HR Director: “We’re aligned, then. We’ll launch the referral campaign next month and increase the bonus to $1,000.”
Hiring Manager: “I don’t think we should.”
Operations Director: “You don’t think we should increase the bonus?”
Hiring Manager: “I don’t think we should launch the campaign at all…at least not yet.”
Operations Director: “We need 40 people, and referrals have historically been one of our strongest sources.”
Hiring Manager: “I know, but we’re solving the wrong problem. We don’t have an applicant problem. We have a retention problem.”
HR Director: “We still need to fill the openings.”
Hiring Manager: “And we will keep having openings if new employees continue leaving within their first 60 days. We’re about to spend more money bringing people into an experience we haven’t fixed.”
The room gets quiet.
HR Dicector: “What would you recommend?”
Hiring Manager: “Before we invest in attracting more people, give us two weeks to talk with the employees who stayed, the ones who left, and the supervisors training them. Then we can decide whether we need a bigger campaign, or a better first 60 days.”
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[Disclaimer: we’re about to talk about something that makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable in the workplace, disagreement]
One of our favorite examples of productive disagreement in the workplace was the relationship between Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (one of us decided to forgo law school to stay at Spherion, a story for another time, so naturally, we nerd out over this kind of thing).
Scalia and Ginsburg were famously close friends. Their families celebrated New Year’s together, Scalia brought Ginsburg roses for her birthday, and the two bonded over their shared love of opera. With the very public affection between them, it is easy to assume they were largely free from workplace conflict… but nothing could be further from the truth. They held staunchly different beliefs and interpretations of the law, regularly disagreeing on some of the most consequential legal questions in the country and often writing opinions directly opposing one another. Yet they read each other’s work, challenged each other’s reasoning, and ultimately pushed one another to produce stronger opinions. Their relationship is a powerful reminder of what the highest-functioning teams understand: strong relationships do not require artificial harmony.
When we think about great teamwork, that artificial harmony is what we tend to picture: Meetings run smoothly, everyone agrees with one another, and decisions end with a room full of nodding heads. But, if everyone around the table sees the problem exactly the same way, there is a good chance the team has a blind spot. High-performing teams want people with different experiences, expertise, personalities, and ways of processing a problem because the friction between those perspectives often improves the answer. Contrary to popular belief, disagreement is not a breakdown of the culture; it is the culture working as intended.
Here is our take:
- Disagreement is a feature, not a bug. One of us likes to say “We disagree by design.” Teams that don’t design for disagreement get it anyway, it just happens in hallways, after meetings, and in quiet non-compliance instead of out loud where it’s useful.
- If you see something differently, you have a responsibility to say it. At McKinsey, one of us was introduced to the idea of an “obligation to dissent.” It was not about being contrarian for the sake of it; it deliberately challenged the typical workplace norm that staying quiet is safer than speaking up.
- Leaders have to create real permission to disagree. Hierarchy naturally makes dissent harder. If you always speak first or react defensively when challenged, asking, “Does anyone see this differently?” will not mean very much.
- The goal is a better decision, not consensus. Healthy teams can debate hard, make the call, and then move forward together. Agreement after the strongest arguments have been considered is very different from agreement because nobody wanted to challenge the room.
Scalia had a personal rule for disagreement that we love: “I attack ideas. I don’t attack people. Some very good people have some very bad ideas.”
We believe that is a very important distinction. You can respect someone’s experience, value their contribution, and have a strong relationship with them while still believing their recommendation is wrong. Healthy dissent stays focused on the work, creates room for curiosity, and gives the team a chance to reach an answer no one person may have reached alone.
The goal is not to make your meetings more argumentative. It is to build a team where “I don’t think we should” (see above) is welcomed, not feared.
The next time someone says it, watch the room. What happens next may tell you more about the strength of your team than the disagreement ever could.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team