Dealing with Divergent Views in Your Team

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Tough Leadership Conversations:  Dealing With Divergent Views in Your Team (download transcript)

Adam Lacey

Welcome to the Tough Leadership Conversations series. I'm Adam, the co-founder of Assemble You, the audio learning experts. I'm joined by Ruth Farenga, Executive Leadership Coach, TEDx speaker, host of the Conscious Leaders podcast, and author of the brilliant Next Level Leadership.

Together, we'll examine how to navigate some of the most challenging workplace discussions: think pay rise requests, performance reviews, managing managers, dealing with divergent views, and talking about mental health.

Unclear communication can lead to an erosion of trust, staff absenteeism, a breakdown of relationships, and a decline in performance, so getting these tricky conversations right is absolutely essential.

This series is as much about reflecting inward as a leader as it is about your day-to-day management practices and techniques. We'll discuss approaching situations with a positive intention. Fundamentally, we get the most out of individuals when we concentrate on what's working rather than what we perceive to be broken. So with that in mind, let's get started.

So, Ruth, what are we talking about today

Ruth Farenga

So today we're talking about dealing with divergent views in your team.

Adam Lacey

Fantastic. And can we just start by outlining what we mean when we say divergent views? What are we talking about here?

Ruth Farenga

Yes, so we're talking about different perspectives. So these could be political perspectives, religious perspectives, creative perspectives. And they may originate from our background, essentially. It could be our upbringing, our religious persuasion, a political persuasion, anything that's helped us turn into the person we are now.

Adam Lacey

Yeah. So this is talking about more about like how we are constructed socially and otherwise as a human being, isn't it? And how we maybe bring biases, bring upbringing, bring our religion, everything into our work, because we are only human and that will form part of us and our identity is what we're talking about here almost.

And so if you've got a team with lots of different identities or different backgrounds, then that can sometimes cause friction in terms of them agreeing, disagreeing on certain things, or just actually coming at problems or coming at anything from completely different viewpoints and then not understanding other people's viewpoints because they're so entrenched or embedded in what they feel, what they see, where they come from. So this is a really interesting one.

Ruth Farenga

Really interesting. I was gonna say that Andy Woodfield, who I interviewed on the podcast, he was a partner at PwC. He said quite famously on his podcast episode with me that it's really easy to build diverse teams or divergent teams because as a big company like PwC they could hire pretty much who they wanted. So we can meet those diversity, you know, standards really easily. He said getting them to get along, that's a massive job. That's huge. That's way more difficult or way more important if we're going to hire a diverse team.

Adam Lacey

Great. And that's what we're going to talk about today, really, like how do we actually make this work? And I think there's an understanding in one way here. And I'll kind of, I'll make a comment, you know, diverse teams are better teams. And Ruth, I want you to take that comment apart in a way that I know you want to. So, if I was saying people with lots of different backgrounds, lots of different opinions, you know, you're going to get better results out of that. What's your response to that?

Ruth Farenga

Yeah. Diverse teams aren't necessarily better teams. The Harvard Business Review tells us this is the case. But the most high-performing teams are diverse, but they are also married with a high degree of psychological safety. Now we can go into a little bit about what psychological safety is made of. I think there is a lot in the media out there that somehow diversity equals performance. And we are missing this key element of safety here if we want to create those high-performance teams.

Adam Lacey

Yeah, and without safety, you're not going to achieve the high performance. And in fact, you're probably going to end up with a team that is trickier to manage, disagrees more regularly, doesn't compromise, doesn't come to good understandings and ways forward. So, cool. So this element of psychological safety, one of our favourite topics, is absolutely critical to this particular point.

So Ruth, let's get into that. How do we start to think about bringing psychological safety into a team? And especially a team with, you know, with a lot of people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different biases.

Ruth Farenga

I think it's really important to quote Google's research on this. So they did a project called Project Aristotle. And they wanted to understand in their business why some units, some divisions, performed a lot better than others.

And they said it boiled down to psychological safety. Psychological safety is made up of these two key components. The first is emotional awareness. So that's aware of yourself, your mood, your others. What are their personality types? What their moods are on that day? That kind of ability to interrelate and understand each other's personality and mood. That's the first one.

And the second is equality in conversational turn-taking. Essentially taking equal time to speak, usually in an uninterrupted way because what can happen in a very diverse team is we start hearing from some voices much more loudly than others, and then other people start to feel left out. They start to feel unheard. They feel they're not being valued, not being listened to. And that's where you're going to get conflict or unhappiness in the team.

Adam Lacey

Yeah. Okay. So emotional awareness and equality in conversation. Let's unpack that first one a bit. How do we help facilitate emotional awareness in our team? What are some things that we can actually do as a manager there? Because I feel like we're at risk of, and I'll say something, you know, controversial as I always like to, but we're at risk of emotional awareness, you either have it or you don't, almost. But I know that's not the truth, but there is often a perception. Some people are just very emotionally aware, very good at it. Others, not so good. But how can we support everybody to be better at this particular skill?

