Last week, I concluded what will likely be just a first installment of The Leader’s Edge multipart series. After all, the challenges of leadership in today’s ever-evolving business landscape feel endless. 

If you’ve just tuned in, I invite you to read back through the whole series, in which we followed a cohort of leaders from the fictionalized Horizons Tech organization as they engaged in a leadership development program. Through the lens of leaders like Mike, Vijay, Amir, and Angie, we explored the challenges and growth potential of expanding your leadership range and what we here at TeamCatapult refer to as “communicative competence” —  a foundational skill for leaders today who are navigating the high stakes of uncertainty and change.

Today, I thought I’d wrap up with just a few thoughts, knowing that there will likely be more to come.

Behavior change is hard

When facing new or recurring challenges, we tend to default to doing the things we already know how to do. We reach for approaches that we have reached for before and that feel familiar, even when we know they’ve only gotten us so far in the past. But this tendency toward the familiar can manifest as the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. At least, that’s the well-worn and always resonant definition passed down from Albert Einstein. Who are we to disagree?

How often have we each been in a high-stakes situation, realizing that we were worried, scared, frustrated, anxious, or exhausted from continuing to experience the same results over and over? Knowing that we likely needed to do something different, yet having absolutely no idea what we could do differently?

Changing behavior is tricky. We each have well-worn patterns of behavior that exist for a really good reason. Identity-forming stories from our past sit just below our behavior — stories that form the basis for what we believe about ourselves, what we believe about others, what we believe is possible, and what we believe about how to get there. These stories are why we do what we do. They tell us that our behavior is appropriate to the situation — and it’s hard to catch sight of where this might not be the case, especially because our stories and current behaviors have often served us well. In fact, they are often what have gotten us the successes we have today. Our stories are very self-reinforcing like that. 

But our inability to see the invisible costs of our actions — including our impact on our team dynamic — can lead to toxic team cultures, individual burnout, and product deliveries that fall far short of their potential. 

As leaders, so much of our work is less about knowing all the answers and so much more about working with other humans. From individual contributors to CEOs, working with other humans is how we move work along and bring about change in today’s complex organizations. 

So when we start having the same conversations over and over again, or it feels like we’re not making headway where we expect to, our tendency will be to resort to a tool or technique to help us improve. Like using dot voting when a team is challenged by decision making or RACI charts for confusion about roles and responsibilities. But repetitive or stuck conversations and frustrating situations are an invitation to look at behavior — not tools. 

More often than not, tools like dot voting, RACI charts, or prioritization models make us feel like we’re moving forward. But they aren’t doing anything to address the underlying issues that led us to this point, and they certainly won’t prevent us from reaching the same kinds of impasses again.

We need to be looking at behavior change — both our own and in the system-level dynamics — to find the answers about what might be holding us back. 

This work is not for the faint of heart. It’s not an easy solution. It requires space and reflection. It requires us to take an unflinching look inward, at ourselves. It requires us to honor the good parts of our behaviors as well as to acknowledge and course correct the parts that have served us well in the past but have started holding us back. And, most importantly, the work of behavior change requires us to engage in effective and productive conversations — ones where we can talk about the most difficult experiences, share authentically about what’s happening for each of us, and co-create a way forward. 

Behavior change in oneself and on teams is rarely quick, and it’s almost never straightforward. The kinds of conversations that cultivate it require time, space, and going slower. Yet like any worthwhile activity, they are a practice — meaning you can get better at them, they can become easier with time, and they can even become part of the culture. Communicative competence and the ability to hold effective, productive conversation can, over time, simply become the “way we do things around here.” 

As the skills of communicative competence build and grow, conversations can take less time and yet be more meaningful than any conversation you’ve had in the past. They can propel you forward rather than hold you back. They can lighten the load of the collective group rather than be heavy for one person. 

As participants in TeamCatapult’s leadership programming can attest, building the profound skill set of communicative competence takes a willingness to stay in it — but it is always worth it.

Responding in the face of difference

So much of behavior change has to do with how we encounter and navigate difference — difference between ourselves and others, differences of opinion on our teams, different perspectives on a situation, different models for communication,  different belief systems about how people should engage and how things should get done, etc. 

When we encounter difference, we have a choice about how we respond. 

• We can exit the process or conversation 
• We can ignore it and move the process or conversation toward something more familiar and comfortable 
• We can choose to engage with the difference and be curious

Often, leaders and teams default to the first two options — exit or avoid. And when they choose to engage, they often try to overcome differences by learning some new content, tool, theory, or strategy. 

But more often than not, the thing we need to learn is more about how we show up and the behavior that we express — specifically, how to engage with curiosity while staying in conversations that can be difficult and uncomfortable. 

Facing difference has been a major theme of The Leader’s Edge series. In Part 2, for example, Mike was majorly challenged by a different perspective on the value of time. He thought he would gain time by bailing on the program — and chances are, he might tell you that he did, indeed, gain back the hours he had set aside for the program. But it was likely a false sense of achievement. What it likely gained was actually time for repeating the same conversations and navigating the same group communication patterns over and over again. Doing the same thing on repeat while expecting different results.

Mike’s impatience and unwillingness to invest time in a different approach to leading his team cost him the opportunity to see the role that he was playing in colluding with the organizational pattern of firefighting problems and applying bandaid responses to endemic issues. While Mike had been rewarded for his firefighting strengths, it was no doubt taking a personal toll on him. Firefighting without addressing the underlying communication patterns and interpersonal dynamics is like being on a treadmill. Temporary or stop-gap solutions don’t solve ongoing issues. Nothing changes down the line. Nothing improves in the future. 

If you are a leader who’s unwilling to take the time to cultivate behavior change by exploring your relationship to difference, you’re asking your people to join you on an endless treadmill loop that will never quite get you where you want to go. 

In Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5, Vijay and Amir struggled with difference, too. For Vijay, it was how to ensure he was actually inviting different perspectives to be voiced on his team — something he inherently felt the value in. He was ready to meet different viewpoints with open curiosity, but hadn’t realized that his team dynamic might be preventing them from being surfaced in the first place. 

Amir, meanwhile, had to face his demons head on so that he could become more comfortable with hearing different perspectives and not feeling them as an attack on his own self worth. For his entire career, he had spent a lot of time and energy steering conversations and setting the team’s direction without ever leaving room for disagreement or discussion. It was far more comfortable for him to expend the energy of directing the team’s sails all on his own than it was to hear that his team might not agree with him.

As a leader once said to me, “When someone holds up a mirror for you and, without judgment, asks you to take a look at what you are doing and how it’s contributing to issues you’ve been blaming on others or on the situation, it can be the most confronting experience of your life.” They continued, “But the gifts will be in the new actions that you can take from that new awareness the next time that pattern shows up.” 

Communicative competence + leadership range = real change

It is no secret that organizations today are suffering from a range of endemic issues, from quiet quitting and challenging transitions to a lack of diversity and recurrent downturns/layoffs.

These are, in essence, symptoms of an overarching issue: organizational culture. As I stated in the beginning of this series, investing in leadership development is critical if organizations want to course correct the trajectory of upheaval and change, low morale, teams not reaching their potential, late deliveries, and subpar outcomes. Because when it comes to organizational culture, leaders bring the weather. 

This is certainly what Angie discovered in Part 6. Her participation in the Horizons Tech leadership development program yielded incalculable value to her as a leader and enabled her to create a sea change on her teams. She had been trying to do it all, and, somewhere along the line, she had become the kind of leader she never wanted to be — and that no one wants to have. Without meaning to, she had been slowly eroding her team’s confidence in their ability to find their own solutions and found herself in the overwhelming and unsustainable position of having to micromanage every step to delivery. 

For her, the program’s emphasis on building communicative competence enabled her to navigate and cultivate group dynamics with a much greater sense of self-awareness and a substantially higher ability to “read the room.” For the first time, she was able to facilitate authentic conversations even in the midst of high-stakes conversations. She was able to help her team tap into their collective intelligence to solve problems more effectively and efficiently without needing or expecting her to step in at every step of the team process. 

In short, she was able to develop a team that produced more effectively and efficiently than it had been able to previously by empowering them in their own process:

• They felt individually and collectively valued for their ideas and contributions
• They felt more confident in their shared ability to deliver outcomes they were proud of
• They were excited to come to work, saw themselves as team players, and felt more invested in their organization

And where Angie had previously felt overwhelmed and constantly panicked in her leadership role, she now felt grounded, capable, and prepared to move fluidly through what she came to recognize as her “leadership range.” 

