There is an understandable desire when developing teams to create a positive experience. We want people to feel engaged, connected and energised. We want workshops to generate enthusiasm and team members to leave feeling optimistic about working together. When a session becomes uncomfortable, when disagreement surfaces or when someone reacts strongly to feedback, it can be tempting to conclude that something has gone wrong. Yet meaningful team development does not always feel comfortable in the moment.

Sometimes the most important progress occurs when a team finally surfaces something it has been avoiding, when established ways of working are challenged, or when people hear perspectives that do not align with their own view of the team.

At our recent High Performing Teams in Times of Change event, Matthew Eames described part of his organisation’s development journey with a memorable phrase:

“The train wreck we had to have.”

He went on to explain:

“We had to put everyone together to create that friction to build something new.”

This was not an argument for creating conflict for its own sake. It reflected something more nuanced: sometimes a team cannot develop without first confronting the dynamics, assumptions and behaviours that are getting in the way.

High-performing teams are not teams without friction. They are teams that have developed the trust, psychological safety and skills to use friction productively.

Comfort and Psychological Safety Are Not the Same Thing

Psychological safety has become an increasingly prominent concept in conversations about team effectiveness, but it is also frequently misunderstood. Amy Edmondson’s research describes psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In practice, this means people feel able to raise concerns, admit mistakes, ask for help, challenge assumptions and contribute ideas without fearing humiliation or interpersonal punishment.

It does not mean everyone feels comfortable all the time. In fact, a psychologically safe team may sometimes experience more visible disagreement than a team with low psychological safety, precisely because people feel able to say what they really think. A team where everyone appears agreeable can therefore be deceptive. The absence of visible conflict may indicate genuine alignment, but it can also mean people have learned that disagreement is not worth the interpersonal risk.

Over time, important information remains unspoken. Weak ideas receive less scrutiny. Frustrations are discussed outside the room rather than within it, and decisions can appear to have support that does not genuinely exist. Comfort can feel good in the short term. It is not always a reliable indicator of team health.

Productive Conflict Is About the Work, Not Winning

Not all conflict improves performance. Personal attacks, defensiveness, entrenched interpersonal disputes and repeated arguments without resolution can consume enormous amounts of energy and damage trust. The objective is not simply to encourage teams to disagree more often.

The distinction lies in how conflict is approached and what it is trying to achieve. Productive conflict keeps the team’s attention on the issue being examined. Different perspectives are used to test assumptions, identify risks and strengthen decisions. People can challenge an idea without diminishing the person who contributed it, and they remain sufficiently curious to consider that another perspective may contain information they have missed.

This requires a particular kind of team maturity. It requires people to separate challenge from rejection and leaders to demonstrate that disagreement is a legitimate part of the team’s work. It also requires enough shared purpose for people to remember that they are trying to solve the same problem, even when they disagree about the solution. When those conditions exist, friction can become a source of learning rather than a threat to relationships.

Avoiding Conflict Has a Cost

Conflict avoidance can be particularly difficult to recognise because, on the surface, the team may appear to be functioning well. Meetings are polite. Relationships seem positive. Decisions are made without significant disagreement.

The costs often appear somewhere else. Decisions may take longer because difficult issues are repeatedly deferred. People may leave meetings and privately express concerns they were unwilling to raise in the room. Leaders can become responsible for mediating tensions that team members do not address directly. Poor behaviour may continue because colleagues are reluctant to challenge it, while genuine differences in opinion become passive resistance during implementation.

For leadership teams, the organisational consequences can be even greater. Senior leaders are responsible for testing assumptions and making decisions under conditions of complexity and uncertainty. If maintaining harmony becomes more important than challenging the quality of the team’s thinking, the organisation loses access to some of the expertise sitting around the table.

A harmonious leadership team is valuable when harmony is the result of trust and alignment. It is much less valuable when harmony is maintained through silence.

Vulnerability Creates the Conditions for More Honest Conversations

Claire Spencer offered another perspective during the event when she spoke about the value of creating space for senior leaders to reflect on their role, how they connect with others and “how they can be vulnerable.”

Vulnerability can sound abstract in a business context, but its behavioural expression is quite practical. It is the leader who acknowledges that they do not have the answer. The colleague who says they made a mistake before somebody else identifies it. The team member who admits they need support. The executive who can hear challenging feedback without immediately explaining why the other person’s interpretation is wrong. These behaviours matter because teams learn from what happens when someone takes an interpersonal risk.

If vulnerability is met with curiosity and respect, people become more willing to speak honestly in the future. If it is met with judgement, defensiveness or consequences, people quickly learn to protect themselves. Trust therefore develops through repeated experiences of interpersonal risk being handled well.

This is one reason team development cannot be reduced to a single activity designed to “build trust”. Trust grows through the accumulation of everyday interactions in which people discover that honesty, challenge and vulnerability are safe enough to practise.

