The Ground Rule That Fosters Healthy Team Debate

To reach the best conclusion, decision, or position, leaders and teams sometimes benefit from a full-fledged debate on the issues involved.

This requires team members to stake out competing viewpoints and then advocate strongly for their preferred perspective or outcome.

In any debate, team members marshal facts and make the case for the correctness of their position while exposing the weaknesses of the contrasting views.

In formal debates, people take a side and make their case to win the argument, but that’s not how good debates in teams go.

When debating an issue on a team, everyone is encouraged to make the strongest case as well as poking holes and exposing weaknesses for any option. Team members often switch back and forth in their advocacy, examining the merits of each proposal from every angle.

What makes it a debate rather than a discussion is the mandate to challenge the positive and negative claims surrounding an option or proposal. Team members don’t accept any claim as true or factual without evidence.

During the debate, no one is safe from having their viewpoints criticized, challenged, and confronted.

The thought is that the debating process reveals the true strengths and weaknesses of the proposals or options, giving the team a more objective and accurate view of what is the best path forward or at least the merits of each path.

The confrontational nature of debating the so-called “facts” can make the conversation somewhat contentious and often results in heated and highly impassioned arguments for and against different viewpoints.

That makes debating an uncomfortable and face-threatening activity for many of those involved.

Good leaders understand this and thus don’t just introduce a debate by asking people to go at it. Instead, they clarify why debating an issue or decision would benefit the group and ask the team to adopt this unique process for a limited time.

Of utmost importance is for the leader to set one critical ground rule — that team members need to direct their arguments at ideas and not at people.

This means refraining from using personal pronouns, especially “you,” and focusing on the merits of the position, not on who offered a claim or counterargument. By separating people and ideas, a debate can get testy without hurting feelings or harming relationships.

A lively debate is sometimes needed on teams to challenge working assumptions and to fully address the complexities of a difficult issue.

The divergence of viewpoints stated through healthy provocation can often produce a clarity not easily achieved in any other way.

Teams don’t debate issues nearly as often as they could or should. With the right ground rules, both teams and decisions would benefit from more vigorous debates.

Would you like to debate that?