Ruth Farenga

Now, this is a really big topic. Sometimes we might hear it called emotional intelligence. So it's things like self-awareness, self-management, interrelational awareness and relationship management. They're the Daniel Goleman four aspects of emotional intelligence. So this is really about starting with self. I'm aware of how I behave. I'm aware of my values. I'm aware of what I care about. All that type of thing. I know how to manage myself, so I know how to manage and regulate my mood as best as I can. I know when I'm getting reactive.

And then we're talking about interrelational skills. So this is listening is a really important interrelation skill. Always talking about listening. I feel like this is one of the topics I talk about the most. One of the most highly underrated skills there is around, is the ability to hear other people.

And then relationship management. You know, just because someone's different from me doesn't mean I can't build a relationship with them and start really trying to understand their perspective. So I think there's a lot in that emotional awareness side about management of self and then how we bring that into forming and enhancing those relationships through key skills like listening.

Adam Lacey

And I guess, how do you help people in your team with that? Is this part of the one-to-ones? Is this you reflecting this kind of stuff back at them? Are you giving them concrete examples of, you know, “In that meeting you didn't really listen to what they were saying or understand it? Next time I'd like you to X, Y, Z.” What are the steps?

Ruth Farenga

Yeah. You certainly can deal with difficulty in a kind of performance management way and we can refer people to our performance management module if people have, you know, difficult feedback to give. But I think, sort of, prevent it happening in the first place. Things like one-to-ones between team members are really important.

So Pip Jameson, who I interviewed for the Conscious Leaders podcast, runs a company called The Dots. I think Forbes called it “the LinkedIn for creatives.” And their organisation, their platform is quite a successful, medium-sized business. She gets people to have randomised coffee catchups every week. So a little tool will assign someone a new person to have a half an hour of coffee catch up with. So every week you are meeting someone different in the company and having a non-work or work, whatever, chat to get to know each other. And I think this is where our social connections at work and social activities for employees can really help them. But sometimes they need to be structured because we can get cliques emerging and people just hang out with.

So we might have some drinks reception, or we might have a tea, coffee at the staff, the social. But we say, “Go find someone you haven't talked to, barely in the company or in the team, and spend five minutes understanding about how their week was”.

You know, and you might do that a number of times during an away day or some kind of social activity. I know these things can feel forced and sometimes we just wanna be informal, but they can help us break out of our limited cliques that we can fall into.

Adam Lacey

Yeah. And I like that. And what are your thoughts on when we are doing that as a manager, and, by the way, I really feel that a strong social relationship, personal link, between people working together is really important. And it doesn't have to, you know, they don't have to be best mates like you're saying, but there's an element of mutual respect that needs to be there. There's an element of understanding their personal situation. What they do, what they can't do, how they come at certain things. And you only get that by actually, understanding that person. Understanding a bit about, okay, well what jobs did you have previously? Where did you grow up? You know, what holidays do you celebrate?

Again, asking if we're bringing things like religion or stuff like that into it, I think all that context is super, super helpful and important. Obviously from a HR point of view, you've got to be careful about telling people to disclose all their personal information to their colleagues. It's a real tough balance to get right, isn't it? I guess it's more about facilitating the opportunity to, and letting a social occurence happen almost.

Ruth Farenga

You can certainly have more structure. Like I've seen effective teams where they, at the beginning of a project together, when they have a new team form, they'll produce a slide on things about their working style. So “I respond well when people do this, or I'm great at these things, like I'm great at detail, I'm bad at detail, I'm good at starting projects.”

Some other people will know psychometrics as well that help, them there's loads on the market. You know, sometimes this can be as simple as sharing your interest, sharing what you hate, what you love, you know what you like to do outside of work on one slide, and then going round and spending five minutes on each person just to really understand each other or getting them to pair up in a group to do so. You want that kind of exchange to happen, for sure.

Adam Lacey

Yeah, I think that's really important. I've got quite a funny example actually of communication not happening well and that going wrong in that when Rich and I went from just, you know, me, him, and James in the business to starting to hire more people we would have team meetings. And in those team meetings, we'd discuss ideas. And in particular me as well a little bit, but Rich in particular is real ideas guy, is always coming up with great ideas and he'd talk about them. And the people that had just started working for us would think that those are tasks that need to get done. And so they'd start working on them. And these are just what he would call a brain fart. You know, he's just dumping information and “I've been thinking about this, but why don’t we do this and blah, blah, blah.” But actually, what we hadn't explained was just like we're creative people, we've got lots of ideas, please do not act on all of them because we do not have the resources to do half of this stuff that we're thinking about. We are just thinking aloud and we're talking and we're after opinions and ideas back, and we want you to criticise them and all the rest of it. But that had to be explained and that had to be kind of outlined.

Ruth Farenga

But wouldn't it be great like if you have a slide you can refer to as well, and you're like, “I don't even understand what this person is on about”, and you go back to their slide and go, “Oh, right, okay. They like thinking aloud. They've got loads of ideas but you know, they need pinning down or like to find out what this is really about.” That's really clear.

