Stoke disagreement

Don't you love it when you have an important issue to discuss with your team. You're in a meeting, you bring up that issue. And everybody agrees right away. So you can just quickly move on to the next decision.

I hate that.

It sounds great. But I had a client say to me once, and I'm stealing it from him. So thank you, Bill, you know who you are, that if you have six people in a room, and they all agree, you have five, too many people in that room.

The challenge is, when you agree quickly, the deep discussion, the important discussion, the different perspectives you might need to take on the issue never happen, because you make that decision too quickly.

So as a coach, and I suggest you as a leader, sometimes we need to stoke disagreement, especially when it seems like everybody's on the same page.

I recently had an example with a client I was working with, who were about to make a really big decision that was going to triple the size of their business. Sounds exciting. It was exciting. But my sense is they were moving forward on something that could make or break their company way too quickly. So what I had to do is add a stoke disagreement.

How did I do that?

I did that by asking difficult questions from about six or seven different perspectives.

How would it impact people?
How would it impact cashflow?
How would it impact their culture?
How would it impact their relationship with their vendors?
How would it impact their position with their vendors from every perspective and I stoked disagreement.

Now that is not a bad thing. That's a good thing.

Because by stoking disagreement, we took what was about to be about a 12 minute conversation. And we wound up spending the next two hours digging into that make or break company issue. And making a much clearer decision and creating much more important, productive, thorough plans to make sure that they were moving forward in the right way.

If you have six people in the room, and they all agree, you have five too many people in the room, what are you doing to stoke disagreement?

Not for every decision, I'm not telling you to go be a pain in the butt and stoke disagreement everywhere. But if you've got something that's important to your business, important to your people, important to your strategy, and it looks like you're gonna breeze through it really quickly.

What are you doing to stoke disagreement to make sure that you are hitting that issue from several different angles several different perspectives.