Managing Leadership^®

This isn’t all that easy, because most people fall into it unawares. Groups tend to self-select those who are of like mind, and to force out, like viruses, those who aren’t. It’s a natural process with built-in rationale; we don’t want in our midst nay-sayers, negativity, non-team players, and the like. It all makes pretty good sense.

But it can be poison. Often, the disagreement you confront is not arbitrary, but represents healthy diversity dedicated as strongly as you to accomplishing the same goals. Sometimes, even when it is arbitrary, it can still serve your purposes.

I’ll give you a fairly extreme example of this, to help highlight the main points: I was once involved in a project of vital importance to my organization, which required our moving into what for us turned out to be uncharted conceptual territory (we hadn’t realized this, at first). Once we broke the intellectual code, we began to generate some good, inventive ideas for advancing our cause in this area.

Except for one of our members. He was unable to make the perceptual transition necessary to accurately understanding and dealing with the new terrain of our endeavor. Aware that he was not getting it, and was starting to be cut out of the herd for that failing, he became increasingly contrary, criticizing our proposals with what we saw as infuriating nit-picking.

However, for all that he couldn’t bring himself to countenance what he sincerely felt was a dangerously unconventional approach, he was quite intelligent, with a sharp eye for detail and the cascading effects of discrete events. So, despite the real drain he was on our energy, I resisted suggestions that we remove or completely marginalize him.

Instead, we made sure to present our proposals to him. He devastated them both with his unpleasant ill-will and his incisive assessment of their practicality. We then reviewed his criticisms, dismissed those that were irrelevant, addressed those that were vital weaknesses we – lacking his habit of thought – had missed, and then re-presented the proposals to him until our plan withstood his assaults.

The result was proposals that were approved without dissent by the top boss, and that also turned out to be of signal importance to the overall fortunes of the organization. In retrospect, it is clear that our outfit’s results would have been dangerously different had we not only not conceived of our proposals, but also had we not subjected them to contrasting – and even hostile – opinion.

Diversity can be difficult for your team. But its lack can be devastating for your entire enterprise. Open your decision-making process to it. Those decisions that survive the exposure will undoubtedly be more robust and healthy for it.

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My thanks to Robert May for his excellent piece on this topic posted at Businesspundit.com, which served to bring to mind for me the topic of today’s essay. Please stop over and view Rob’s insightful article.

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