Conflicted Read online

  How to achieve that? If you have a particularly acute sensitivity to relationship signals, try not to let them dominate your perception of every conversation. When your partner seems upset or preoccupied, do not assume it’s about you: listen to what they say and engage in the content of the conversation. If, on the other hand, you suspect yourself to be someone who can get so wrapped up in the content of a conversation that you don’t pick up on your partner’s feelings, try and pay more attention to nonverbal signals: the pitch of their voice, facial expression and body language. Otherwise you might hear your partner’s words but miss what they’re saying.

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  If conflict can have a surprisingly productive role in romantic relationships, what about the relationships between colleagues? Work is never just about work. The jobs we do are always bound up with our feelings – good and bad – about the people we work with. At the office, even more than at home, we feel pressure to avoid disagreements and the stress and negative feelings that often go with them.

  Modern workplaces place a premium on getting along. That’s a good thing, but it means that even when our frustration with someone’s behaviour is perfectly justified, often the smart thing to do is hide it. The unaired conflict doesn’t disappear, however, but manifests itself in office politics, which is essentially the phrase we use for passive aggression at scale. Scholars who study organisations have found that the worst, most unproductive workplace cultures are riddled with passive aggression. That’s why the most successful firms make a determined effort to get their internal conflicts out into the open. Carefully managed, conflict can bring co-workers closer together.

  Southwest Airlines might just be the most successful airline in history. In 2019, the Texas-based low-cost carrier celebrated its forty-sixth consecutive year of profitability, a unique record in a volatile industry. Southwest’s success is often explained with reference to its charismatic former CEO, Herb Kelleher, who co-founded the airline in 1967. Kelleher, who died in 2019, was a man of unquenchable bonhomie and he created a corporate culture in his image: Southwest staff are famous for their conviviality and quirky humour. Jody Hoffer Gittell, a management professor at Brandeis University, argues that the firm’s success is not just down to its warm welcome or ukulele-playing baggage handlers, however, but to the way Southwest staff communicate with each other – including how they handle internal conflict.

  Gittell spent eight years researching the corporate cultures of airlines during the 1990s. She interviewed staff from the most senior to the most junior, and focused on the major carriers, like American Airlines (AA), United, and Continental. Gittell identified a significant obstacle to profitability: sectarian warfare. The industry, she discovered, has a tradition of status-based competition between the many different functions required to get a plane full of passengers off the ground and back again: pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, ticketing agents, ramp agents, baggage transfer agents, cabin cleaners, caterers, fuellers and mechanics. A ramp agent at AA explained industry politics to her:

  Gate and ticket agents think they’re better than the ramp. The ramp think they’re better than the cabin cleaners . . . Then the cabin cleaners look down on the building cleaners. The mechanics think the ramp agents are a bunch of luggage handlers.

  The staff used derisive names for other functions (‘agent trash’, ‘ramp rats’) and fiercely guarded their position in a strict hierarchy, with pilots at the top and cabin cleaners at the bottom. A station manager at AA confided in Gittell that ramp workers, ‘have a tremendous inferiority complex . . . the pilots don’t respect them’. A cabin cleaner complained that, ‘The flight attendants think they’re better than us, when they’re sleeping five to an apartment and they’re just waitresses in the sky.’

  As Gittell put it, with considerable understatement, the different functions in an airline ‘typically lack shared goals or respect’. During her research, she kept hearing about an airline called Southwest, which was said to be different, and so she began to study it. The contrast was dramatic. Staff across different functions seemed to respect and even like each other. Pilots appreciated the work of ramp agents, and cleaners got along with cabin crew. This culture of respect didn’t just make Southwest a more attractive place to work; it was the reason for its profitability.

  The vision of Kelleher and his co-founder Rollin King was to provide frequent, low-cost flights of under 500 miles in busy markets. This was brave, since short-haul flights are inherently costlier than long-haul ones. The more time a plane spends on the ground, the less money it makes, and planes that fly shorter routes land more often. What enabled Southwest’s counter-intuitive strategy to work was its relentless focus on reducing turnaround time, that time spent getting a plane ready for the next flight. Quick turnarounds are impossible without a high degree of co-ordination among all the airline’s functions. Pilots, flight attendants, baggage handlers and others must constantly communicate any snags in the process and find immediate solutions. To do that well, they need to get along and they need to care about the success of the whole company. Southwest’s culture of collaboration means it has the fastest gate turnarounds in the industry. One of its managers told Gittell, ‘Sometimes my friends ask me, why do you like to work at Southwest? I feel like a dork but it’s because everybody cares.’

  It’s not that staff from Southwest’s different functions don’t clash with each other. Argument and annoyance are inevitable in any activity that requires a lot of close and complex co-ordination. But instead of turning their mutual frustrations into seething antipathy, Southwesters air them directly. As one station manager put it to Gittell, ‘What’s unique about Southwest is that we’re real proactive about conflict. We work very hard at destroying any turf battle once one crops up – and they do.’