The “What Now?” Action Plan and Takeaways

More than anything else, my hope is that The Leader’s Edge has inspired you to look at the ‘problems’ within your team differently and take a different approach. But sometimes it’s hard to know where to start.

So, first and foremost, I invite you to connect with us here at TeamCatapult to explore options for bringing our team into your organization. Our programming is designed for leaders and leadership teams just like yours — so let’s get the conversation started!

[ Connect with TeamCatapult ] 

We also have an upcoming Masterclass — a 3-hour diagnostic lab designed for team leaders. Titled “Diagnosing Your Team’s Dysfunction— and the Role You Play In It,” this Masterclass promises to be eye-opening and game-changing. You can join as an individual, so we look forward to seeing you there! 

And don’t forget that my newest workbook, Building a Model for Leading Change, was designed with you in mind — you can always pick it up and start there.

For now, I want to offer you some key takeaways and foundational concepts from the work that Angie, Vijay, and Amir engaged with over the course of The Leader’s Edge. You can take these with you, starting today, and see what shifts as a result. 

• Use repetitive and/or stuck conversations as a signal that something needs to shift in the conversation. Be curious about what it might be and what part you might be playing in the pattern. 
• Create space for more dialogue and less monologue — believe that effective and open conversations can give us what we need.
• Establish connection before moving into content. People need to get present in the moment, both in relationship to the topic and to the group as a whole. Use a check-in process as a way to get everyone’s voice into the space and warm up. 
• Welcome opposition — even when it feels scary. You can either invite the opposition in the room or it will impact you outside the room. Unvoiced opposition manifests in all sorts of unproductive ways, so your best course of action is to make space for it in the moment.
• Shift your attention from having the answers to creating the environment where the group can find its own solutions.
• Pay attention to relationships — it’s a “must” for effective leadership and should not be dismissed as “group therapy.” If you’re not paying attention to relationships as a leader, you’re not leading. 

Don’t forget: there are no silver bullets, and communicative competence is not the work of a day. Keep going, engage openly and with curiosity, and be kind with yourself and others.

We look forward to connecting with you when you’re ready, and don’t forget to keep an eye out for future installations of The Leader’s Edge!

When I stand in a room full of senior leaders and ask, “Who here values collaboration?”, every hand goes up. When I ask, “Who here collaborates with their team?”, every hand will most likely stay up. But when I ask, “Who here seeks the answers to the most difficult and complex issues directly from their team?”, the dynamic shifts. If people are being really honest, the number of hands raised will go down — by a lot. 

Here’s the thing: when our teams raise issues or challenges that are happening in the organization, it’s really easy for leaders to get hooked into immediate problem solving. As leaders, you’re likely used to being looked at for answers, and you may have a lot invested in being the one to come up with solutions.

But it’s important to remember three things: 

1. Not every issue, as it’s first described or identified, is the real issue 
2. Complex cultural challenges rarely have simple solutions
3. Your team likely has the answer it needs — it just needs a group culture that will enable it to emerge 

It takes trust, and it takes time

If you’re just tuning in, welcome to the Leader’s Edge, a multi-part story exploring the challenges and growth potential of expanding your leadership range and communicative competence. 

Throughout this series, we’ve been following a cohort of leaders from the fictionalized Horizons Tech organization as they engage in a leadership development program. The program was designed to increase their ability to navigate behavioral change and communicate effectively amidst complex interpersonal dynamics — in other words, their “communicative competence.”

For the last few episodes, we’ve been following along with various leaders in the program as they wrestled with their complex relationships and patterns around inviting opposition from their teams. 

This week, we’re joining Angie, who found her edge as a leader in the space of collaboration.

Like so many of the leaders I poll when giving talks and workshops, Angie would absolutely have raised her hand when asked if she values collaboration. But, if she were being honest, she would be the first to admit that she does not actively collaborate with her team. Moreover, until her participation in the leadership program at Horizons Tech, she would likely not have realized that her unwillingness to collaborate with her team was to the detriment of her team’s productivity and the quality of their work product. 

In fact, prior to her participation in the leadership development program, she generally felt very positive about her personal problem-solving abilities. 

Over the course the six-month-long program, she learned more than she would have thought possible about how to build trust — trust in herself to revisit some of her assumptions about what make a strong leader, trust in her team to be able to work through difficult conversations, and trust that taking the time to develop a high-functioning group dynamic is worth every second.

What follows is the story of how she learned that you have to go slow to go fast — and bringing the answers is rarely the solution.

Personal Stories Take a Toll on Teams 

During the course of the leadership development program, Angie had many powerful opportunities to experience how valuable conversations about process, behavior change, and interpersonal communication can be in team settings. 

We first met Angie in Part 2 of The Leader’s Edge, when she made the decision to stick with the program despite her initial skepticism. In that episode, her colleague Mike had voiced concern that the time spent in workshops was taking away from his other priorities. At the time, she had felt similarly. 

In fact, Angie’s entire M.O. was wanting to take action, move quickly, and get things done. Angie was a “fixer” — she was known in the organization for stepping in and solving complex issues. Part of what enabled her to do this was her ability to look at a problem, identify a solution, and get her team to execute on it. And that’s what she had consistently been rewarded for throughout her career.

The first time she questioned this leadership style was Day 1 of the leadership program, when she heard a story from another participant about how, at a previous organization, they’d been on a team where the leader had displayed these kinds of patterns and beliefs. He described the negative impact this approach had had on the team’s dynamic, recalling how disempowering it felt to just be told what to do. 

He described the team he’d been on feeling frustrated, unheard, creatively stifled, and increasingly burned out.

The whole story took Angie aback. Shocked her, really. She realized that when her team seemed behind the ball in terms of delivering, she would just tell them what to do and how to do — and that would be the end of the conversation.

She never took the time to ask what was going on for them — what they thought the problem was or what they thought might solve it. Notably, Angie was not uncomfortable with hearing pushback or feedback. In fact, she valued feedback in principle — she just didn’t think it was worth the time to solicit feedback when she could just apply a solution and see results.

That said, when Angie really thought about how she’d been feeling in her role — a process she explored through journaling throughout the duration of the leadership development program — she realized that her approach was taking a toll on her. Her team had grown exponentially over the past year, and she was spending a lot of her time in high stakes — worried about meeting deadlines and keeping her team aligned when it felt like all the pressure was on her to have the answers. 

Moreover, she was beginning to realize that her propensity for swift and fast action made it hard for her team to give her feedback or suggest different ideas. Generally, she didn’t worry about — as long as they got results, everything was okay, right? — but she hadn’t really considered the invisible costs.

What Angie was now seeing more clearly was a dynamic in which she would shut down or be dismissive of others opinions or perspectives, simply because she wanted to keep moving at a fast pace. As a result, she was missing ideas from others about how to make things better. The team just stayed in constant action, rarely pausing to take time to reflect or invite constraint, concern, or opposition to the direction Angie was setting.

Over time, Angie’s belief that she had to have the answers and her unwillingness to slow down and hear alternatives was making a major impact on her team: she was short-circuiting the team’s potential to innovate and find better solutions, she was leaving the team feeling unheard and unmotivated.

And, boy oh boy, she was heaping an unsustainable (and unproductive) amount of pressure on herself as a leader. By onboarding the role of “sole decision maker,” she felt increasingly responsible for bringing more energy and determination to keep it up across a quickly growing team. She felt like it was just her doing all the work, and she realized that it was, in a sense, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

She was overwhelmed, it felt like it was her against the world with so much of the burden of her department resting on her shoulders. And as the department scaled and became even larger, the burden of “being the hero who gets things done and has all the answers” was drowning her. 

These were the invisible costs of her leadership style.

As the leadership development program progressed, Angie came to understand that this was an unsustainable or scalable path. The wisdom of the group was being lost, and, as a team, they could only ever rise to the best that Angie had to offer. 

