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I often say that all healthy long-term relationships experience conflict AND have ways to engage conflict that meet the needs, though not necessarily the wants, of everyone involved.
I’ve started to wonder how this shows up strategically in organizations.
“We need better alignment.”
It’s one of the most common things we ask for in organizations. And while alignment is an important goal, I’ve come to believe we sometimes we, often unintentionally, make it harder to achieve.
Most of us genuinely want people to speak up. We say we value different perspectives, honest feedback, and challenging assumptions. But people pay less attention to what we say than to what we consistently reinforce.
What happens when someone asks a difficult question? What happens when someone with less positional power challenges an idea from someone with more? What happens when new information surfaces late in the process? What happens when someone changes a leader’s thinking?
Those moments teach people far more about an organization’s culture than any values statement ever will.
If thoughtful questions are treated as slowing the meeting down, people learn to stay quiet. If changing your mind is seen as weakness, leaders become less willing to be influenced. If the fastest path to agreement earns the most praise, curiosity quietly disappears.
Organizations don’t become what they aspire to be. They become what they consistently reward.
That reward doesn’t have to be formal. It can be as simple as who gets thanked, whose ideas are explored, whose questions are taken seriously, or who is invited back into the conversation after offering a different perspective. Over time, those moments teach people how to participate.
That’s why I’ve come to believe authentic alignment depends less on people’s willingness to speak up than on an organization’s willingness to be influenced.
Being willing to be influenced doesn’t mean being easily swayed. It doesn’t mean leadership abdicates its responsibility to lead or that every dissenting opinion changes the outcome. It means remaining open to information, perspectives, and thoughtful questions that improve the quality of our thinking before we decide.
To be clear, I’m also not talking about rewarding people for derailing a process or arguing for the sake of arguing. Purposeful disruption is different. It challenges assumptions, surfaces overlooked perspectives, and strengthens both the quality of our thinking and our commitment to a shared purpose.
So how do we know whether that’s happening?
Can people tell stories about times when someone challenged an assumption and improved the work?
Not just times when different perspectives were invited, but times when they genuinely influenced the outcome.
Can people recall a leader publicly changing their mind? A difficult question that led to a better decision? A concern raised by someone with less positional power that changed the conversation?
Those stories reveal far more about an organization’s culture than its stated values. They tell people that purposeful disruption isn’t merely tolerated. It’s valued because it strengthens both the work and the relationships that make the work possible.
An organization that can be influenced, that rewards purposeful disruption, and that remembers the stories of when someone changed the outcome is an organization that learns.
Alignment is simply one result of that.
