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Among the numerous leadership principles, or “articles of faith,” that Amazon. com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos created when the online retailer sold only books, was an instruction to “disagree and commit.” Practically, this meant tearing into colleagues’ ideas with blunt feedback. Each year, Amazon recruiters identify thousands of job prospects who are screened by “bar raisers”—stars in the Amazon culture. The company links performance to the success of their assigned projects. The leadership principles emphasize continuing feedback as well as competition among employees to correct problems or suggest improvements. An emboldened junior employee co-invented Amazon’s drone-by-delivery service; and a lower-level operations executive developed an idea to get goods to urban customers in an hour or less—Amazon’s Prime Now service. “We always want to arrive at the right answer,” one company executive said. “It would certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.”1

Unlike Amazon, many organizations are not comfortable with conflict. Not surprisingly, conflict within teams and between teams is one of the top concerns of team management.2 Many teams either actively avoid conflict and risk making “trips to Abilene” (as discussed in Chapter 7) or engage in personal, rather than principled, conflict. Some team leaders pride themselves on the fact that they never have conflict in their teams and these leaders do their teams a great disservice.

Differences in interests, perceptions, information, and preferences cannot be avoided espe- cially in teams that work closely together for extended periods of time. Improperly managed conflict may lead to hostility, performance deficits and in extreme cases, the dissolution of the team. Under some circumstances, conflict can benefit teamwork. Engineers at Apple accus- tomed to working on their own projects in a silo, often find the peer-vetted reviews of their work disruptive. During the peer review, team members present their work to the team and receive both positive and negative feedback. This process can lead to conflict, but at the end of the day,

1From Inside Amazon: Wrestling big ideas in a bruising workplace by Jodi Kantor, © August 15, 2015 The New York Times. 2Thompson, L. (2016). Leading high impact teams. Team leadership survey from the Kellogg School of Management Executive Program. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

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