Letting go of having all the answers 

One thing that Angie noticed in her leadership development program is that her team conversations were nothing like the conversations she and her peers were having in their sessions. The program cohort even talked about the topic of exclusion and bias in the company and how it was showing up in their work — a topic was never talked about in such a real, candid, and authentic way at Horizons Tech. In that conversation, she noticed, everyone was able to name their different experiences: some thought that their focus on D&I was all talk and no real action, others shared very personal stories of where they had experienced exclusion, and others shared that they were sick of talking about it and felt wrongly accused of not being inclusive. Not only had very honest perspectives been brought into the conversation, but no one was judging anyone else for saying what they really thought or expecting one person to have all the answers. 

They were simply asking curious questions and talking with one another — and that was probably the most remarkable difference Angie was experiencing in terms of how their conversations flowed. Because real, hard issues were brought up in the group, and because they discussed their perspectives openly and fully, she found her own thinking on topics changing — sometimes right in the middle of the conversation! It felt freeing to talk with others like this. 

For once, she didn’t feel like she needed to have all the answers. In fact, it felt like the most productive thing she could do in these conversations was ask questions!

Soon, her purpose in the leadership development program became to grow her leadership range, take more responsibility for her impact on her team, and figure out a way to help her team have the kinds of necessary and collaborative conversations that she was finding so impactful with the leadership program. 

It wasn’t easy. 

After the second phase of the program, Angie came to realize that her tendency to solve problems was connected to some of her early memories growing up and being rewarded for “stepping up in her family system.” She was often praised for taking action — so much so that, as an adult, she was highly driven to “win or succeed at all costs.” In reflection, she could trace so many of her career promotions to her behavior of stepping forward and getting things done. 

It is always hard (and often uneven) work to shift the core beliefs that we hold and re-train the unproductive patterns and behaviors associated with them. Especially when we have been rewarded for them in the past! But Angie found that the more she understood about herself — and the more awareness she developed around her actions as a leader — the more change she was able to invite in herself and on her team. 

It took time, and it wasn’t always straightforward, but with her intentions set, she brought her new insights into her work with her team and saw their collective potential grow more than she could have imagined.

Meaningful change takes time, not tools

One morning, in the midst of her ongoing ah-ha realizations about her core beliefs and behaviors as a leader, Angie was presented with a new sticky challenge to an upcoming delivery. As she read through her email, that familiar sense of dread and overwhelm emerged. Immediately, she began crafting an email to her team telling them what they needed to do. 

But, as she got to the second paragraph, she stopped. “What am I doing?” she asked herself. “Here I go again! I’m solving the problem on my own.” 

She recalled one of the cornerstone concepts of her leadership development program (“Awareness precedes Choice precedes Change”) and she made a choice.

She deleted her draft email to the team and started a new one. Two of her team leaders were trained group facilitators and she decided she would ask them to pull together a facilitated meeting with the team. She described the challenge they were facing, and she asked them to design a session for the team to quickly brainstorm some solutions. 

As she requested, the team met and crafted an okay solution to the problem, but Angie recognized that there were still some holes. 

One of the team facilitators who had led the meeting, Jada, stopped by to talk with her about the meeting. “How are you feeling about the meeting outcome?” Jada asked.  

Angie needed to consider her response. She was known for her forthrightness and honesty, and she decided now was not the time to change that. So she said, “I’m feeling okay. It’s not really what I was hoping for. It feels like a surface-level solution, and I think we might be missing something really important if we move forward with this. I’m not sure why we don’t seem to be able to get to really thoughtful solutions in this team. I was really trying to turn this over to the team, but I’m left feeling like maybe I need to find some solutions to this problem on my own.”

Jada was a bit surprised by Angie’s response. Jada had a hypothesis about what might be happening, but she was not sure how much she could say to Angie and still keep her job. In fact, Jada had tried to give Angie feedback in the past, but it often felt like it was either not well received or just didn’t even register with Angie. 

But Angie seemed deflated, so Jada decided to give it a try. She asked, “Are you open to hearing some feedback about this?”

Angie replied, “Absolutely. You know you can say anything to me. I always want feedback.” 

Jada smiled, thinking about how different her experience of that had been in the past. Courageously, she decided to go with Angie’s stated intention anyway. She said, “Angie I believe you always have the team’s and the organization’s best interest in mind. And I know that being responsive and timely is a core value of yours. But I think that your desire for pace comes at the cost of creating some space for people to think more deeply together. We all know that you can grow impatient with longer conversations. I know this as well. When I was designing that session, I wanted to try some different things, but I was pretty sure you would get impatient. That’s why I just went with our old familiar process of asking people to brainstorm ideas on sticky notes and then voting to see which ones people agreed with most. I honestly think if I had designed a different process — one that invited more conversation instead of just the sticky notes and dot voting — we would have had a different conversation.” 

In that moment, Angie had yet another one of her insight moments — she’d been having so many recently! But here it was again: her value of pace was causing others to design processes that suited her preference, NOT processes that would foster better solutions. Ugh! 

In real time, she was starting to realize something pivotal: just how much influence leaders have in the systems they work in, and just how much teams and team dynamics calibrate to the standards and preferences — spoken and unspoken — of team leaders.

And she actually felt a sense of relief. She asked Jada, “Will you facilitate another meeting? And this time, will you design a process that you think will help us reach a better outcome?” Then, she remembered a strategy she’d learned about in her leadership development program. This seemed like a perfect time to try it out! She said, “You have my permission to ask me to sit out of the conversation and just listen. I promise I will show up with an open mind and willingness to give this as much time as the team needs.” 

It was a daunting moment, but she was putting into practice the realizations she’d been having about how to help bring real change in the team culture: 

• By focusing on creating the environment, the team would be able to find their own answers — they didn’t need (or want) her to bring all the solutions
• The team needed permission to speak honestly after such a long-established pattern of staying silent
• Together, they needed to build some trust that the team would not be punished for a mistake or voicing a different opinion
• Her team needed to know that she would support them — and that might sometimes looks like stepping to the sidelines 

In other words, she was implementing what the leadership program co-leaders called “creating a container” — and it was the thing that made the cohort conversations so rich and generative. 

Part of the program gave Angie access to a leadership coach for one-on-one individual coaching. At first, Angie hadn’t thought she’d need it, but by now she could see that it would likely be really valuable to have someone to think with about the changes she wanted to make in her leadership presence and approach. 

So she reached out to her assigned coach and set up bi-monthly coaching sessions. She booked them out for the next 3 months and made a personal commitment to show up to those sessions, regardless of whatever emergency came up at work. 

Sometimes, she caught herself feeling shocked that she was spending what felt like so much time on changing her approach to leadership. Sometimes she’d even feel resentful — after all, she’d been getting things done just fine before. Was this all really worth it?

But she stayed with it, and, over time, started to see big gains from small changes. 

• She asked one of her direct reports to facilitate a team restart for them where they would define how they wanted to work together
• They started every day with a check-in 
• She actively encouraged people to oppose her, and when someone did, she set her intention to listening and adapting based on different perspectives
• She addressed her tendency to go too fast by actively and intentionally slowing down conversations in some instances, and then only pick up the pace when all the relevant information seemed to be on the table

At first this process was painfully slow for Angie, but she could see herself developing range in her leadership, and she could see the team responding well as time went by.

• As a group, they were hearing a greater diversity of ideas and opinions — and the ideas that emerged only got stronger through the group conversations 
• They were addressing challenges before they became problems
• They were learning to collaborate with each other more effectively rather than only looking to Angie to have the answers
• They were becoming more innovative and efficient as a team 

This, Angie realized, is what it looks like to truly collaborate with one’s team. In fact, I have no doubt that if she were in one of my workshops today and I asked “Who here seeks the answers to the most difficult and complex issues directly from their team?”, she would be able to honestly and proudly keep her hand raised.

Do you seek the answers to the most difficult and complex issues directly from your team? If not, what belief do you hold about yourself or about them that is stopping you from doing so? What impact has it had on you as a leader to feel the pressure of always needing to come up with a solution?

Welcome back! If you’re just tuning in, the Leader’s Edge is a multi-part story exploring the challenges and growth potential of expanding your leadership range and communicative competence. 

Throughout this series, we’ve been following a cohort of leaders from the fictionalized Horizons Tech organization as they engage in a leadership development program. The program was designed to increase their ability to navigate behavioral change and communicate effectively amidst complex interpersonal dynamics.

From Day 1, several of the participants had found themselves particularly challenged by the idea of engaging productively around disagreements and opposition — including the kinds of resistance that came up for several of them around spending valuable time in the leadership program!

