Learn to Disagree More Effectively

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1:21Julia Minson:I'm Alison Deard. And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HPR IdeaCast.

1:33Adi, how do you like to handle disagreement at work?

1:36Julia Minson:I don't think I handle it very well. I'm very conflict avoidant, so I do an end run around disagreement and try to resolve the issue in some other way. Hmm. That's the opposite of me. I think that I'm sort of, it's not that I welcome disagreement, but I don't mind it. And so if I have an opinion, even if I know it might ruffle some feathers, I express it. And I sometimes worry it's going to get me fired, but it hasn't yet. So the point is, though, we know that conflict and debate is good for teams and organizations. So it's useful for all of us to figure out how to embrace conflict in your case and then do it in a nicer way in mine.

2:19And disagreeing is really, really hard. In a workplace, there are different power dynamics. There are different relationships. So we wanted to talk to today's guest because she has studied disagreement in depth, and she has some practical advice about how to do it better, meaning better outcomes for ourselves, for the person we're disagreeing with, and for our organization.

2:39Julia Minson:You know, I like that just on its face, particularly in this moment when we are so polarized, where we so quickly demonize people who don't agree with us. So, you know, this seems like a good topic. Yes. Our guest today is Julia Minson. She's a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. She's co-author of the HBR article, A Smarter Way to Disagree, and has a new book out called How to Disagree Better. And she spoke with me about the importance of observable behavior, curiosity, and finding common ground, plus a lot more. Here's our conversation.

3:12So why do teams and organizations need to do a better job of disagreeing? Well, I mean, disagreement is such a crucial skill for any organization, right? The reason we bring people together into teams is because we want their opinions. If I didn't want another person to express their views, why am I paying for their presence in the room? There's a great quote by William Wrigley Jr., like the Wrigley Field and the, you know, Wrigley chewing gum guy who said, when two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary. And so what do teams normally get wrong? Is it they're not disagreeing enough or they're disagreeing in unhealthy ways?

3:53So, I mean, honestly, I think it's both because it's a system, right? So when we don't feel like our ideas are going to be received with appreciation, with receptiveness, we don't want to speak up. You know, we can advise leaders and team members all day long about how disagreement is important, but it's important in these like fairly abstract ways, right? Like it'll be good for the company. It'll be good for the team. But the cost to me as an individual, if I disagree with my boss or if I disagree with my team member, is very immediate and very real. And so people are always making this trade-off between, do I want to speak up for the good of the future and have a difficult and unpleasant and risky conversation right now?

4:40So there's a real tension there. Yeah. I imagine that personality differences and cultural differences also come into pretty significant play here also. Yeah. So I think, you know, there's always kind of different factors that predict how well we are at any skill. Right. And so disagreement is, you know, like musical ability, right? Like some people are just better at it than other people. But all of us can get a lot better with a little bit of training and attention to, you know, how we're doing it. Do you encourage the leaders that you work with to embrace disagreement, to sort of encourage it among their team members?

5:20So what I really work on with leaders is a skill set that I call receptiveness to opposing views. And it's basically engaging in any disagreement in a way that shows the other person that you're thoughtfully considering their perspective. because I can tell you that you should disagree with me all day long. But if you work for me, you're going to say, well, does she really mean it? Am I going to get ostracized? Am I going to get kicked off this project? Right. So I have to show with my behavior that I really mean it. And the way I show it is by showing you that I'm really thinking about what you're bringing to the table and I'm really engaging with it instead of just saying, oh, you should disagree because disagreement is good for us.

6:05Yeah. Given that, you know, most of us probably do have a distaste for disagreement, particularly in workplace settings and particularly in times that feel divisive. And so you don't want to bring that divisiveness to the office. What's the first step in just sort of overcoming that hurdle as a leader yourself? You know, even before you start encouraging it on your team, how do you sort of get into the mode of, OK, disagreement is healthy and I actually want it here? So leaders have a tremendous amount of agency and leverage by modeling the type of behavior that they want to see, right? So if I can change my own behavior to demonstrate receptiveness to opposing perspectives, then my team members see it.

