Hiring Orson seemed like a no-brainer. He came highly recommended. Two of us had worked on projects with him.1 He knew our business, and his resume matched the job description to a tee. We were all delighted to find a quick solution to an urgent staffing problem. 

Three months later, Orson was out. His uncooperative behavior had driven everyone around him bonkers. Worse, he had embarrassed the team in front of a key client. How had we misjudged Orson’s fit so poorly?

Actually, we hadn’t. We discovered later that several of us had had reservations about Orson. The two people who had collaborated with him? Individually, they hadn’t enjoyed working with Orson. But they assumed the other one had and didn’t want to speak unkindly about someone they barely knew. With no dissenting views, a few early positive takes had started a runaway train that no one felt individually qualified to stop. So no one did.

Voicing dissent is difficult. It seems impossible with a tyrannical boss. Think Putin’s administration. But it doesn’t take a fear-based management style for dissent to stay submerged. We don’t like rocking boats and we don’t want to speak unkindly about someone’s behavior, work, or ideas. Nor do we want to slow down a process when we ourselves feel its urgency.

Even the best individual intentions can keep important dissent bottled up. It takes organizational norms and processes to reliably surface the contrary views required for good decision-making.

What kinds of processes might have helped us surface dissenting views on Orson?

The Devil's Advocate(s)

One well-known process is to designate a devil’s advocate: someone whose responsibility it is to argue against an emerging consensus. But the designated devil’s advocate may not be the one with misgivings, and prying reservations out of someone else might backfire on the devil’s advocate.

That’s why distributing the responsibility for voicing dissent is often the better approach. Require each person involved in the decision to come up with a counter-argument to the prevailing viewpoint, regardless of their own preference. Next, each person presents their respective dissent while others withhold their rebuttals until all the counter-arguments have surfaced. Only then can the team turn to making an informed decision. Call it the distributed devil’s advocate approach.

Raise Your Fist

This structured approach to raising dissent introduces its own structural problems, though. As team-members report out their misgivings, earlier and more confident voices will inevitably carry more weight. A shortcut to a relatively unbiased overview is the Fist of Five: Get everyone into a common space (real or virtual) and have them signal their enthusiasm for the matter at hand with a simultaneous show of fingers. Five fingers means you’re ready to be the initiative’s champion; zero fingers means “over my dead body.” Although you can use the fist of five as a voting mechanism, more important than the outcome is the discussion it provokes. People raising fewer fingers are sources of valuable hidden dissent.

Unanimous five-fingered enthusiasm means you have a winning proposal on your hands, right? Teams that find easy consensus may rightfully feel that they are functioning like a well-oiled machine. But although excessively harmonious teams may be able to perform routine tasks at high efficiency, they are vulnerable to poor decision-making when they face non-routine situations. 

Diversity

If your team finds easy consensus, it may be that it lacks diversity. It’s time to introduce fresh blood with a complementary background to the team. If that’s difficult in the short term, it can be helpful to bring in someone with an outside perspective, someone explicitly invited to ask “What could go wrong?”

By establishing structured processes, organizations can ensure that dissent is surfaced. At the same time, having formal processes also signals that dissent is valued, and establishes a cultural norm of raising dissent so that it emerges informally as well. 

Working on a harmonious team feels good. But a high-performing team achieves its goals by using dissent, not by sweeping it under the carpet.

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About the Author

Nathan Kracklauer is the co-author of The 12-Week MBA and Abilitie's Chief Research Officer. He joined Abilitie's predecessor company, Enspire Learning, in 2002 and was the principal author of courses for organizations such as Harvard Business School and the World Bank. Nathan has facilitated leadership seminars at major global corporations and at executive education programs at IMD Business School, London Business School, and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

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1This is a fictionalized account of true events that transpired not at the author’s organization, but at one with which he is intimately familiar.