In the last two episodes, we watched as first Vijay and then Amir—two team leaders at Horizons Tech — had profound “ah-ha” moments during the second session of the leadership program. The “ah-ha” moment they experienced had to do with expressing concern or disagreement — which was a specific mode of communication they had been learning a lot about. 

In the language of Structural Dynamics, a core model for communication that is at the heart of TeamCatapult programming, expressions of concern, disagreement, or opposition are called an “Oppose.” Vijay, who had always made a point of hearing from all voices, was surprised to feel his own hesitance to offer an “Oppose” in the group check-in, and it catalyzed the following realization: while he made space for hearing from each of his team members, he might not be cultivating the kind of space where opposition or concern about the team’s direction could be comfortably shared. 

More specifically, Vijay recognized how important it would be to create that kind of group comfort, as it differed from the organization’s culture as a whole. Typically, when people voiced dissent, they would have to be ready for a fight. Vijay wanted to make a point of creating a team environment where concern or dissent could be met with curiosity rather than defensiveness — he had experienced himself how much easier it felt to share openly and honestly when his feedback was clearly welcomed.

Amir, meanwhile, had also been deeply impacted in the leadership development program by the experience of watching opposition be met with curiosity — and actually redirect the group process in a generative way. But unlike Vijay, Amir felt enormous anxiety about the idea of having opposition voiced on his team, even with his newfound appreciation for the positive impact it could make. Still, he was committed to trying. After all, this was what it meant to develop his leadership range by building communicative competence with his team, right?

In this week’s episode, we’re going to walk through a process that can often feel mysterious to program participants: What does it actually look like to bring new learning from the program back to your team, especially when it’s learning that you yourself find challenging?

In other words, what does it look like to actually scale your learning as part of growing team competence?

The process that Vijay and Amir were embarking on was a long one, but it was poised to course correct some of the critical and common patterns plaguing so many teams in our organizations today:

• Being unable to agree on what steps to take and who should own what
• Avoiding the difficult conversations that we know we need to have
• Feeling tension around accountability
• Spinning wheels without gaining momentum or making headway
• Feeling unheard and, over time, burned out
• Feeling like meaningful change is never going to happen
• Repeating the same actions and expecting different results
• Making everything harder than it needs to be through redundancy and miscommunication 
• Failing time and time again to align on a common vision
• Seeing small issues escalate quickly to major misunderstandings on a regular basis 

We’ll follow along as first Vijay and then Amir — both coming from very different places — try inviting opposition on their teams. We’ll explore what went well, as well as where they found sticky points that challenged them in the process of bringing new learning into their leadership role.

Vijay — inviting the team into the process

After the second session of the leadership program, Vijay hit the ground running when he kicked off his next team meeting. He was excited to share his learning with his team and help them all make the leap toward feeling more comfortable voicing concern or disagreement during the team check-ins. 

Right off the bat, here’s what he said: “As you all know, I’ve committed to improving my leadership this year. I’ve been engaging in learning about communicative competence and just how important it is for all of us, myself included, to bring certain contributions to the conversation so we don’t get stuck.”

For a moment, there was silence in the room. 

“That sounds great,” someone finally said. “But what do you mean by ‘contributions’?”

Uh oh. Suddenly, Vijay’s confidence wavered. He had been engaged with so much intensive learning and new language about different communication modes that he was momentarily overwhelmed by the idea of making it make sense for his team. 

But then he remembered what the co-leaders of the program had recommended: simply define the Four Player Model for your team. The Four Player Model reflects the Four Modes of Conversation, a cornerstone of Structural Dynamics, which is a way to understand communication developed by researcher David Kantor. The Four Modes of Communication form the basis of many of TeamCatapult’s workshops on communicative competence, and Vijay had become very familiar with them since the start of the program. They can lead to an enormous depth of learning and understanding, but they are actually really accessible and easy to onboard as a team. 

Sharing about the Four Modes of Conversation enables a group or team to share a language about communication, and things can build from there.

So Vijay took a deep breath, and shared according to the program co-leaders’ recommendation. He said: 

“I’ve recently learned about a communication tool called the Kantor Four Player Model. It’s a theory of face-to-face communication whose premise is that everything we say can be coded into one of four actions: 

• Move, which sets the direction in a conversation (like a new idea)
• Follow, which supports or continues the direction (like agreement)
• Oppose, which offers correction or constraint (like a concern or disagreement)
• and Bystand, which offers a morally neutral comment on what’s happening in the conversation (like, ‘I see we have different perspectives on this topic.’)

I’m not going to go into a lot more depth about this model right now, other than that I want us all to be aware of it so we can all start to pay attention to our team conversations. What’s important about knowing these is that when one or more of the actions is missing in a conversation, the conversation can become ineffective, or even get stuck. 

So, when I said that I want us to be aware of certain contributions we bring to our conversations, this is what I meant. We need to make sure that all four of these actions are voiced in our conversation in order for the conversation to be effective. Otherwise we run the risk of our conversations being ineffective.”

He looked around, noticing that his team looked surprised by the new information, but they seemed receptive. So he continued by expressing his belief that, as a team, they weren’t voicing the action of Oppose regularly or proactively, and that he saw this as contributing to a pattern. 

“As you know,” he said, “I value hearing every voice, but I’m starting to understand that just hearing from everyone is not really the point — especially if everyone just states their agreement to the set path. The real value in our conversations is ensuring that you all can express your full perspective and feel that doing so might offer a valuable course correction to the game plan.”

He could sense some unease in the room.

“What does that look like?” asked one team member.

Vijay thought about his response for a moment. “Well, I want us all to start paying attention to ideas when they get voiced. If we have something we disagree with, then let’s share that in our team meetings, with everyone present. Usually, when someone disagrees or dislikes something, you come to me in our one-on-ones. But let’s practice bringing it up here, so everyone can benefit from the conversation. I think there is real data in hearing different perspectives, including disagreement.”

After a moment of silence, a team member spoke up. “Would you like us to start now?”

“Sure,” Vijay responded. “Whatcha got?”

“I think this sounds all nice from a theory perspective, but the last time I voiced opposition to a leader in this organization, I found myself given the cold shoulder for weeks. I got the feedback that I could really stand to be more of a team player.” 

Vijay paused for a moment, realizing that he could identify based on a similar situation he’d been in years ago at another organization. And given the culture in their current organization, it was not hard to believe that this had happened to his team member. 

Vijay grimaced. “I’m really sorry that was your experience. I know you to be someone who is driven by your values to speak honestly, and I’m sure that really impacted you. I can say that I genuinely mean what I’m saying to you: I welcome you or anyone else to let me know if you feel like I’m not being open to your pushback in the moment. But I think this will be something that we will develop, together, over time. Our trust in this will build.”

He recognized that the team would want to test out what he was saying to see if he really meant it, but he felt good that one team member had already voiced their concern — it felt like a step in the right direction.

They spent the next part of the meeting updating their working agreements to reflect the following: 

• Voice our opposition when we have it 
• Bring the conversation in the room, rather than offline or 1on1
• Stay in the conversation, even if it gets difficult
• Give Vijay feedback about how he’s doing to welcome (or not) the communication action of Oppose

Of course, like any new group process, it would take time for people to get used to vocalizing opposition or concern. But because Vijay’s team already had a track record of hearing from all voices — and because Vijay himself consistently modeled the fact that he was receptive to pushback — the team felt curious and optimistic about what this change would do for them over time.

Amir — working through the tension

Unsurprisingly, Amir’s experience of bringing his learning back to the team did not go quite as smoothly. After all, although it had not been his intention, he had been actively shutting down opposition on his team for quite some time.

At Amir’s first team meeting after the second session of his leadership program, he followed through on his commitment to do the thing that scared him most: inviting opposition. He decided to do so in the context of an idea he had been nurturing for the team to plan a week-long retreat the following month. He hoped to develop their collective leadership and scale some of the material he had been working through in the leadership program. 

So, he introduced the idea to the team, then asked them what they thought about it. 

A few people supported the idea and thought it would be a welcome break from their daily work routines. One team member enthusiastically built on the idea, suggesting that they visit the local amusement park together — he had done that with a previous team and enjoyed getting to know others in a more relaxed environment. 

The other team members remained silent. 

