How Leaders Can Encourage Real Debate

“We welcome dissent here.” Executives and volunteer leaders love to say that, understanding that it’s important to include debate and fresh ideas.

But including isn’t the same thing as welcoming. Like an “open door” policy where the boss is only open to a certain kind of interruptions, inviting debate can sometimes be a pro forma exercise before following through on a leader’s predetermined path. 

A thoughtful piece in Stanford Social Innovation Review, “Teaching Disagreement Is Leadership Work  (opens in a new tab),” speaks to that challenge and offers some advice about how to move beyond rubber-stamping-with-room-for-disagreement” into something more authentic. The authors’ main 

point is that dissent is a deliberate practice, not an agenda item. “Disagreement does not emerge fully formed, nor does it improve simply because leaders grant team members permission to speak up,” they write. “People learn how to disagree by observing what leaders reward, ignore, or subtly discourage.”

As a first step, they recommend that leaders have a clear sense of what their people value. It may be that younger staffers and volunteers come at a problem with very different perspectives than experienced hands; surfacing those distinctions may surface disagreement, but it also frames a discussion around what everybody considered important. 

The process also helps orient the conversation around the team/volunteer’s broader organizational goals, not their hobby horses. The structure demands that participants ask “ whether, by voicing their concerns, they intend to further the goals and work of a broader collective…or their own.”

But more than creating the environment where people can sensibly and safely create an environment for meaningful disagreement, leaders also need to be prepared to open a discussion about the rifts that disagreement create. “Welcoming dissent” isn’t healthy or even particularly helpful if all it does is let frustrations fester. The SSIR authors emphasize the importance of repair as key to team relationships. “Leaving these moments unaddressed allows tension to accumulate, making future disagreements more difficult and personal,” they write. “Rather than asking, ‘How do we move on?’ leaders should ask, ‘What would it take to repair the relationship?’”

A few years back, a National Association of Corporate Directors report on boardroom culture (opens in a new tab) put a spotlight on one organization that distinguishes between “consensus” and “alignment.” Consensus is the overall agreement around a decision; alignment is the acknowledgement that there is disagreement and dissent, but that the group has incorporated those disagreements in healthy ways. In light of the SSIR article, that means doing more than just nodding at the differences; it means working to understand the value systems underneath them, and what kind of trust-building is required to truly move on.

That’s not an easy process to go through, especially when association volunteer groups rotate new people every year, changing the cultural dynamic. But the risks of not engaging in the process are substantial, the SSIR authors note: “Without the ability to engage with disagreement constructively, governance becomes performative, systems become punitive, alignment becomes coercive, and culture fractures under strain.” Disagreement either bubbles under the surface and turns toxic, or it gets voiced and addressed. Which environment would you prefer to be in as a leader?