Resistance Can Contain Useful Information

One of Matthew’s other observations from the event is particularly relevant for anyone responsible for leadership or team development:

“The people that liked the program the least have actually had the most amount of development.”

We should be careful not to interpret this as meaning that resistance automatically indicates learning, or that a development program is successful simply because participants find it uncomfortable. Sometimes people resist an intervention because it is poorly designed, irrelevant or inadequately facilitated. However, resistance can also contain useful information.

Development asks people to examine established habits and assumptions, some of which may have contributed to their success. Feedback can create a gap between how someone sees themselves and how others experience their behaviour. Changing familiar patterns can temporarily reduce confidence because a person is experimenting with behaviours that do not yet feel natural.

From an organisational development perspective, the response should not be to pursue discomfort as evidence of impact. Nor should it be to immediately remove every source of discomfort. The more useful task is to understand what sits underneath the reaction and create the conditions for people to work with it constructively.

Leaders Set the Rules for Disagreement

The formal leader has a particularly important role in determining whether conflict becomes productive. Teams pay close attention to how leaders respond when challenged. A leader may explicitly encourage people to speak up, but if their behaviour changes when somebody disagrees with them, the team will usually trust the behaviour more than the invitation.

A defensive response, dismissive comment or subtle withdrawal can be enough to teach people which subjects are safer to avoid. Leaders who want greater challenge therefore need to model how to receive it. That can involve asking people to explain a different perspective before responding, acknowledging when a challenge has improved their thinking, and demonstrating that changing one’s mind in response to better information is a strength rather than a loss of authority.

Leaders can also deliberately prevent disagreement from becoming concentrated in one or two people. If the same individual is always responsible for challenging the prevailing view, they can quickly acquire the reputation of being “difficult”, even when the team benefits from the perspective they provide. Healthy conflict needs to become a team capability, rather than an unofficial role assigned to the most outspoken person in the room.

The Role of Facilitation in Difficult Team Conversations

There are times when teams can navigate these conversations themselves. There are also times when established dynamics make that extremely difficult. Long-standing interpersonal tensions, significant changes in leadership, mergers, restructures or periods of sustained pressure can create patterns that teams struggle to interrupt without support. Skilled facilitation can help create a structure in which different experiences can be explored without allowing the conversation to become personal or unproductive.

This is particularly valuable when data is involved. A team diagnostic can reveal that members experience trust, communication or accountability differently. The numbers themselves do not explain why those differences exist, but they provide a neutral starting point for a conversation that might otherwise feel too personal to initiate.

The facilitator’s role is not to eliminate disagreement. It is to help the team remain in the conversation long enough to understand what the disagreement is telling them and translate that understanding into different behaviour.

Development Happens After the Difficult Conversation Too

A powerful workshop can create insight, but insight is not the same as behaviour change. The real test occurs when the team returns to everyday work.

Whether a team develops depends on what happens the next time someone challenges an idea, misses a commitment, raises an uncomfortable issue or gives difficult feedback. These moments determine whether the team returns to its established patterns or practises something different.

This is why meaningful team development requires reinforcement. Teams need opportunities to reflect on what is changing, recognise when old behaviours are reappearing and continue building the capability to navigate difficult conversations themselves. Over time, something important begins to shift. The team no longer needs every difficult conversation to be facilitated. Members become more confident addressing issues directly, and disagreement becomes less threatening because there is evidence that the relationship can withstand it. That is when productive conflict begins to become part of how the team works.

High Performance Should Not Be Measured by Comfort

There is an important lesson here for leaders, People & Culture teams and anyone designing leadership development. A positive participant experience matters. People deserve development that is relevant, respectful and thoughtfully designed. But comfort should not become the primary measure of success.

The purpose of team development is to help people and teams work more effectively. Sometimes that involves affirmation and connection. At other times, it requires people to examine behaviours, relationships or assumptions they would rather leave untouched.

The goal is not to create discomfort. The goal is to build a team with enough trust to engage with discomfort when the work requires it.

Matthew’s description of creating friction “to build something new” captures this distinction well. Productive friction has a purpose. It helps the team move towards something it could not achieve by continuing to operate exactly as it had before. For teams working through significant change and complexity, that capability becomes increasingly important.

Build the Trust to Have the Conversations That Matter

Teams rarely improve by avoiding the issues that make them uncomfortable. Sustainable performance requires enough trust, psychological safety and shared purpose for people to challenge ideas, raise concerns and address difficult dynamics without allowing disagreement to damage the team.

The Steople High Performance Teams Survey™ helps teams understand the factors influencing how effectively they work together, including Trust, Communication, Clarity, Direction, Balance, Interdependency and Commitment. Combined with skilled facilitation and ongoing development, these insights can create a safer and more constructive starting point for the conversations that teams may otherwise struggle to have.

Contact Steople to discuss how we can help your team build the trust, capability and confidence to turn difficult conversations into stronger performance.