Tension is Evidence, not an Error
When tension rises in a leadership team, most team members read it as a sign something has gone wrong. A relationship is strained. A meeting has gone off the rails. There’s a problem to be fixed.
So they do. They soften, defer, or stay silent. Harmony is restored. And with it, the avoidance of everything that matters.
Tension is not the problem. Tension is information. It is the visible evidence that different views, priorities, and perspectives prevail. Which is to say, it’s evidence that collaboration exists. Collaboration dances with difference. Remove the tension and you have not solved anything. You have only stopped listening.
High performing teams hold a different belief. They focus less on problems to be fixed and more on tensions to be managed. They see tensions as natural and normal and that exist between two necessary and competing elements – control and autonomy; risk and compliance; functional and organisational priorities; collaboration and commitment. Each are polarities to be managed.
Three ways flourishing teams manage these tensions:
1. They name it instead of numbing it.
Floundering teams smooth tension over. Flourishing teams put it on the table. Naming a tension; as one executive said, “we’re pulling between speed and quality here.” They turn individual discomfort into a shared responsibility.
2. They treat difference as the point, not the problem.
Collaboration always dances with difference. Without difference there is nothing to collaborate on. The disagreement in the room is not in the way of the work; it is the work.
3. They distinguish tensions to manage from problems to solve.
Not every tension has a solution. Some, for example, central vs local, short term vs long term, recur by design. Trying to “fix” them once and for all only buries them. Managing them keeps the tension in check.
A team with no tension is not aligned. It is anaesthetised. The goal was never to remove the friction, it’s to learn to work with it.
INVITATION
The next time you feel tension rise in a room, pause before you try smooth it. Ask:
What is this tension telling us about what matters?
Is this a problem to solve, or an inevitable tension to manage?
What would we learn if we stayed with it ten seconds longer?
Don’t agree to disagree. Stay, and work it through.