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  Until relatively recently, academics who studied management assumed that workplace conflict was bad for productivity. But, as with marital relationships, there’s now an increasing recognition that conflict can have positive effects – and that avoiding it is harmful. In ‘conflict-avoidant’ workplaces, staff think of conflict only as a dangerous, destructive force that must be shunned. The result is that differences of opinion are channelled into passive-aggression. An employee at an online education service that exemplified this culture told the leadership expert Leslie Perlow, ‘I noticed early on that colleagues weren’t being frank with one another . . . they smiled when they were seething; they nodded when deep down they couldn’t have disagreed more. They pretended to accept differences for the sake of preserving their relationships and their business.’

  A crucial challenge for any organisation is to ensure that its employees conceive of conflict as something other than personal rivalry. Management scholars make a distinction between task conflict – arguments over how to solve a problem or make a decision – and relationship conflict, when things get personal. Task conflict, even when it’s heated, can be collaborative and productive, if the participants care about solving the same problems. As we’ll see later, it flushes out new information and stimulates critical thinking. Relationship conflict is inherently competitive, and usually destructive: personally conflicted groups make inferior decisions, and the people in them feel less happy and less motivated. This holds true in studies of students and professionals, blue-collar workers and executive teams.

  The border between task conflict and relationship conflict is a messy one: conflict over a task often slides into personal competition. Evidence suggests that when people interpret disagreements as personal attacks, their cognitive function is impaired, in two principal ways. First, they become rigid in their thinking, clinging to the first position they choose, even when it is shown to be wrong. Second, they engage in ‘biased information processing’: new information is only absorbed insofar as it fortifies their position. In short, they become exclusively focused on proving themselves right rather than helping the group be right, which makes the group itself a little more
stupid.

  The organisational psychologist Frank de Wit has examined how a difference in mindset explains why task conflict can tip over into relationship conflict. He draws on a distinction from the science of stress, often used in sports psychology, between threat states and challenge states. When people evaluate a potentially demanding task, like making a golf putt or giving a public speech, they make an instinctive calculation of whether they have the resources to deal with it. If they feel they do, they go into a heightened state of mental and physiological readiness – the challenge state. If they feel they might be overwhelmed by the task’s demands, they focus mind and body on fending it off – the threat state.

  Challenge and threat states have different physiological markers. In challenge states, the heart beats faster and also becomes more efficient, maximising the amount of blood it can pump to the brain and muscles. In threat states, the heart beats faster but it doesn’t pump more blood. Blood vessels in the heart raise resistance, constricting the flow. Hence the distinctive sensation of anxiety, of being agitated and trapped at the same time. Challenge states involve a measure of anxiety, too, but in a way that converts into physical and cognitive horsepower. In lab experiments, people in challenge states have superior motor control and perform better on mentally demanding tasks, like brain teasers, than people in threat states.

  In a series of experiments, de Wit looked at how people responded to direct disagreement in group discussions. He monitored each participant’s physiological responses, while assessing their debating tactics. The more that each participant’s cardiovascular measures indicated that they had switched into threat state, the less likely they were to shift from the initial opinion and the more likely they were to screen out information that didn’t help them win the argument. Participants in a challenge state were more open to divergent viewpoints, and more willing to revise assumptions.

  When people feel challenged but not threatened, confident they can handle the disagreement without losing face, they can take a looser grip on their own arguments. That prevents the discussion from degenerating into a personal competition, and keeps the group focused on solving the problem at hand.

  Different managers approach team conflicts in different ways. Some try and avoid it altogether; others actively foster a culture of confrontation. Researchers who studied a successful technology firm in the late 1990s observed that, ‘Both male and female senior execs were expected to conform to dominant norms: brutal honesty and controlled anger – which often coalesced in the form of screaming arguments that had a scripted, playacting quality.’ Theatrical confrontation was also central to the culture of a tech firm known by the pseudonym Playco, studied by the sociologist Calvin Morrill. One employee defined what it means to be a strong executive at Playco: ‘A tough son of a bitch, a guy who’s not afraid to shoot it out with someone he doesn’t agree with, who knows how to play the game, to win and lose with honour and dignity.’ Superiors and subordinates were expected to ‘joust’, and someone was always judged to have ‘carried the day’ (not necessarily the superior). Skill in jousting was a key component of evaluations. ‘We’re sharks circling for a kill,’ said another Playco executive. ‘If someone takes a bite out of you, you take a bite out of him.’

  A confrontational culture can facilitate rapid decision-making because weak arguments get quickly weeded out. It works best in organisations that are scrambling to adapt to change. But it encourages fierce personal competition, which distracts from the task at hand. It also – and this is just my personal intuition – selects for assholes. The sweet spot is a culture in which conflicts are played out in the open but everyone is focused on the group being right rather than proving themselves right, a culture in which disagreement is a challenge to be met rather than a threat to be repelled.

