Building a Conflict-Competent Boardroom

Senior leadership is neither equal to seniority nor the big title; at the board level, it implies the high level of intellectual and emotional maturity. 

The modern digital board has many responsibilities, also gets a lot of distractions and hits many pitfalls on the digital transformation. In order to lead today’s hyper-connected digital organizations with the hyper-diverse workforces, board directors should become the digital provocateur to drive changes and set the leadership tone for digital transformation. In practice, people vary in their ideology, cognizance, perceptions, and priorities; and they react to situations in different ways. Therefore, conflict is perhaps inevitable, even at the board room. How to build a conflict-competent boardroom to ensure effective communication and high mature governance? How do high performing Boards make great decisions and deal with not only emotions, legitimate, but also politics, power, or conflict?

Strive to be conflict competent: From the boardroom to the coffee room, many command-control working environments are static and tedious, there is no energy in the room because people are afraid of being themselves and saying anything which might cause conflicts. In an open and creative work environment, there is the energy between people, meaning they are not afraid to say things that will help the business improve. Forward-thinking boards are looking for people who have cognitive differences or unique strength as part of the mix of Board skills, for bridging gaps, improving governance effectiveness and embracing trends such as digital transformation. Diversity, mainly the diversity of thought and color of viewpoint helps to build a mindful digital board. Conflicts are perhaps inevitable due to different personalities or communication styles. The diverse viewpoints should always be welcomed, even they seem to conflict. But conflicts need to be handled wisely. If there is a trustful relationship in the board, conflicts within the group can stimulate deep discussions, spark collective creativity, improve decision maturity and the board productivity cycle. Criticism shouldn’t be taken too personally. It is important for leaders to accept some constructive criticism from time to time, and be fully aware of how they are performing. The wise leaders look at constructive criticism or well-wish feedback as a way to improve their leadership maturity.

The key is to find out the root cause of the conflict: When conflicts happen, it’s important to listen and understand before acting, and constantly learn, educate, and share. The challenge for leaders is to motivate others to be real problem solvers by first understanding what is the conflict, and then, deal with it smoothly. Are conflicts caused by cognitive difference, miscommunication or excessive emotional involvement? Could it be a cultural difference, emotional responses, or the growing pain of the board transformation? Etc. How aware are you of what triggers to the conflict, and what are the specific ways to better manage them before and after the buttons to trigger the conflict are pushed? Global boards will, for the most part, go through a learning process, relationship building and understanding of what it takes to get cross-cultural agreements. Maintaining the great board dynamic can help transform the emotional board to an effective board by dealing with conflicts smoothly. and improve communication continually.

The certain level of conflict perhaps generates creative tension or stimulates brainstorming: A conflict-competent, mindful Board exhibits a creative tension between collegiality and challenge. Highly quality digital board directors not only make constructive criticism to the management but also are the fiercest critic to themselves. They are hunting for constructive criticism and smart skepticism as the hidden gems. Being innovative is a state of mind; it is about thinking differently, acting differently, delivering differently, adding value differently from the status quo. Innovation requires thinking beyond, as opposed to outside the box, altering or changing the frame of reference to create previously unconsidered solutions. To achieve the creative tension balance, the behavior of the Chair is key, both for what they do in meetings and what they do behind the scenes. From a governance perspective, the complementary mindsets and expertise at the boardroom will help to identify management blind-spots and capture collective insight.

Senior leadership is neither equal to seniority nor the big title; at the board level, it implies the high level of intellectual and emotional maturity. The right way to deal with conflict is to identify them right at the start, find the root causes, and handle them wisely. There is still a long way to achieving corporate governance maturity. But it’s worth the effort. High-mature digital boards with conflict-competent and “cool-headed” directors are driving force for progress changes and exemplary of contemporary leadership.

Posted in: Board Room,Communication,Future of Leadership