Lead the way

Leaders who harness the power of conflict create a cultural context that liberates the creative impulse of their teams—like Satya Nadella who brought about a productivity spurt in Microsoft by increasing intellectual friction and decreasing social friction.

- TIMOTHY R CLARK

Without conflict, your organisation will die and you will fail as a leader. Unfortunately, when we talk about developing conflict management skills, we often assume this means learning how to eliminate conflict, which only reveals our state of confusion about the topic. The question is not whether conflict is good; the question is whether you can harness its power. Leaders who learn to do this create culturally flat organisations that democratise innovation and outpace the competition. The best example of this today is Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.

Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014. Since then, he has led one of the most remarkable corporate transformations in modern history. How has he done it? By injecting psychological safety into the culture to create an environment that encourages creative abrasion and constructive dissent. When Nadella assumed his role, Microsoft had suffered through what many have labeled as its ‘lost decade’, a period during which the organisation lost its tolerance for candour and missed crucial inflection points in its markets, such as paid search, mobile, tablets, web services, music, and social networking. It missed these opportunities because it had developed a fear-based culture that neutralised peoples’ willingness to challenge the status quo. In short, Microsoft lost its ability to harness conflict. Under Nadella, it has rediscovered it.

Creating psychological safety