The idea that arguing is healthy for companies is a really popular perspective that I think is completely wrong.
It sounds like post rationalization: wanting the hire to be good, therefore deciding that the frustrating interaction with the hire was good.
Just like the word “love” is too vague to describe the many shades of feeling it is applied to, so is the word “arguing.”
I argue with my best friend in a very different way than I argue with my co-workers.
With my best friend it rarely gets heated. We argue over the points of a problem we are excited to work on. At the end of a conversation we have explored ideas that make us happier and get us closer to an answer.
With my co-workers, it can be a force of wills, rather than a force of ideas, though ideas are always present. We are not comfortable enough with each other to investigate deeper, underlying personal or social issues. Those ideas never get resolution and continue to create conflict.
In many, many office/work situations I’ve seen people argue over ideas because they don’t respect the other person’s viewpoint and/or don’t want to change their own. Both sides may have very great perspectives on an idea, but because of where they are starting from, the argument is very different. At the end of the day, the job usually gets done, but neither party is happy. Why? Was it really just about the work?
These are completely different types of arguing. With my friend, I’m excited, hold mutual respect, am forgiving. With my coworkers, I feel cautious and careful, ignored, frustrated, or misunderstood. I argue with both, learn greatly from both, and solve problems with both. However, I feel as though I solve more meaningful problems, much faster with my friend than I do with my coworkers.
You can just stop talking to friends whenever you want, and you can talk about whatever you want without much repercussion.
At work, the stakes are higher. Your job, or promotion, or the company’s longevity is on the line. You’re working with a cast of people you don’t really didn’t, often covered with a social veneer that is intended to force amicability and respect while maintaining an appropriate emotional distance. How healthy does this environment sound? Yet it’s standard.
In the workplace, I try my hardest (and do not always succeed,) to work calmly towards a point of mutual understanding where the ideas themselves are not tied directly to the people suggesting them.
The whole point of a team is to work together to improve something that one couldn’t on their own. However, this is not why everyone joins a team. Some people are on a team because they need a job to survive. Some people are on teams because they are trying to out-compete other people to get a promotion.
The act of mediation and mutual progression is one that seems to get more complex the more I look at it. I approach it from a more Zen school of thought. Imagine if everyone on your team was a kindergartner. Would it be easier to forgive them? How would you treat everyone if you realized they may just not know any better? Also, you should be hiring people who are better than you at what you’ve hired them for. In that sense you should be able to gain a curiosity for their opinion, how they formed it, and how they think it applies to what you’re talking about. These two pathways are really great roads to take towards gaining a less heated understanding of someone who is has a completely different opinion.
The greatest killer of compassion is urgency. When someone needs something ASAP, suddenly everyone in the office is fucking up. The second greatest killer of compassion is complacency. When you’ve gotten used to people being a certain way, and you don’t think they can change themselves for the better, then they become shitty people. Everyone gets trapped in these patterns, however the leaders I respect find ways of getting out of them, and consistently finding ways to improve both what their team knows, and how their team interacts with each other.
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Good to Great is a really fantastic book, but it is not hard science. It is social science performed from natural experiments. A great introduction to what natural experiments are and how they are used to inform social science can be found in the first few chapters of Collapse by Jared Diamond (which one of my professors critiqued for being founded on the fundamentally flawed idea of cultural determinism.) In Nate Silver’s book, The Signal and the Noise, he criticizes the hedgehog concept in Good to Great and puts forth his own concept about the fox, the hedgehog’s polar opposite. I could go on, but this should show how much profession difference of opinion there is in the field of social science.
Consider that C-Level positions at multi-national corporations could be self-selecting for people with incredibly tenacious and argumentative personality types. Because of that, someone who could potentially be less argumentative and effect change even faster than the star CEOs in Jim Collin’s book were unable to make it to the position due to their lack of ability to argue their way there. It’s hard to say because there are such an incredible amount of variables that come in to play and our perspective on them is always changing.
