Conflict Debt?
Harvard Business Review in its article "An Exercise to Help Your Team Feel More Comfortable with Conflict" , discussed the idea of "conflict debt" and how it can harm your team or organization... Rather than working through the conflicts that will help our organizations move forward, we duck, dodge, and defer them. The result is that most of us find our teams up to our eyeballs in conflict debt . Conflict debt is the sum of all undiscussed and unresolved issues that stand in the way of progress. Conflict debt can be as minor as withholding the constructive feedback that would allow your colleague to do a better job and as profound as continually deferring the strategic decision about when to scale your new product line. Paying down the conflict debt on your team is critical, but it won’t be easy. The problem is that your team likely lacks both the skills and the mindset to use conflict productively. One reason for that is that we’re biol...