For Amir, he was hopeful that there were a few people in the room who seemed to agree with his suggestion, but he had no intention of going to an amusement park. It seemed misaligned with his intention of focusing on their team communication and dynamic. 

He remained quiet for a few minutes as he pondered his next step. If this conversation had happened just 2 weeks ago, he would have closed it down and disregarded the amusement park idea all together. He also would have assumed that the silence from the majority signaled their consent, and he would have just started to make plans. 

Recognizing the likelihood that he was being met with silent opposition, Amir felt the stakes rising for him internally. He found himself growing a bit angry with those who were sitting quietly. Why don’t they just say what they want to say, he thought, even though he dreaded it at the same time. 

But then he remembered his commitment to doing things differently. So he did. Rather than being upset that they weren’t speaking, he decided to issue an invitation to vocalize opposition. What he said was: “For those of you who are silent, why don’t you just say what you want to say. Clearly you disagree. So rather than sitting here silently wasting our time, just say it.”

At that moment, all the air was sucked right out of the room. You could feel the tension rise. 

Then one person said, “Look, I just think that’s a lot of time out of the office that does not directly relate to us getting work done.”

Someone else followed up, saying, “I agree, I don’t think we can afford that much time away.”

Amir was becoming even more frustrated by this conversation than he was by the silence. How could they think that learning to become better leaders and communicators was a waste of time? A few months ago, he might have agreed with them, but he had a very different point of view now. He had seen the power of having more development-focused conversations as a way to get work done better. 

He found himself equal parts frustrated and deflated. How could he convince the team this was a good idea? How could he get them to see things from his perspective? And what was he supposed to do now that he had surfaced the Oppose? 

In short, he was feeling really unskillful in this moment. He felt like he’d done so much developmental work on his leadership range but still felt like he had no idea how to actually do things better. Additionally, he knew the team was on the hook for a big deliverable, and he sensed that if they could not get better at having some of these needed conversations, they were going to be at risk on whether they could deliver on time. This would ultimately mean that Amir’s leadership and value to the organization would be questioned. 

As these thoughts circled in his mind, he could feel his frustration turning to anger, his face was feeling flush with heat. He could feel things spiraling. 

What he wanted to say was, “Too bad, we’re going to do it anyways. Please plan accordingly and do what you need to do to make the time work.” 

But he thought better of it. 

Instead, he thought back to one of the workshops from his leadership program in which one of the leaders had offered the following idea: when you feel the heat rising, first find a way to lower the stakes for yourself. 

Amir had to get out of the room for a minute, he realized, because he was so angry he was afraid of what he might say. So he took a deep breath and said, “Thanks for sharing your perspectives. It helps me understand your point of view. Let’s take a short break and then come back and continue the conversation.”

They agreed to come back in 15 minutes. In fact, the two team members who had courageously voiced opposition and concern to the idea were grateful for the break. When Amir had gone silent for what felt like an eternity, they could tell he didn’t like what they’d said. His whole demeanor had changed, and they were worried that they might have risked too much in offering their point of view. 

During the break, Amir headed for a walk outside. Once he got through the doors, he took a deep breath and began to think about what might be missing in the conversation. He knew they had navigated similar conversations in his peer group in the leadership program, but what made this one so different? The stakes felt higher and he just was not sure what to do.

Then he remembered the idea of “defend versus suspend,” relating to the fact that when we engage in defending our own point of view, we’re unable to hear other people’s points of view. More importantly, we’re unable to be genuinely curious about why someone else thinks the way they do. 

That’s when the light bulb moment hit — he needed to be curious. 

He finished his walk, grabbed some water, and sat back down in the room with renewed clarity about his next action. He had successfully lowered the stakes for himself by reframing his view of what was happening in the team conversation. They were not disagreeing just to disagree, but because maybe they knew something he didn’t. 

The two team members that challenged the retreat remained silent. They were too concerned about what might happen next. But after a long silence, another team member spoke up and said, “the challenge is that this is a tough time of year for half of us. We have some extremely tight deadlines, and the idea of being out for a week seems overwhelming. I would likely have to work nights and over the weekend to make up for the time I was away, and I’ve already been working weekends for the past three weeks.”

Amir was surprised to learn about working weekends. He hadn’t realized that was happening. 

He followed up, asking, “How many of you are working weekends right now?” 

When seven of the ten people in the room raised their hands, Amir was even more surprised. 

One by one, each person shared feelings of fatigue and worry about needing to work additional hours. 

It was at this point that Amir realized he had been so focused on the outcomes of the team work that he forgot to think about the impact his idea would have on them. So Amir asked, “What if we could look at a different time of year for our retreat, or go away for just one day instead of five?”

That’s when one of the original team members to voice opposition spoke back up, “I’m totally on board with developing our team leadership. In fact, I think what you’re suggesting would be really valuable, especially if we do it in more manageable chunks. One day versus five is very doable.” 

Amir felt a huge weight lifted, knowing that someone else valued the idea of leadership development and that his option for recalibrating the timeline and time spent for the retreat had landed well. He felt validation for the idea, but was also able to see the value of listening to the team members to adjust with their needs in mind. 

He said, “I can totally support pushing this out. How about we make plans for 6 months from now. That will give us time to meet the deadlines, take a short break, and then go on a leadership retreat.” 

This idea got a unanimous voice of approval from everyone.

Amir left the meeting thinking about how absolutely unskillful he had been in his initial attempt at seeking opposition, and how things had turned around once he’d taken the time to lower the stakes for himself and re-engage with fresh perspective. In the end, it had been a win for everybody. 

Meanwhile, when the team members gathered together for lunch later that same day, they reflected on how productively the conversation had gone — and how relieved they were that they weren’t going to be spending their lunch hour complaining about Amir’s high-handed approach and its negative impact on them. 

Of course, since this was such a change from what it had been like to voice opposition to Amir in the past, they weren’t sure whether it was the beginning of a sea change or just a new kind of coffee in his cup — but that’s the nature of change: it takes time and a steady building up of positive experiences.

Bringing the conversation in the room

In the stories above, Amir and Vijay were both wrestling with growing their leadership range and being able to invite opposition into the conversation when needed. But they each went about it in a different way. 

Vijay started off with his team by being transparent, sharing what he was doing in the leadership program, and why he was bringing the learning back to the team. He was actually inviting his team to talk about HOW they were talking with one another. It was a reflective conversation, and it went quite smoothly. 

By contrast, because Amir’s difficulty with opposition was laid down for him early on in his formative years, voicing and welcoming opposition were much more stressful for him. When we feel like we are in high stakes mode, our behavior changes — and Amir was no different. 

You’ll notice that when Amir brought his learning to his team, he didn’t actually share his learning journey or his intention openly. Instead, he privately set his intention of facing opposition more productively. And then, when he suspected that there was opposition, his intention of welcoming disagreement and being curious did not really get voiced through the lens of curiosity. Instead, it was voiced with a hint of accusation and blame. 

In short, Amir created a bit of a mess at first. But, unlike previous occasions, he stuck with the conversation. He took a pause, which interrupted the pattern, and he took time to remember what his intentions were. He was able to come back to the conversation and continued it with much more openness and curiosity. As a result, Amir’s team got to a really good place in the end — and it was very different from where they would have been if Amir had just dropped the topic or made a unilateral decision at the first sign of disagreement. 

There are a few key principles to the work of building communicative competency in teams that we can learn from Amir and Vijay. 

• Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You’re going to be unskillful sometimes as you learn and practice. It’s okay. The greatest learnings will likely come from the messy situations you create. 
• Let your team know what you’re working on. Take a nod from Vijay. Invite your team to give you feedback. Share your intentions with them. 
• Invest the time in practice and journaling. You cannot do this work without reflecting. Every day that ends without at least a small bit of reflection time is an opportunity missed for awareness and change. As I always say: awareness precedes choice, precedes change. 
• Stay when it gets difficult. The moment you may want to fold up your notebook and go home is the very moment that you need to stretch into staying with the conversation. If you need a pause or a break, take it. But be sure to know when you’re coming back to the conversation. If you need 15 minutes, take it. If you need 24 hours, take it. But commit to coming back to the conversation so you can pick up where you left off. 

What’s a concept that you intellectually get and understand, but if you’re really being honest, you struggle to put it into action in certain situations? 

What needs to be true to take the scary step of trying, even if you know it will be challenging and you might not be very skillful or get it right on the first try? 