  If you’re a relatively junior employee in a company riven by toxic confrontation or passive-aggressive politics, there may not be much you can do about it except try not to let the culture define you, and look for another job. If you’re a leader, however, you can do a lot more. You can model positive disagreements with close senior colleagues, letting everyone know, implicitly and explicitly, that people at this workplace can disagree vigorously and still get along. You can convey to members of your team that if you disagree with them openly, it’s not because you don’t respect them but because you do. In workplaces where tough decisions have to be taken at speed, communication needs to be direct to the point of abrasiveness; there is little time for subtlety or politeness. The psychologist Nathan Smith, who studies leadership under pressure, told me that he advises senior hospital doctors to prepare junior medics in advance for this style of interaction, so that they don’t feel personally persecuted when on the sharp end of it.

  Organisations can also introduce simple processes which allow frustrations to be aired and resolved. Relative to other airlines in Jody Gittell’s study, Southwest had by far the most proactive approach to conflict resolution. Her analysis suggests that this resulted in faster turnaround times, greater productivity, and fewer customer complaints. A Southwest Airlines employee told Gittell, ‘Where there’s really a problem [between functions], we have a “Come to Jesus” meeting and work it out. Whereas it’s warfare at other airlines, here the goal is to maintain the esteem of everybody.’ The meetings were officially termed ‘information-gathering’ sessions before acquiring their more soulful nickname. They have a regular format: one side gives their version of the problem, then the other gives theirs, before a consensus on the way forward is reached.

  Managers at the other airlines studied by Gittell tried to ignore internal disagreements altogether, but when one of them, United, started a new unit, ‘United Shuttle’, its leaders decided to emulate Southwest’s proactive approach. After Shuttle outperformed the rest of the company, the mainline operation began to hold conflict-resolution sessions too. A ramp manager told Gittell what a difference it made: ‘At first we would blame them and they would blame us. So we started having joint meetings, twice monthly. At first they were bitch meetings. Now they’ve evolved into “I can take that on, I can do that.”’ One meeting in particular was the turning point: ‘The meeting started out with attacks on management and attacks on each other. Terry [a senior manager] came in with flip charts and thought it was chaotic. But Charlie [a middle manager] said it’s the best meeting we ever had. Everyone spoke their minds, and people were saying, “Here’s what we’re going to do.”’

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  John Gottman, one of the founders of modern relationship science, proposed that the behaviour most deadly to a relationship is contempt, because contempt represents an attack on another person without any focus on the problem, any pretence of a common goal. Nickola Overall agrees that contempt is destructive, but even here, she said, there may be a buried signal waiting to be uncovered. ‘I believe that all emotions are important social information. Even with those difficult negative emotions you can sometimes get a glimpse of the other person’s perspective. You can get a sense of their dissatisfaction and pain.’ That doesn’t mean negativity should always be interpreted sympathetically: ‘Sometimes, the information you’re getting is that this person can’t be trusted; that they’re not committed to you. The ultimate goal shouldn’t always be resolution. Sometimes you need to end the relationship!’ But it does mean that there is a role for negative emotions in healthy relationships.

  Of course, there is always a risk that a row will get out of hand and damage the relationship we have with our partner, friend or colleague. Awareness of this risk is what leads so many of us to avoid conflict whenever possible. It’s what stresses us out about the prospect of even a mild confrontation. What we tend to under-estimate are the risks of not airing our differences. When we don’t expose our relationship to the relatively minor stress of a candid disagreement, at least two dangers loom.

  One of them is that our frustrations, instead of going away, manifest themselves in low-level sniping. Researchers disagree on ma
ny issues concerning the complexities of relationships, but one of the clearest findings of the field is that there isn’t any useful role for passive aggression. The evidence suggests that ‘indirect opposition’ is almost always a waste of time, whether that’s at home or in the workplace. It neither motivates anyone to change, nor resolves any problems; all it does is corrode trust. If we reach for it often, it’s because we want others to know when we are hacked off but are too anxious at the prospect of confrontation to be upfront about it.

  The second danger is that we stop learning about each other until, one day, we discover it’s too late. What can you learn from a row? You can learn what, or who, that person really cares about. You can learn how they see themselves – which may be different from how you see them, no matter how well you think you know them – and you can learn how they see you.

  Under the right conditions, conflict unifies. It can also force people to consider other perspectives, think more deeply about what they’re trying to accomplish, and fertilise new ideas. In other words, it can make us smarter and more creative. That’s what the next two chapters are about.

  3. How Conflict Makes Us Smarter

  Collaborative disagreement is the best way to harvest the intelligence of a group, because it makes a virtue out of our tendency to be unreasonable.