How to create a space where people say what matters
Most management teams do not avoid conflict because they are weak. They avoid it because conflict feels costly, and the space around them is not strong enough to carry it.
That fear is rational. Conflict carries the risk of exposure, escalation, or unintended tension. No one wants to be the person who slows things down or makes things uncomfortable. And in many teams, the structure rewards silence over candour. Disagreement is often seen as disloyalty, or as a distraction from delivery.
As the leader of a management team, your job is not to demand courage. Your job is to build the arena where disagreement can happen without damage, and to support the individuals who bring real concerns forward. You create the structure. You anchor it in purpose. And you make sure that no one stands alone when they do the hard thing.
A functional team does not need less conflict. It needs the ability to use conflict well.
Why people avoid conflict
Even experienced leaders hesitate before saying, “I don’t think this will work,” or, “I see this differently.” That hesitation is not weakness. It is usually the result of experience. Most people have learned what happens when they raise something unpopular in the wrong setting. They have seen meetings drift away from real tension and land on smoother ground. Over time, they learn to stay quiet.
Eventually, people stop bringing what they really think. The meeting feels aligned, but it is only aligned on paper. The risk lives elsewhere. Problems go unnamed, or are phrased too vaguely to act on. Trust is maintained on the surface, but underneath, no one is sure what anyone actually believes.
This is how management teams lose sharpness. They do not fail all at once. They flatten. Slowly.
Supporting the conversation before it happens
Creating space for conflict is not just about what happens inside the meeting. It also depends on what happens before it.
I remember one case from a content group. One of the leads came to me, frustrated and angry. Her team had been doing work for production units that kept changing direction. Content was created, then scrapped. She felt their time was being wasted, and she blamed the production manager. She called him lazy. Unimaginative.
I had spoken with him recently on another topic, and I recognised what she was running into. He was not indifferent. He was protective. He was deeply concerned that any soft request from outside the project would undermine the authority of his producers. His instinct was to block it.
They were both telling the truth. But neither of them could speak in a way the other could hear.
So I worked with each of them. I told her, if you want to influence this group, you need to be concrete. You need to bring proposals that can be evaluated on their own terms, without undermining the system they’re defending. I told him, if something is raised with evidence and impact, your job is not to shut it down. It’s to involve your people and evaluate it together.
The result wasn’t dramatic. It was better. The content team proposed an extension to pre-production. It was clear, specific, and measurable. The producers could see the value. The project managers could assess it. And a real conversation finally took place.
What it looks like in a real moment
I also remember a meeting after weeks of chasing a technical issue. We had tried every diagnostic, tested every theory, and nothing was working. The team was still engaged, but we were going nowhere.
At the start of that meeting, I walked in and threw a pen to the floor. I was visibly upset. And I said, “We’re off. This is not working. Whatever you’re doing right now—stop doing it. It isn’t leading anywhere. Try something else.”
It was a harsh thing to say. I didn’t plan it. But it was true.
The room went quiet. Not in fear. Just in recognition. No one flinched. People looked at each other, and it felt like relief. Someone had said what they were already thinking.
That moment reset the conversation. People stopped defending ideas and started thinking again. We changed our angle. Eventually, we discovered the fault wasn’t even in our own code. It was a flaw in the Java interpreter we had licensed.
We got there because the team was able to absorb the interruption. That kind of shift only happens in an environment that can carry tension without breaking.
But I’ve also seen the opposite.
In a leadership summit in Paris, my team had been working on a technical framework we believed could improve delivery across projects. One of the other managers—someone closer to infrastructure than product—stood up during the discussion and accused us of interfering with his codebase and undermining his team.
It wasn’t a technical complaint. It was a political move. The accusation was made publicly, in front of the vice president and the entire leadership group.
My first instinct was to deflect. To nod politely and offer to look into it. But I didn’t. I answered clearly. I laid out the facts. I made it clear that if something in his area was broken, the responsibility was his—not ours.
The room reacted. Some thought I was too direct. Others saw what was really happening. Either way, it shook the group.
But it didn’t have to. The only reason the conflict arrived in that form was because there had been no earlier space to raise it. No expectation. No forum. It came out late, and sharp, and in a tone no one could ignore.
If you don’t create space for tension early, it will find its way into the room anyway—just not on your terms.
How to design for this
If you want productive conflict, you cannot rely on individual bravery. You have to make disagreement normal.
You do that by building it into the rhythm of the team. You create space for questions that have no resolution yet. You ask, “What are we avoiding here?” And when someone raises a concern, you thank them. Not to make a moment of it, but to show that it’s expected.
Many teams use structure to help. Some assign a challenger in each meeting. Some keep a backlog of skipped topics. Some hold premortems where the team asks, “What will we regret not raising now?” Others involve the full group, not just the expert, in naming what might still go wrong.
These are not fixes. They are practices. They make friction visible and survivable.
And like anything in leadership, this does not hold itself. If you don’t reinforce it, the team will revert. Rituals get dropped. Smoothness creeps back in. You have to re-earn the space over time.
Two real-world examples
A version of this played out inside Uber. During its growth years, engineers began avoiding discussions about technical risk. The pressure to deliver was high, and conflict too often led to blame. People stayed quiet. The result was avoidable failure—poor design choices, reliability issues, and talent churn.
Eventually, the company changed its internal expectations. Blameless postmortems became standard. Engineers were given defined rituals for surfacing concerns early. Risk discussions were reframed as part of delivery, not a challenge to it. Over time, the silence broke. Product cycles recovered, and trust returned between layers of the company.
This wasn’t a cultural fix. It was structural. And it worked because the new system no longer punished candour.
And it’s not only about avoiding failure. When space for honesty is built in from the beginning, teams perform better. Google’s internal study, known as Project Aristotle, looked at hundreds of teams to understand what made the best ones work. The single strongest predictor of high performance wasn’t expertise, tenure, or even clarity of goals. It was psychological safety. Teams that spoke up early, challenged each other, and raised concerns without fear consistently outperformed teams that kept the peace.
It’s not softness. It’s structure. And it makes the work better.
Alignment after conflict
You know conflict has worked when the team commits to what follows. Not quietly. Not with hesitation. But fully.
That is what this space is for. You bring your view. You raise what matters. You help the team think. And when the group decides, you align. You do not second-guess the result in the hallway. You do not wait for the next meeting to reopen the topic. You carry the outcome with the others.
If a management team cannot do that, it is not leading. It is negotiating.
This sometimes needs to be said. Especially in new teams. You name it: “This is where the disagreement happens. But once we commit, we carry it together.” You model it. You reinforce it. And when someone breaks it, you address it. Not harshly. Just clearly.
What it feels like when it works
Handled well, conflict is not destructive. It is productive. It sharpens thinking. It shortens feedback loops. It brings the right problems into the open at the right time.
And when it works, the meeting feels different.
The tone becomes serious, not tense. People speak earlier. They ask sharper questions. They are not afraid of being wrong, because the team is not performing. It is solving.
When a management team knows how to carry conflict well, the meeting becomes dynamic. It becomes the place where the work moves. Everyone brings their role, their competence, and their judgment. And the conversation finally starts to matter.
One book, if you want to build this into your team
If there is one book worth reading on this topic, it is Amy Edmondson – The Fearless Organization. It is not about harmony. It is about honesty. Edmondson gives clear, well-researched guidance on how to create psychological safety inside teams—not as a concept, but as a working condition. The book shows how candour makes teams faster, smarter, and more accountable, and what leadership behaviours actually create that shift. It is serious, useful, and written for people doing real work.
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