Making Space to Disagree - Meg Douglas Howie

This resource first appeared in issue #31 on 03 Jul 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Other, Managing A Team: Other, Becoming A Manager: Coaching

I know I keep hammering on this, but it’s such an important topic, and people keep writing good articles about it.

In our line of work our team members are generally experts or becoming experts in various areas, and if they’re not comfortable speaking up and disagreeing — with each other, or maybe more importantly, with us — not only are you losing incredibly valuable input, you’re also running the risk of eventually losing them.

There’s a number of techniques in here for soliciting input in early stages of discussions that avoid either-ors or active disagreement - ranking options, placing optoins on a two-dimensional spectrum, and approaches that are more like brainstorming. That allows people to weight options or express pros and cons differently. And as a benefit, the conversation automatically focuses on the more subtle/interesting tradeoffs rather than on the parts where there’s consensus and so no further conversation is really needed.