6:48And it's really useful to model the behavior we want to see in very public settings, right? Because if I'm having a one-on-one conversation, then I can show one person that I'm receptive to their views. If I'm having a regular, you know, team check-in, then every Tuesday I'm showing 10 people that I'm receptive to their views. And so as I start showing and behaving in the way that I want other people to behave, then I am telegraphing to the world. This is the type of thing that's welcome here. And this is the values that we have as an organization. Yeah. So I definitely want to dig into sort of how you demonstrate receptiveness to others' views and opinions and disagreement.

7:31But first, let me just ask you, there are leaders who say, yes, I love disagreement, but what are the biggest mistakes that they make in modeling disagreement to others? Like, what are the problems that you see out there in the world? So I think people who say that they love disagreement, they probably do love disagreement, but they are not recognizing that they're a minority. Most people don't love disagreement. That's one difference. The other thing is that if you're a leader who loves disagreement, you might be forgetting about sort of the status differences that give people different opportunities to act on the way they prefer to act.

8:11Right. So a colleague of mine and I were doing a training in a hospital system a couple months ago. That hospital system had one of these leaders that loves disagreement. month. And then when we got there and we're talking to some of the other employees, you know, fairly senior people, they basically said, look, when the executive team disagrees, it sounds like mom and dad fighting. Right. And so the people who were in the position of power felt very comfortable with it. But everybody looking on didn't feel nearly as great about it. Right. So that appreciating the fact that other people have different circumstances than you do and different preferences than you do, I think is a really useful thing to do.

8:52And what are some other ways that you think leaders subconsciously suppress disagreement while thinking that they're doing a job of embracing conflict and embracing viewpoints? So I think a really sort of high level, you know, upstream way that we suppress disagreement is by hiring people that we agree with. And it's a very funny thing because, of course, you should hire people you agree with because those are the smart people because they agree with you. Right. Maybe they're the smart people. Right. I work at a school of public policy. And so a lot of our students manage large public organizations and many of them are very ideology driven.

9:42They sort of went into public service because they have a mission. And so they will say things to me like, well, Julia, I work at an environmental nonprofit. Should I be hiring people who don't care about the environment? I'm like, yeah, you should, right? Because otherwise everybody at your organization is sort of drinking the same Kool-Aid. And that I think feels quite counterintuitive to folks. But by the time you have a team in place that feels really comfortable, you might have a problem. Yeah. So your research has identified reasons why most of us are pretty bad at understanding other people's perspectives.

10:24So just outline what you found about that. Sure. So a lot of my work is grounded in an old social psychology theory called naive realism. And the idea behind naive realism is that people think that they get it. They like naively believe that their perceptions are a reflection of an objective reality. Right. I see the world as it is. I am a smart, reasonable, good person. Basically, like I'm with the program. Right. Right. And that makes sense because how else could you get through the world? The problem with naive realism is that when we encounter disagreement, we have to say, well, if I'm a smart, reasonable person who basically gets it, why are we disagreeing?

11:09And the obvious answer to that question is that the other person doesn't get it. And because they don't get it, I'm going to fix them. OK. Right. And of course, fixing then takes different forms. So sometimes you say, well, let me tell you how it really is. Let me show you the report. Let me show you the data. Let me give you the customer feedback. And then you will see that I'm right and you're wrong, right? And that often doesn't fly because, of course, the other person, they also think that they get it. And they've seen the data. And they've interpreted the data in a different way, right? And they have sort of years of experience that dictate their understanding of the situation.

11:48And they prioritize different things. They prioritize different things. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, when just sort of telling people facts doesn't work, you jump to, you know, a couple other conclusions that are even more nefarious, which is, you know, well, maybe they're not that smart. They went to the lesser business school. And so we can forgive them for not being very good at understanding, you know, complex relationships or even worse. They are biased. They don't want to get it. You know, if they admit that I'm right, it will look bad for them. You know, their budget will get cut or their staff will get cut or they will have to recognize that I'm a better fit for this leadership position.

12:33Yeah. Right. And so once you tell that story to yourself inside your head, it's very hard to have a respectful conversation between adults. Yeah. And at the same time, we also don't see how they are perceiving us, which is with all those same judgments. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. That's exactly right. Right. So one of the main points of your book and your article is that to disagree better, you need to focus on not your mindset or your emotions, but on your behaviors. We recently did a podcast with Amar Kaisi of Trinity University who talked about the importance of positive intent mindset.