If you’re just tuning in, The Leader’s Edge is a multi-part story exploring the challenges and growth potential of expanding your leadership range and communicative competence. 

Throughout this series, we’ve been following a cohort of leaders from the fictionalized Horizons Tech organization as they engage in a six-month-long leadership development program. The program was designed to increase their ability to navigate behavioral change and communicate effectively amidst complex interpersonal dynamics.

In Part 3, we spent time with Vijay, a well-liked leader in the organization. We watched as he realized that the communication mode of Oppose — the act of voicing opposition, concern, or constraint in a conversation — might have been missing from his team conversations. “Oppose” is one of the Four Modes of Communication in the language of Structural Dynamics (the approach to communication developed by researcher David Kantor). The Four Modes of Communication are a core facet of TeamCatapult’s leadership development programming, and Oppose is consistently the most challenging. This was certainly the case for Vijay, despite his preference for hearing from all voices on his team!

Thanks to his journey with the leadership development program hosted by Horizons Tech, he was eager to learn more as quickly as possible to help him calibrate more effectively with his team — so eager, in fact, that he was getting frustrated with the pace of the program’s second 3-day intensive workshop. He wanted to get to the point and get going.

After hesitating to share his resistance to the set pace, he decided to voice it. Not only did he discover that he wasn’t alone, but the program co-leaders heard his concerns and worked with the group to rearrange the day. They decided to move forward in a way that felt more fast-paced while still carrying the value of the deep group learning that comes with time spent. 

For Vijay, this modeled something new that he immediately carried forward into his work with his team: moving forward, he wanted to ensure that he was inviting his team’s true perspective — even when it didn’t align with his own — so that opportunities to meaningfully shift the group process or approach weren’t missed. 

Over time, he — and his team — not only felt that there was a more effective balance between hearing all voices and moving forward in the conversation, Vijay felt much more grounded and aware of how he could help balance the needs of the team and the needs of the day in a way that helped everyone (including himself) feel more forward momentum in the group process.

Notably, however, while Vijay’s leadership outlook made it relatively straightforward to practice incorporating opposition into his team meetings productively, someone else in the room discovered that they had a steeper hill to climb. 

Why inviting opposition can feel challenging

When Amir watched Vijay voice his concern about the pace of the day, he was really surprised. He was not used to seeing opposition voiced, and was definitely not used to seeing it go well when it was. After a moment’s hesitation, though, he decided to follow Vijay’s lead and voice his own concern. It made him nervous, but, like Vijay, he felt immediate and positive feedback when the workshop co-leaders decided (with the group’s buy-in) to close the session a full 2 hours before the planned time. 

He’d never seen a process work like that. Normally, if someone dared to voice opposition in the organization, one of two things happened: they were either politely dismissed or it started a full-on debate about how one person was wrong and the other was right. He had never seen vocalized opposition or disagreement actually change the course of the outcome productively. It really impacted him to see the co-leaders listen to the concern, inquire more about what it meant, ask the group for input on what would make it better, and then follow the group’s suggestions. 

He found himself in a completely new frame of experience. He felt validated and understood, like he could actually impact an outcome — even if what he was voicing felt like opposition to the plan or intention. 

But, in this same moment, he realized that he spent the majority of his day trying to avoid opposition from his own team. He would go to great lengths each day to make sure no one had a chance to really voice dissent or concern. 

Why? Because he didn’t know what to do with it when it got voiced. Not only did disagreement feel like a personal attack, opposition felt like it would take the conversation “off the rails” — and he was scared he would be seen as an incompetent leader. 

You see, Amir’s best days as a leader were when he felt like everyone was getting along with one another. He liked harmony. On the one hand, it was okay when people shared their ideas, even if they had different ideas than his. In fact, Amir loved the creativity of ideas and was quite well known in the organization for being creative and inventive when things were tough. On the other hand, he would find himself in high stakes when people argued with one another or with him. What he disliked most was when someone opposed him or told him he was wrong. His tension would skyrocket, and he would even get a bit of tunnel vision. 

As Session 2 of the program progressed, it became pretty easy for Amir to see why he might struggle with hearing pushback and opposition. Growing up, he was often rewarded for having the right answer and being a high performer in school. However, on the occasions where he didn’t do well on a test or got a lower-than-usual grade, it would result in lectures from his parents about doing better. They let him know that it was disappointing to them when he didn’t do well. As a result, he realized he had a tightly held story about himself that said he was “always disappointing others.” 

As a leader, this internal story played out daily in his work. He would feel the stakes rise the second he sensed that someone thought he was wrong, or that he was bringing a “less than stellar’’ idea to the table. And because he had never before been asked to develop the self-awareness to recognize when he was in “high-stakes mode” — much less why the tension had risen for him — he had simply developed a leadership style to avoid the feeling altogether. He liked to have a clear agenda, stay focused on the topic, and move on quickly if there was any hint that someone disagreed. 

In short, he didn’t create space to hear from others on the team. As a result, whether he realized it or not, he was sending the message to his team that opposition was just not welcome in team conversations.

Consider your impact

Over the course of the 3-day intensive that had started with Vijay’s check-in about the pacing, Amir came to understand some of the impact that his leadership style around opposition was having on his team. Over time, his team had learned to speak quickly and offer new ideas only. More than likely, he realized, if they didn’t like something Amir or someone else suggested, they were taking the conversation “off line” — either making suggestions or giving feedback away from team meetings and out of Amir’s eyesight. 

Their meetings had become fast paced, which Amir had considered a “win,” but he was now bringing more awareness to something that many of the team members already felt: 

• Team conversations remained superficial 
• People shared platitudes with one another and offered ideas, but the meetings lacked meaningful conversation
• Team members were holding back valuable feedback because they didn’t feel like Amir was able to listen

In fact, what Amir didn’t know was that a couple of the team members had started to meet for lunch occasionally so they could dive deeper into some of the real issues they were experiencing. 

Moreover, they were beginning to experience some of the key markers of burnout:

• They didn’t feel valued for their perspectives or ideas

• They felt inefficient as a team

• They were experiencing low morale and little ownership 

• They weren’t feeling energized about the work or the team direction
• They were starting to use phrases like “just tell us what you want us to do” — a key lagging indicator that team members are starting to withdraw or withhold their real thinking from conversations

Through the leadership program workshops, Amir really became aware of how avoidant he became around voiced opposition or concern, and he caught glimpses of the impact that it was having on the team. 

Over the course of the session, he became more curious about why he switched into high gear so easily, and he was determined to shift his behavior. 

Change takes a commitment

Amir wanted to make a change. He didn’t want his team to feel unvalued, unheard, or disempowered. That was not his intention at all! So Amir began a journey to change his own behavior so that he could more effectively lead change in his team culture. 

It started with using journaling to process his thoughts. At first, he was resistant to journaling. He’d read all the self-help advice about the benefits and power of journaling, but he just did not see any benefit to spending the time to write out the thoughts in his head. He didn’t have time, is what he told himself. He thought it would be much more efficient to just think through his ideas and then take action. 

But then he had an individual coaching session with one of the program co-leaders in which he shared a challenge he was facing with a team member. The person just frustrated him constantly, and every interaction seemed to be difficult. 

To his surprise, the coach asked him, “What might you be doing that’s contributing to this dynamic?” 

Amir was taken aback, and slightly annoyed. He didn’t think he was doing anything — it was the other person that was challenging. So his coach gave him an assignment to journal each morning about the dynamic and what was happening between him and this team member. The idea was to let his brain talk to him through pen and paper. She gave him this prompt: what might I be doing that’s contributing to my frustration? 

“Just see where your pen takes you,” she said, and encouraged him to write whatever he was thinking at that moment — even if it was “I think this is the stupidest activity ever.” The goal was to do it consistently for five days, and then they would talk again about what he was noticing. 

Amir gave it a go the next day. He carved out 10 min and sat down and began writing. He spent the first 5 minutes writing out how stupid it was to be wasting time this way, and then he moved to the prompt. He started listing out what he was doing and things that might be causing friction with this other person. 

And, indeed, he came to the next coaching session with a couple of hypotheses about what role he might be playing in frustrating his teammate. More importantly, he was able to think through a set of actions he wanted to take to shift the dynamic. 

