On Sunday I met with our University of Revolutionary Living (URL) teachers. It was an intense meeting where we wrestled through what God was calling us to accomplish with the classes. I left so excited to see people willing to passionately debate and challenge each other.
Patrick Lencioni in his book, The FIVE Dysfunctions of a Team, talks about two things necessary for an effective and healthy team: trust and conflict. I saw this at work with the URL teachers. Here’s an excerpt from the book:
Trust lies at the heart of a functioning, cohesive team. Without it, teamwork is all but impossible… In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group… By building trust, conflict is possible because team members do not hesitate to engage in passionate and sometimes emotional debate.
All great relationships, the ones that last over time, require productive conflict in order to grow. This is true in marriage, parenthood, friendship, and certainly business. Unfortunately, conflict is considered taboo in many situations, especially at work (and I would add at church!)…
It is important to distinguish productive ideological conflict from destructive fighting and interpersonal politics. Ideological conflict is limited to concepts and ideas, and avoids personality-focused, mean-spirited attacks. However, it can have many of the same external qualities of interpersonal conflict - passion, emotion, and frustration - so much so that an outside observer might easily mistake it for unproductive discord. But teams that engage in productive conflict know that the only purpose is to produce the best possible solution in the shortest amount of time. They discuss and resolve issues more quickly and completely than others, and they emerge from heated debates with no residual feelings or collateral damage, but with an eagerness and readiness to take on the next important issue.
Ironically, teams that avoid ideological conflict often do so in order to avoid hurting team members’ feelings, and then end up encouraging dangerous tension… It is also ironic that so many people avoid conflict in the name of efficiency, because healthy conflict is actually a time saver. Contrary to the notion that teams waste time and energy arguing, those that avoid conflict actually doom themselves to revisiting issues again and again without resolution.
Our need as Christians isn’t to run from conflict with those you trust, but be willing to wrestle through challenges to find the best solutions. Spend some time thinking about that!
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