Mentera’s June Wellness Workshop with LifeLabs Learning was led by Kevin Knox, a wellness and personal development coach with a background in organizational and cognitive psychology and a specialty in storytelling and communications, strategic thinking, and leadership development. The focus of the workshop was on conflict and collaboration.

Despite its bad reputation, Knox noted that conflict can actually help people collaborate more effectively. He cited a 2016 study that found that 80% of our work requires some form of collaboration. “We have to understand how to negotiate, we have to have some sort of communication skills to create a solution for whatever it is we’re working on,” he says. “[C]ollaboration is really a significant part of what we do.…We actually are able as a team to produce more, right? When you invite two people who are average level employees to ideate and solve problems on a specific data set or problem that you’re trying to solve, and you have an individual contributor who’s an expert, the two average people will outperform the expert every time because two minds are better than one.”

Collaboration

Collaboration, says Knox, is necessary for a company’s creativity and it leads to retention and higher levels of profitability. “Now, when collaboration works well, doesn’t it feel great? It feels great to be on a solid team. There are high levels of psychological safety you believe in and trust the people you work with. There’s a mutual respect and deliverable, a type of engagement that happens when collaborations are going well.”

Unfortunately, he says, research shows that most employees at all levels report difficulty collaborating and that conflict is the leading cause of project failure. Citing a 2022 Harris poll, Knox notes that on average, employees waste 7.47 hours per week—or one full workday—by not being able to collaborate.

Conflict

He suggests reframing conflict as something to be avoided, stressful, and demoralizing to something that can be productive. The goal he says is not to be productive by avoiding conflict. “It’s a false binary: Either we should have conflict or we should not have conflict. The binary that we actually want to introduce is, ‘are we having productive conflict or unproductive conflict?’” The idea that we should avoid conflict, he says, negates the possibility of performing at a higher level.

Knox offered two tactics he says will improve the quality of your team’s collaboration through conflict. The first is to normalize it. “You invite people, ‘Hey, I want a little conflict here. And you explicitly name it and create on-ramps through talking points and meetings to ask people to do it,” he says.

The second tactic he says is deliberately engineering conflict through a process known in organizational psychology as “red teaming.” Red teaming is when one team works on a project and another team who has not been involved in the project is invited in at one stage of the project specifically to “poke holes” in the strategy, product or idea being created. They are specifically tasked with finding out what is or what could go wrong.

Conflict and Collaboration

“What we’re doing here is not just normalizing conflict but creating it as a tool or a stage within a project roadmap; we’re engineering and inviting constructive conflict….It’s actually productive conflict. [Conflict] is not just people crossing their arms and checking out because they disagree. It’s more about how can we fruitfully leverage conflict to get to a new desired result?,” says Knox.

To learn more about what Knox has to say about conflict and cooperation, watch an online replay of the workshop at mentera.com.