13:11Why do you think that narrowing down on the behaviors rather than sort of what you're thinking and feeling ahead of time is most important? because honestly, like a very practical way, I am focusing on ROI. Okay. So I think that if we all had positive intentions and kind of warmer evaluations of our counterparts and, you know, had better emotional self-control, the world would be a better place. It's just, that's really, really hard work and it takes a very long time. And there's something that gets in the way, which is interpersonal perceptions, right? So if I think the kindest, nicest, best intention things towards you, there's still two things that have to happen for that to impact our interaction.

13:59One is I have to be able to express all that, right? And I have to be able to express it consistently and with signals that you understand. And then you have to interpret the signal. And so at every step along that chain, we lose information and we misinterpret each other. Right. So what often happens is I prepare for a conversation that I expect to be difficult by saying, I'm going to be really patient and I'm going to be curious and I'm going to exercise intellectual humility and I'm going to show empathy. Right. And then I walk into the conversation, the person starts talking and like half of my intentions are out the door.

14:38Right. Right. Because I'm still trying, but like I am not, you know, a Buddhist monk. So I don't have amazing control over my emotions. I just have like medium decent control. And then I try to show my empathy and I try to show my curiosity, but I might accidentally ask a snarky question. I didn't intend it to be snarky, but it came out to be snarky. Yeah. Right. And then you are reading all of this. And of course, this is a disagreement. So you have negative expectations about me. Right. And so the question that I asked that was kind of snarky, that wasn't intended to be snarky, comes across as super snarky to you.

15:20Right. Right. And so I'm doing all this work in my brain. But what you're perceiving is not good. Yes. Right. And so if that's the problem that we're trying to solve, then we need to get sort of like closer in the production chain to the thing that we want, which is the perceiver to experience us as being empathetic and curious and engaged with their perspective. And so that's behavior. Yeah. Now, this does presume that the goal of the person in the disagreement is to come to a common, happy place as opposed to just win the argument. So what do you say to people who are like, well, no, I actually want to win.

16:06So why should I approach things that way? Okay. I'm so glad you brought up goals because that's, you know, it's either my second favorite topic or it's tied as being with my favorite topic. The goal of winning an argument is generally unrealistic. When you are imagining your winning argument and the other person saying, oh, I'm sorry, Julia, you were right. I'm wrong. You're so smart, right? It's never going to happen. My husband's really going to enjoy this conversation, I have to tell you. Okay, go ahead. You know, so because in any argument, again, the math is that both people are living that fantasy.

16:45Right. Right. So at best, your odds are 50-50, which are not great odds, right? But in reality, most conversations, if a person feels like they're sort of being argued into a corner, they're just going to walk away, right? They're going to roll their eyes and they're going to say, I don't need this. Right. Right. And I think that's something we often forget in conversations. It's an opt-in voluntary activity, right? And so if the other person doesn't like how you're treating them, the easiest thing for them to do is to just walk away. Yeah. You know, probably the most familiar example of all of that is teenagers.

17:22But there are a lot of settings, for example, in healthcare. If you're a healthcare provider and you're trying to persuade a patient to do something they don't want to do, get a vaccine or take their blood pressure medications or get a particular set of tests, if they don't want to do it, they will leave your office and they will just never show up again. And so that's the real risk. And so I think we need to be very, very careful and thoughtful about what our goals are, how realistic they are, and what they might lead to inadvertently. Yeah. And in a workplace setting, you might not walk away.

17:55You might see whoever has less power in that situation. I mean, you would see a client walk away. Yes. But whoever has less power would perhaps agree with you and then walk away feeling hugely resentful, maybe talk about you behind your back, say you're a terrible boss, and then eventually leave, which is costly to the organization. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

18:19Julia Minson:Legal teams are under more pressure than ever. More data, more complexity, more scrutiny. They need AI built for the realities of legal work. For more than a decade, Relativity has invested in AI built specifically for legal teams, designed to meet legal standards and support defensible decisions. The result is explainable AI that handles tedious tasks, So judgment and critical decisions stay where they belong with you. Relativity is the AI platform for legal work. Learn more at relativity.com slash ideacast.

