there is [hard] work. If people feel that words like ‘collaboration’ and ‘alignment’ are nothing more than new speak for the old system of ‘do what your boss tells you,’ then you’ve really lost a lot of corporate value because, of course, the aggregate corporate value—in addition to our financial balance sheet—is the collective intelligence of the people we’re paying to come to work. And when they don’t use that intelligence to its fullest, we are squandering a corporate resource.” Without providing the opportunity for people to offer their creative input, you’re wasting their brains and talent.

Builders don’t fend off contention; they manage it as a source of inspiration. If you can foster a safe place to air the issues, you constructively unleash power that will otherwise inevitably become toxic—festering and infecting things later. If the team keeps the contention around the issues, Builders welcome it. If folks begin to attack other people, the contention is not acceptable.

Gloria Fox, a committee member for the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, has dealt with contention on an almost daily basis since she took office as a Massachusetts state representative in 1985. “Politics is very personal. ‘What is in it for me?’ is how most people feel about politics. ‘What have you done for me lately?’ is what most people feel about politics. And then you have to take it another step forward—‘What have you done?’” she said. You can start to shift selfish negative contention into positive energy, Fox advised, by giving people a constructive outlet. “You give people a task,” she said. “You give people a job to do. Many people complain, but they definitely need to get busy on some form of action.”

Contention about the issues, if left untapped and without an outlet, will become destructive down the road where it will be unwelcome, personal, and counterproductive. Worse yet, avoiding contention cheats you out of the best opportunity to unlock the most powerful ideas. This is fertile ground at the beginning of every project and a dustbowl if it never gets planted.

The essential key is Builders make sure the struggle is focused on creating something new or fixing the problem, not each other. We call it creative contention, and Builders find it to be a very good thing.

As an innovator at MIT for decades, until his death in 2001, Michael Dertouzos brought a sense of humanity to the technology world. But he said rarely did a week go by without a major wrestling match with his colleagues.

“I think dissent is very important, especially when it is toward a broad common goal. You agree on the broad goal and then you disagree and you quibble about how exactly to get there. All of us kind of fight with each other and I think if any one of us was missing, it would be a less powerful combination. It is important to let the differences and the tensions grow,” he advised. “They contribute to changes that are very, very important.”

In addition, creative contention can help your team avoid its own delusions of grandeur and dangerous self-agreement. “When I ran a $2 billion division of Honeywell, I saw how you could stifle debate just as easily as you could encourage it. I found groups there where the lack of debate was just deafening,” said former CEO Bill George, who is also author of bestselling Authentic Leadership. “In the beginning, people around there with strongly held views were labeled as prima donnas—sometimes their point of view was right and sometimes they were wrong, but you still needed their ideas and insights. Believe me, companies who don’t value it miss out because the alternatives go unexplored, and some of those alternatives wind up being chosen paths.”

George said his “ego and desires to be CEO occasionally got in the way while I was at Honeywell. I had 20,000 people working for me and I really wasn’t strongly emotionally connected with the defense business as an industry.” But when George landed the top job at Medtronic, a medical device creator and distributor, his heart was captured like no senior role had ever captured it before.

“I felt a switch turned on and I got engaged in ways I hadn’t in my entire career.” Instead of staying cozy in the corner suite at headquarters, he devoted much of his time in the field with the research physicians, sales team, and customers. He dressed in greens and peered over brain, heart, and spinal surgeries where doctors used his company’s products, personally witnessing more than 1,000 medical procedures.

“It’s okay not to find the right fit in your profession right away, but you have to keep trying and never settle. When you find the right fit, everything changes. And one of those things that change is the way you gain the confidence to really jumpstart the people around you. If you and your team are passionate and really believe in the cause, then you can’t help but have fireworks. It was the culture at Medtronic. If what you’re doing doesn’t turn you on, and if you’re holding back what you have to say or contribute, that is not okay. You’re not going to be willing to hear the bad news or the best ideas. You’re not going to be successful.”

As candy king William Wrigley once said, “When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.” Builders make contention not only acceptable, but required in a frequently held organizational gathering. One of the keys to making this debate a healthy one is a clear set of ground rules.

Staley recalled, “When I took over as CEO of Cargill, I wanted to define for the corporation a set of behaviors—to counter some very bad cultural habits we had gotten into. We got into a culture [where] you discussed, you made a decision, but you didn’t agree with it, [so] you wanted to let everybody know, ‘I didn’t agree with this decision,’ and you did everything you could to make sure it wasn’t successful. I tolerated that sometimes, so we would go back and spend a lot of time rediscussing, redeciding with other people how we made that decision. I hated that. I was involved in that several times. I said, ‘If I ever have enough say around here, enough authority, we’re going to stop this,’ because it’s just really a cancer.”