So, when it came to think about what he was doing to preempt opposition on his team and what he might be able to change to invite it more effectively, he started with journaling. And by engaging in the journaling process despite his initial resistance, he found himself more grounded in his thinking. So much so that he felt inspired and able to share his insights and newfound commitment with his leadership program cohort. 

Here’s what he said: “I have come to realize that I dislike being opposed. I’m noticing that I equate someone opposing me with the disappointment my parents would voice about my grades growing up. The experience of being listened to by our group co-leaders and seeing what a positive impact voicing opposition can have when it’s met with curiosity was very different from any conversation I’ve witnessed or participated in as part of this organization. It’s also very different from my own team conversations. I think I avoid opposition like the plague.”

He took a deep breath and continued, “Today, I am committing to welcoming more opposition in my team conversations. I’m starting to see how helpful it can be. And I’ve had a huge realization: I was holding back my own perspective and concerns because I didn’t want to be rude. But the pacing of the program was really bothering me, and it felt like a huge weight was lifted off me when we talked about the challenges as a group. It felt empowering when we made some positive adjustments to our group process because of the concerns that were expressed, and I want my team to experience that. If I get this kind of positive energy in a leadership development program, imagine what might be possible if my team were able to have a similar experience in their work!” 

He smiled, realizing this was the moment of him taking the plunge. “So,” he concluded, I’m committing to welcoming more opposition. I’ll let you know how it goes!” 

What’s a topic that you resist hearing opposition on? Why do you think that might be? 

Amir had a steep hill to climb, but he had found his purpose in the program. He would deepen his self-awareness and leadership range so his team could co-create a better group process, take ideas further by exploring their edges, and tap into their collective intelligence rather than taking important conversations “off line.”

He had done a lot of introspection to explore why he might be so resistant to hearing opposition, but he’d also caught sight of an inspiring question: What would it feel like to invite it anyways? He was at the beginning of a breakthrough that had the potential to fundamentally change the way his team worked together — and he was committed to the work ahead.

Stay tuned for the next edition of this multi-part series to learn how Amir brought his learning from the leadership program back to his team to help accomplish these goals — and how he overcame familiar patterns and challenges in the process.

If you’re just tuning in, the Leader’s Edge is a multipart story exploring the challenges and growth potential of expanding your leadership range and communicative competence through a leadership development program. Welcome!

Throughout this series, we’ve been following a cohort of leaders from the fictionalized Horizons Tech organization as they engage in a six-month leadership development cohort program. The program was designed to increase their ability to navigate behavioral change and communicate effectively amidst complex interpersonal dynamics.

Last week, we met Mike and Angie — both well-respected leaders who were initially enthusiastic about being invited to participate. They believed in the premise that developing their leadership range and their communicative competence were essential for leaders navigating the high stakes of uncertainty and change, but — like many people beginning a “development” process — they didn’t fully understand going in what this kind of learning actually included or what the payoff would be.

• What would they be learning, exactly? 
• What was the purpose? 
• How would they bring their learning back to their teams? 
• What impact would they see?

We watched as Mike felt so confronted by the unknown that he decided to exit the program. He did not feel able to invest in an unknown or unfamiliar process. The pressures of his day-to-day role felt too pressing, and he felt a higher sense of priority for just “getting things done” in the way he was used to. 

Angie, on the other hand, remained curious and open — despite having her own abundant leadership pressures and priorities. In Session 1 of the program, she heard another participant’s story of a leader’s negative impact on them, and it catalyzed an uncomfortable recognition that she had probably had an unintended impact on her team, too. She wasn’t sure where the program was going, but she understood that growth was needed and this was her opportunity to become a more self-aware and versatile leader. She decided to stay in the soup.

She was not alone. In total, eight leaders from the organization committed to the six-month development program and stayed the course. 

Together, these eight participants moved through a process dedicated to growing their communicative competence — a skill set enabling them to better understand themselves and their team dynamics, as well as to more effectively cultivate the kinds of individual and group behavior change that leads to consistently high-functioning teams.

But staying in the unknown of a development program, even when we’re committed to being there, can be difficult. And one of the early challenges some participants face is whether and how to bring their concerns and misgivings into the room with them. Doing so taps into a very common kind of discomfort — the discomfort of voicing (or hearing) “opposition.” 

A major point of learning for many TeamCatapult program participants is the process of coming to value and welcome the imperative role that “opposition” and “disagreement” play in effective communication. In Structural Dynamics (the approach to communication developed by researcher David Kantor that we build our curriculum around), the act of opposition is known as the communication action of “Oppose” — and it’s critical for enabling the “real stuff” to surface in a conversation. 

Disagreement can be a major trigger

How often do you leave a conversation and vent to someone else about what you wish would have happened differently in it? 

For some of us, we will have lots of stories and explanations about why we did not or could not say what we really wanted to say in the moment. Maybe we felt that it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. Maybe we knew we would have been met with anger or defensiveness and didn’t want to invite that kind of dynamic. Or maybe we’ve been told that saying what we really feel could have serious career repercussions. All of these are valid concerns. 

The lack of opposition in a team system can often lead to people saying things like: 

• “We talk about the same things over and over, never really getting to the ‘real’ conversation.”
• “If I could only convince others to see what I see, we would be so much better off.”
• “I get it, but my leadership doesn’t — and I don’t know how to tell them they are the problem.”
• “We debate about roles and responsibilities, but we’re unable to agree on who should own what.”
• “We avoid the difficult conversations that we know we need to have.”
• “Our decision making is undefined and/or slow and unclear. It leads to lagging behind on decisions that need to be made, and we’re never clear about who’s making them, when they will be made, and how we will be accountable.”

While voicing the communication action of Oppose is essential for surfacing these important concerns, boy, oh boy, can it be a trigger! 

• For some, the challenge is in voicing their perspective when it doesn’t seem to align with other people’s viewpoint (especially when it doesn’t align with the perspective of the group or organization’s leadership). 
• For others, the challenge comes in hearing concern or opposition voiced toward their own ideas or approach.

Over the next several episodes of The Leader’s Edge, we’ll be exploring these kinds of challenges. Here in Part 3 of the series, we’re joining Vijay as he learns the value of voicing and hearing opposition. But stay tuned for Amir’s story in Part 4, where he navigates the common challenge of welcoming opposition even when it feels like an attack.

Discomfort and disagreement ≠ a lack of commitment  

Vijay was a senior leader in Horizons Tech — a valued member of leadership who reported directly to Mike. Vijay was known for being a very inclusive leader, often engaging his team in making collective decisions and believing wholeheartedly in the process of developing leadership. But, like his peers, there were seemingly endless demands on his time. The program felt challenging to him because what he’d been rewarded for most of his career was moving quickly, setting the pace, and getting results. 

So, from the start, Vijay was a bit skeptical of how much time the program was going to take up. During the first 3-day group intensive of Session 1, he shared many of the concerns Mike voiced — including the frustrating and tense feeling that the program was moving too slowly. But rather than piling on or exiting with Mike, he sat back and remained quiet, watching to see what would happen and if something would change.

But by week six, the program was still challenging him. Vijay had been doing the work of bringing the intensive workshop learning into his daily leadership. He was trying out what he had learned about communication and interpersonal dynamics, was integrating the learning into his own regular behavior and practice of communication, and was journaling through the successes and the sticky points. 

During this time, he became more aware of his preference for having his team participate in decision-making and including everyone in shared leadership. He recognized that hearing all voices was a value he held closely as a leader. But, as he deepened his self-awareness around this preference, he began to wonder whether he was hearing useful feedback. He began to feel that maybe he was expecting to hear his team vocalize their buy-in rather than really hearing the pros and cons about an idea. He wondered if this was a form of over-collaboration in which a lot of time was spent simply establishing agreement before moving forward.

He was aware that the work of the program was helping him understand that his “go-to” approach might have some limitations. But, if anything, this awareness was making him feel more impatient with the pacing and the six-month-long commitment. 

He felt himself becoming increasingly concerned as the second part of the program approached. He wanted to make a real and meaningful (and fast!) difference with his team, and he was concerned things were just moving too slow. Moreover, like his peers, he felt frustrated by the amount of time the program was taking away from what felt like his day-to-day priorities. He just wanted to know how to scale this work and what he could do differently.