18:56So when we talk about behavior change, what exactly do you want people to do? So the kinds of behaviors we care about are behaviors that are visible and interpretable, right? Right. So there's all kinds of behaviors I could be doing that you don't notice or you can't interpret correctly. And it turns out that the thing that is the most visible and the most interpretable in a disagreement is words. Right. So this is another place where a lot of my research sort of diverges from popular wisdom, which is that I think body language is not the thing we should be focusing on because body language is very easy to misinterpret.

19:36Or not even notice. Or not even noticed, right? Because again, we are not trained actors, right? So our nonverbal signals are really, really messy. Language is also easy to misinterpret, but we're far more consistent at interpreting each other's language than we are at interpreting nonverbal behavior. So if we want to clearly communicate engagement with opposing views, we need to use our words. And do we need to get better at both articulating our own views as well as soliciting the opinions of others? What tends to happen is that people are very, very focused on articulating their own views and they just don't spend enough time soliciting and really engaging with the opinions of others.

20:21What I often notice in courses and workshops is that as soon as I ask people to engage with other perspectives, they start playing like amateur therapist. And so then they ask questions and they never express their own views. They go completely to the opposite extreme, which is unrealistic in real life, because in real life, at some point you need to say what you believe. So I think one of the ideas that I really want to get across to folks is that you can do both. Right. You can express your beliefs and you can engage with the ideas of other people. And those two things are not at odds with each other.

21:00You should be able to do both in equal measure. Yeah. And so how do you start training people to pay more attention to their linguistic behavior, to what they say? Pay attention to your linguistic behavior, right? Being aware of that is step one. And then thinking about what are you trying to do, right? What are you trying to accomplish? What I always tell people is that a constructive disagreement is a disagreement that leads the two parties to want to talk to each other again. It's not reaching agreement. It's not building consensus. It's not finding a negotiated compromise. It's can we disagree, but in a way that makes you want to talk to me and makes me want to talk to you at some point in the future.

21:45And so if that's the goal, what are the words we use? Right. Okay, so I'd love to walk through just a few role play scenarios here so our listeners and viewers just get an idea of what language you're actually talking about. So say I'm a middle manager who disagrees with my executive level boss on a decision. How should I approach that? So the first thing I would do, and I suspect it's going to be true for every role play you put in front of me, is try to understand the other person's perspective better, right? People often jump into persuasion mode. If I explain to them how things really are, then they will recognize the correctness of my view.

22:26And maybe that's true, but you have no idea where they're coming from. And you're just as likely to, you know, frankly, make a fool of yourself because you're arguing without insight about the other person's perspective. So I would start with really exploring the other person's view, which takes time and usually takes more time than we expect it to. But it really sort of protects you from making your own argument with kind of no awareness of the landmines. Yeah. So what language specifically would I use? Again, if I'm a subordinate talking to a boss? So I would say something like, I'm really glad we're having this conversation.

23:09I'd like to understand more about your perspective. Right. So let's say we're talking about a product launch. And let's say the boss thinks that the product can be launched sooner and I think we need more time. I might say, help me understand why it's important to launch it on this particular timeline. we as the team have some concerns about the timeline but you know you have been doing this for a long time and i'd like to hear your vision for how this can get accomplished right and you try to ask follow-up questions that again show curiosity and show your desire to learn about the other person's perspective because the big risk is that they're going to say something you don't agree with.

23:59And then you're going to start arguing. You have to be more patient. That's really hard, though. So if, you know, my trigger is the boss saying, well, why wouldn't you be able to get that done in a week's time? And they're not respecting my opinion. How do I disagree better with them when they're not disagreeing better with me? It takes quite a lot of self-control. I absolutely agree with you there. It takes self-control and it takes time. I think about the goal of modeling receptiveness as sort of a north star. The north star is supposed to be your guiding principle that you don't get distracted from.

24:41Right. And what often happens in conversation is I go in with that guiding principle and somebody says, well, why can't you get it done in a week? And I get distracted by, you know, that feeling of, oh, I'm being disrespectful. or let me tell you why we can't get this done in a week. Right. Right. And so you really have to sort of exert some self-mastery to stick to the goal. Yeah. And say, well, you know, I have some concerns, but I would like to hear why it's so important to get this done in a week. Right. What is at stake for the team, for you, for the organization? Maybe we can figure something out, but let's discuss sort of where we're coming from and what our priorities are.