“So we said, ‘Discuss, Decide, Support,’ and when we walk out [of a meeting] we’ve made decisions we’re all going to support diligently. It’s okay to come back and say, ‘It’s not working;’ we’ll go back, we’ll change it, we’ll tweak it, we’ll make a major change. But we will spend our energy trying to make this work,” Staley said.

“We have all had to learn to practice behaviors and say, ‘No, it is not your turn to talk, Freddie, you’re listening right now,’” Staley laughed. At his meetings, “we all get poked in the ribs,” he said. “You have to be pretty thick skinned. But I think, at a minimum, I promise our employees that we get at least 95% of the ideas out on the table. Now, you may not agree with our decision, but I can assure you, we’ve pretty well thought it through. If people think you are well intended, they give you quite a bit of latitude and quite a bit of respect.”

Contention doesn’t become evil unless you ignore it. Builders see creative contention as part of a rich collaborative process that never ends—it inspires action day in and day out in an ever-changing environment.

“You have to have a sense of humor in a company like this,” Staley said. “We’re in 60 countries where we’re on the ground, and we’re parading in and out of probably another 100 [countries where Cargill does business]. Every day, there’s something going wrong. With BSE [Mad Cow Disease discovered in beef] two days before Christmas, we have a saying around here: ‘If we ever click on all cylinders, we probably couldn’t stand it.’ It’s never going to happen!” Managing a company of enormous global scope and complexity, Cargill uses creative contention to tackle inevitable daily challenges and get better at what they do every day.

Many companies hold “workout” sessions where it’s required to get all the issues out on the table.^[1] When people really commit themselves to frank discussion, these meetings can be an effective way to create an appropriate politically correct environment to do what’s usually politically incorrect at work. In other words, these meetings can be used to shift the focus from personality conflicts to the actual problems that need to be solved by providing a safer, more honest dialog without as much whining and name-calling. It provides a place to share the facts behind your worst fears and greatest hopes, rather than allowing them to continue to collide by accident.

The sooner you can do this, the better. Encouraging contention in the early stages of an initiative helps you discover where the problems are and fix them while they are small. Without a forum or time and place to attack and resolve the issues, relatively small problems can become counterproductive obsessions.

But, creating a time and place for contention just doesn’t mean having lots of meetings. Vernon Hill, CEO and founder of rapidly growing Commerce Bank, gives his team members contentious ‘panic buttons’ that they can hit at any time to improve the business. “We have a policy of no stupid rules. We have an active policy in-house to pay people to give us stupid rules to kill,” he said, pounding his fist on the table with a smile. “Fifty bucks to kill a stupid rule. Every computer in this company has a stupid-rule button on it. Any one of the team members can click on the button and give us a stupid rule to kill.” This policy creatively challenges Commerce Bank employees to make things better for customers and the company in a very empowering way.

You might think that a concert orchestra would be another example of a place where this kind of highly empowered, creative contention would be a high art. Indeed, the metaphor of a symphony led by a passionate director is a favorite cliché used in leadership training. The irony is that even some conductors will be the first to admit they are among the worst examples of a dictatorship, with players seething in silent resentment.

“An orchestra player is about the least empowered human being on the planet,” said Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. “In fact, in a study they did at Harvard University of the various professions, they discovered that the orchestra player came in just below prison guards in terms of job satisfaction, which is a sort of tragic observation. The reason is that they have no voice, they have no say in the matter.”

Zander had an epiphany when he turned 45. He realized that “the conductor of the orchestra is the only musician who doesn’t make a sound,” he laughed. “The meaning of ‘symphonia’ is ‘voices sounding together.’ So the job of the conductor is to make sure every voice is heard. Not only heard, but beautifully expressed. Because it is very easy to tell people ‘you shut up, and you shut up, and you shut up and then this person will be heard,’ but that is not what music is about at all. It’s about getting people to be fully expressed—passionately engaged, giving their all—and still enabling everybody else to be heard, too.”

“So I did something radical,” he said, looking mischievous. He “put this white sheet [of paper] out on the stand of every musician and, of course, at first most of them ignore it. Some don’t write anything, but many do. I read every single one of them. I encourage them to speak out. In fact, some people come into my rehearsals and say, ‘My God, it is like a Quaker meeting house here.’ I mean here is a pile of 35 of these white sheets and each one of them has something to say. Now, it may be a practical thing like ‘What did the composer mean at this moment?’ or ‘We seem to have a difference of opinion between the trumpets and the oboes about the articulation of this phrase.’ Those are very practical things and we can settle those and it is a good way of communicating because an orchestra player cannot speak to a conductor.”

Lack of open contention breeds cynicism, Zander insists. People will act as though they don’t “want to get involved in something that is going to end up in another disappointment. But if you keep talking to the passion, keep talking to the passion, keep talking to the passion, you will find that the cynics disappear. They aren’t there anymore because a cynic is just somebody protecting themselves against more disappointment.”

