But the fact is that content employees don’t drive a company to achieve big wins. It takes employee conviction, desire and ambition, and those traits don’t create a naturally “aligned” workforce. Show me an organization where employees are universally content, and I’ll show you a failure about to happen. The bottom line is this: If you want your company to innovate and to deliver sustainable value, you and your people need to resist the temptation to indulge in “confrontation avoidance.”
Now, obviously, aligning around a vision and strategy is essential. But it’s insufficient, because it’s too easy to get bogged down in organizational politics. Ask yourself: “Do I really believe that if everyone was aligned all tensions would go away?” NO! This means that your job as a leader isn’t to eliminate dissonance—your job is to make conflict productive. Right Fights enable you and your team to stop fighting about everything that doesn’t matter and start fighting, in a high-minded manner, about what really matters.
Click to Add the First »