Voicing opposition can be the hardest thing to do

As the second part of the program loomed, Vijay cleared his calendar to make sure he had the time carved out to dedicate to it. As he did, he realized just how prominent his previously small frustration had become. He just could not imagine another three days at the same pace as the first 3-day intensive. He wanted to get to the point and move it along so he could get back to his team. More specifically, he believed that if the program co-leaders would just pick up the pace they could easily get at least a half day of their time back — and that would feel like a win to him. 

As was typical in this program, the group started each day of workshops with a check-in. The program co-leader invited everyone to say what was present for them as they came into the group space. On the first day, one person shared a critical insight that had occurred for her since the last time the group met; someone else chimed in about how excited he was to be digging into the next level. 

All the while, the only thing Vijay could think about was how he was becoming increasingly frustrated with this process. Did they need to spend so much time with group check-ins? Why couldn’t they just get to the material? It seemed to prove his point about how they could make the day so much more efficient if they discarded unnecessary exercises. 

Finally, he took the plunge. He said, “I’m finding myself frustrated by this process. While I am getting value out of the learning, I really wish we could pick up the pace and move faster.”

Amir, who was checking in next, seemed surprised. After a brief pause, he seemed to adjust his response. He said, “I, too, am learning. I’ve even carried some of the language from these workshops back to my team. We’ve started to think differently about some of our work, but I’m also feeling similar to Vijay. I think the pace needs to be faster.”  

The check-in continued, and the group heard from everyone, including the co-leaders. 

Then, after everyone had spoken, one of the co-leaders went in an unexpected direction. They said, “I’m hearing a theme here about pace. Let’s talk about that. Can someone say more about what your experience has been with the current pace?”

Vijay hesitated again. He really didn’t want to be perceived as being rude or uncooperative. After all, he was really appreciating the learning and insight he was developing through the program. He wanted to be a contributing participant, and felt really uncomfortable sharing anything more about his concerns. But, he realized, he also couldn’t just hold back his real opinion any longer — his team needed him, and he owed it to them to voice his concern about the time spent away from day-to-day priorities. 

It was at this point that he remembered some of his learning from the first session six weeks ago. It had been about how to “bring the conversation into the room” rather than leaving it offline. More specifically, it was about learning to voice one’s experience and the value of offering an “Oppose,” which he remembered as the voice that offers correction or constraint in a conversation. The program participants had even talked about the pattern they had within their leadership development group, acknowledging that the vocal act of offering an Oppose was more difficult for program participants than other modes of conversation. 

Here’s what the group had learned: when group systems lack the voice of correction, it’s both a feature of the group system and a behavior of everyone in it. In other words, it’s a pattern that everyone is contributing to, whether they know it or not. The voice of “Oppose” might be lacking in a group because we might not be creating the space or welcoming it. Leaders play a big role in this, but so does the whole group. And then there’s the individual comfort that each individual has with voicing opposition or correction. 

Here’s the thing: we are all playing a part in what we get and what we create. So if no one voices a concern or offers correction, we don’t consider other options available to us — we just continue in the set direction without curiosity about what could be done differently or better to get different or better results. 

We will all have formative stories about any action we take in a group. Vijay had a specific story around voicing opposition: he believed that it equated to being “rude and uncooperative.” Importantly, as someone who valued hearing from all voices on his team, he didn’t receive push-back as rude or uncooperative, but he felt differently when it came to him expressing his concerns. 

Now, here’s what you need to know about Vijay: he had an early experience where he had been corrected and gotten into trouble when he voiced opposition and expressed his concern. He’d been told at his first job (in a different organization) that his job was to support the set direction — not challenge the senior leader who set it. In fact, doing so would be a career-limiting move. This formative experience early in his career had become a “truth” for him — a lesson he had learned and internalized that guided his behavior and his understanding of what it meant to voice concern.

So he hesitated to share his pushback to the group process in the setting of the leadership development program. He even felt his pulse increase as he thought about what he might say! But, deciding to trust the learning and the group, he took the plunge and shared his perspective: “I think we spend too much time processing things as a group,” he said, “too much time having to hear from everyone. I like hearing all voices, but this is just too much. Even just this check-in process — if we could eliminate it, that would give us some more time back to either get further with the material or leave us time after to get back to our teams.” 

The co-leader nodded. She said, “I’m hearing both a frustration with the open-system conversations and a desire to shorten the sessions. What are others experiencing?” 

It was a response that surprised Vijay. The co-leader not only didn’t sound offended or look at Vijay like he was being uncooperative, she was soliciting more feedback along these lines. And, indeed, a few more voices offered similar comments. 

It turns out that Vijay was not alone in feeling discomfort with what felt to him like the inefficient use of time.

“We hear you, and this sounds really important to you,” one of the co-leaders said after hearing group feedback. “What we’re also noticing is that the full group process that you find fatiguing is also the exact same process that has contributed to this group — including us — now having a better understanding of the impact we’re having. In fact, it’s because we’ve all been willing to be in this conversation for a few minutes that we were offered feedback and ideas we can put into action. In other words, the very process that’s frustrating is also what is enabling us to make changes! Based on what’s been voiced here, we’ll shift some of the design around and plan to end 2 hours early today. How does that sound?”

The group was dead silent. No one could believe this was happening. Vijay was equal parts shocked and relieved. He had been arming himself for being shut down or argued with when he first voiced his opposition to the standing plan. But instead, he felt like he’d really been heard. Not only that, but two other leaders had voiced a similar perspective to his — and now Vijay was feeling relief that he was not alone in his experience. 

Most importantly, though, was that his willingness to voice what was true for him had actually resulted in a changed plan for the day — a plan that aligned more seamlessly with both his desire to be in the learning and his concern about having time to get back with his team and address his daily priorities with them.

It was a rare occurrence for him, and one he would remember for some time to come. 

Taking the learning back to the team

After the day’s workshop, Vijay made a note in his journal to spend some time reflecting on something he had noticed for himself in the morning’s conversation: when he was leading, he had a preference for hearing all voices, sometimes to the detriment of moving forward; but, when he assumed the role of a participant, he felt impatient about hearing from everyone. 

He wondered how many on his team might have a similarly frustrating experience with his leadership. He also wondered if others might be holding back their true perspective, the same way he had been. He always made a point of hearing from everyone, but was he really creating a space where people could share their full perspective comfortably — including when they disagreed with something?

When Vijay really started to process his thinking around all this, he realized that the answer was probably “no.” The organization’s culture was such that anytime someone expressed opposition or concern, they had to be ready and willing to fight to defend their position. So, even though he made a point of hearing from them, he probably wasn’t getting the whole picture. 

They hadn’t forced Vijay or any of the others who’d expressed concern about the pacing to defend or fight for their perspective to be heard. They simply asked for more information and treated the perspectives as inherently valuable. 

Walking away from the second session of his leadership program, Vijay knew that he wanted to model something similar in his leadership with his team — that he wanted to create a team culture that was open and curious about opposing point of views. 

So, over the next six weeks, he made a point of trying new approaches to group check-ins with his team, trying to strike a more effective balance between hearing from everybody and moving forward based on what was surfacing. 

As we’ll see in Part 5 of this multi-part series (stay tuned!), it wasn’t always a smooth process. In fact, it was hard and confronting. But by investing his time and energy to scale his learning with his team, he found the effort worth it. 

• Over time, he recognized that he was hearing a greater diversity of perspectives during team meetings. 
• The group was thinking with and through challenges that were being brought up earlier in the process — before they became problems.
• The team was learning to collaborate with each other more effectively rather than only looking to Vijay for next steps.
• The team’s ideas were becoming more innovative and interesting as team conversations became more dynamic — and the ideas that emerged only got stronger by being met with the constraint of vocalized opposition and concern.

He could see these small shifts resulting in real change. And, though he wouldn’t have believed it at the program’s start, he knew without a doubt that the long-term changes he was experiencing were worth every second of the learning process.

What is it like for you to voice opposition? 

Think of a time when you’ve held back from saying what you really wanted to say. What would you have said? What was at risk in saying it? What was the cost of not saying it? 

What Vijay learned about himself and his relationship to voicing opposition in his leadership program was invaluable. He would never have guessed that this was a “soft spot” in his team leadership, but he was now seeing better results than ever.

The lack of disagreement on teams is often the greatest indicator that the “real” conversation is not happening, which means we are likely missing vital thinking and information that undermines our performance in countless ways. 

What vital information might you be missing or holding back from your team?