As people fail to have naked conversations, creative ideas become secret assets hoarded by team members rather than a shared resource making the team stronger. “It’s not my idea or your idea; it’s our idea,” Zander said. “Often, we treat all the people who could help us achieve our goals as competitors and get into a zero-sum-game survival mode.”

Whenever the team starts to see their interactions with each other as a matter of winning and losing points against each other, it spells disaster over the long haul, Zander cautioned. “You are either up or you’re down, and you’re worrying and you’re looking and you’re comparing and you’re maneuvering and you’re strategizing and trying to get people out of the way and getting a leg up on the next person. That entire whole neurotic world of ‘Am I good enough? Are they better?’ is all under the downward spiral thing. Most of us live most of our lives there. But vision doesn’t live there. Vision essentially lives in contribution to humanity. I mean it sounds very grand. But that’s what it is.”

Builders put their attention on making a contribution by doing something that also contributes to their own passionate soul. That’s their intention. It’s also the genius of the AND. When you focus your attention, keeping your thought and action aligned with meaning and staying clear about the intention, you can harvest contention. Passion is tense, by definition, just as pain and anger are, Alex von Bidder told us. He owns the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York, where many people claim there is more power in the room at noon than in the West Wing of the White House. In addition to running his business, von Bidder travels the nation and the world leading men’s therapy and spiritual development groups.

“When you join the tension (that’s the definition of contention—meaning “with tension”), then you can put contention to work for you right away before it works you over later.”

Candice Carpenter, founder of iVillage, agreed. “I always promoted an environment in which the exchanges were extraordinarily open and debate was highly favored,” she said. “The way I did that was by letting people debate ferociously with me as CEO. And so, people saw that everyone still got promoted, everyone still got all of the rewards—even if they told me they thought my idea was really stupid. And, that has a very freeing effect on an organization when people feel that while you respect everybody for their intellectual position, the intellectual exchange is without boundaries. You have to be able to take it, but it is worth it to see everybody kind of intellectually turned on, which they will be in that kind of environment.”

Carpenter loved one particular meeting where the brainstorming sounded like ice hockey. “We had a meeting, which had directors, vice presidents, senior vice presidents, and I was always there. And it was standing room only. No one ever missed this meeting. I had people begging me to get into this meeting in a world in which people had too many meetings. It was a strategic meeting, and the rule was, you walk in the door and the best idea wins. People loved this meeting, and the quality of work from the most junior people in that meeting was—I have never seen anything like it—because they knew that if their idea won and they had their argument together, and had done their homework, they would have direct influence on the direction the company went. It was very exciting.”

Not everyone on her senior team was crazy about contention. “Now, I did have people afraid of that in my senior team. I had some people feeling that we had the French revolution or something. It did scare some people who came out of very old-school companies. It scared them to death because it was like the inmates had been given the keys. But, I thought the results spoke for themselves. I mean, a lot of times, what happens is that the real intelligence percolating in the organization gets directly to the top. It doesn’t have to go through eight filters and get watered down. You get the insight in its pure form.”

In the final analysis, the point in all this is to be effective. Long-lasting achievers do feel zealous about the over-arching goal they have set for themselves. But what really surprised us—over and over again—is how their obsession to reach their goal didn’t prevent them from hearing and harvesting many different ideas about how to reach that outcome. That’s where the struggle is focused.

Greg Foster, chairman and president of filmed entertainment at IMAX, thinks this is what differentiates the average movie director from those who have potential for greatness. No matter how dogmatic a movie director is about his or her project from a creative standpoint, a director with great potential is extremely effective at capturing insights from other people and fueling creative contention, he said. “They listen. A lot of young directors love to hear themselves speak. The ones who aren’t afraid to ask for help and say, hey, I’ve got a really strong point of view on this, but there are some things I don’t know and I could really use your help. Those are the ones that you know are going to make it.”

Other people’s assertions are judgments based on experiences seen through the lens of their values and ThoughtStyles at one particular moment in time. Their perspectives may be more effective in reaching your ultimate goal right now or yours may be, but chances are that the combination of different views will more likely be the perfect alchemy to help you get where you would like to go over the long term. It’s the genius of the AND, not the tyranny of the OR.

“Normally, what people are trained to do is to be right and if possible to make the other person wrong,” conductor Ben Zander sighed. “When you raise your finger up and point at them, saying you ‘need to, you ought, you should, you must,’ it closes down every imaginative bone in the body.” When you have to be right with your team, it’s like pulling the plug: You can see the light in everyone’s eyes go dark.

“When you feel that you’re making a contribution, that’s when you get the shining eyes—when we get up in the morning and we live that,” Zander added.

“It’s all about shining eyes.”