“Innovate or die.”

It’s more than a cool catchphrase. Factors like rapidly advancing technology and intense global competition make it extremely difficult to keep up with the accelerating rate of change in business today. Maintaining the status quo, or even striving for incremental improvement, is no longer enough to stay at the leading edge of your industry.

“Yes men” won’t drive the innovation your organization needs to thrive.

Groupthink is extremely dangerous. It can suppress innovation and lead to strategic mistakes and missed opportunities. To keep your business from becoming irrelevant or obsolete, you need a diverse team – people with varied talents, perspectives and backgrounds who aren’t satisfied the status quo and challenge one another’s thinking. Their new ideas and insights are essential to push boundaries and drive your business forward.

How to Keep Conflict from Paralyzing Your Organization

As a manager, it’s your job to make sure the members of your dynamic teams can effectively collaborate with one another – even when they disagree. Otherwise, the dissent can bring projects to a screeching halt and effectively kill innovation.

In this earlier post, we offered suggestions for channeling workplace conflict constructively. But when employees have fundamental disagreements, don’t trust or simply don’t like one another, what are your options? Author Adam Kahane shared these three “stretch strategies” in a recent strategy+business post, to help teams move forward and collaborate without consensus:

Accept the plurality of the situation

Make sure everyone on the team realizes that you don’t have to agree on a solution to make progress. Individuals can work alongside one another toward the same overarching goal in different ways, and for different reasons.

Keep experimenting

Acknowledge as a group that succeeding in an effort isn’t necessarily about coming up with the ideal solution; it’s about continually trying new tactics in pursuit of one. Even if you can’t solve a problem, you should still aim to stay “unstuck” and moving forward.

View yourself as part of the problem

Progress is impossible until team members recognize that they are a part of the problem they’re trying to solve. As their manager, help them understand they role they play in creating or fueling the issue. Only by shifting their perspective can they become part of the solution.

Nothing is perfect in business; we sometimes have to work alongside people we don’t care for agree with. But as a leader, it’s your responsibility to help employees rise above differences to achieve shared goals. The ability to collaborate without consensus is essential to moving forward, driving innovation and ensuring your organization’s long-term success.

Need innovators? Independent thinkers? Exceptional collaborators?

Exact Staff can deliver the high performers you seek for assignments and projects or to grow your core team. What can our national staffing agency do for you? Contact a staffing expert at your local Exact Staff office today.