Adam Lacey

Yeah, it is. I like that. And like you said, there's different kind of psychometric type things that will help you say, “Oh, I'm a, you know, I'm a red, blue, yellow dot,” or whatever those things are, “And this is how I kind of work.” But I think you're right. It's just kind of clearly explaining or having that structural process at the beginning of a project or when a new team is coming together will help expedite that process of people getting to know each other and actually understanding how they can work together. So that's a really nice, proactive thing you can do as a manager in that situation.

Ruth Farenga

I think the point of this is we have to think about why we work. Like why do we do work for people or with people? And usually it's because we care about maybe the purpose of the organisation, for example, and we care about the people. And if we don't know the people, then why would we care? So this is about buy-in and relationships and the strength of bonds. We don't have to be super close, like you said, we don’t need to be best friends, but we do need to care otherwise we may as well not bother.

Adam Lacey

Yeah. No, I love that. So let's talk about equality and conversation turn-taking as well because I like that as our second step on this route or on this journey to a psychologically safe team. How in practice do we make that happen as a manager, as a leader?

Ruth Farenga

So this is about simple structures for listening. Now there are experts in this field like Nancy Kline, who has a great book called Time to Think, if you wanna get into this in more detail. But essentially this is things like, say we have a problem, and I don't mean for every meeting or conversation, but let's say we have a knotty problem, a client or particular project, we might go round and ask each team member for their opinion. And we would give them, for example, two minutes to speak uninterrupted.

And it's really clear, and Nancy Kline goes into this in more detail, that these two minutes are for thinking and talking. So you don't have to speak straight away. You can be like, “Oh, I'm just gonna look out the window for a minute while I think about this. And then I'll come up with an idea”. Or you, yeah, you're thinking aloud like you said Rich does, you know, you can talk through your ideas, the bad ideas, good ideas. And everybody else needs to bring their attention, their presence into hearing you. So as the listener, you're doing as much work as a speaker because you need to be bringing your attention back each time it wanders. And you talked about respect, this is about sharing respect for each team member. And quite often people will say they don't hear from certain individuals in the team, and it's often because there isn't the airtime or they're more introverted. So this can help our quieter members of the team speak up and yeah and you can pass if you don't wanna contribute. It's not like a compulsory thing, but it allows that kind of equality to hear everyone's views.

Adam Lacey

We're helping people develop their emotional awareness. We're helping create equality in conversation, turn-taking, and we're building towards this psychologically safe environment, I guess, that is our team where diversity of view of thought, of background and stuff is heard, is respected and is given time to kind of put views forward. What happens when someone is maybe being deliberately provocative or maybe even exploiting differences or backgrounds to create tension, you know, that type of scenario? Is this kind of straight back to our performance management?

Ruth Farenga

Yeah, I was about to say, yeah, I'd refer people to the performance management section Difficult Performance Discussions because yeah, that's a, you know, if we are seeing poor behaviour, people exhibiting manipulative behaviours that relate to people's backgrounds, you know, that's not tolerable. So I'd definitely refer them to that module to catch that early and nip it in the bud.

Adam Lacey

Great. And then, I wanted to ask you about particular topics. Because I think, particular topics in the workplace can be hot topics and can be things that help or destroy relationships in some ways. And I asked that former question with the reasoning that I wanted to ask this next one. So things like politics or sometimes religion that you hope most people will be more, kind of, understanding around religion these days. But some things like that, politics in particular, just thinking about the last few years can be very divisive. And people can have very strong opinions on stuff that is linked to their upbringing, their socioeconomic background, their kind of their views on the world formed over many years, and you get shoved into this environment in work, possibly with people that have got completely different views to you. What's our role here as a manager? You know, do we just say, “Look, you're not allowed to talk about politics, or you're not allowed to talk about exercise on that topic”. Do we ban things? Is that productive? Is that just sticking our head under the duvet and hoping it goes away? What's our responsibility here?

Ruth Farenga

I think you know what I'm going to say, Adam, this is the tightrope again, what were we talking about. Maybe we need to call this series The Tightrope. Yeah. I think this really depends on your company culture because people buy into a culture that works for them, and then it's really important that you stick to that culture.

So you might have a culture that is very polite and very kind of discreet. And people don't really share a lot of their political views in the workplace. That is okay. It's not necessarily what I would personally do, but it does work for some people and I think it's worth acknowledging and honouring that can function rather well.

If your culture is more open, more vulnerable, there's probably no getting away from that. So we need to lean into it. So if you’re noticing, you know, many people in the workplace are quite vocal about their opinions, then we need to be starting to create an environment where those voices can be heard. Back to the equality and conversational turn-taking, back to emotional awareness, you know, it's a big job. And also I'd really double down on things like values and behaviours. You know, I'm always talking about this. Maybe there are company values that you stick to or their team values. So things like honesty, creativity, directness, respect. If you have a very big range of different employee types and backgrounds, you wanna have a value like that and really define it as a group.

What does respect mean for us? Oh, it means that we acknowledge the fact that we come from very different backgrounds. What does that mean in terms of a behaviour? It means that we hear each other out when we have perspectives and we are able to challenge each other, and where possible we take the emotion out of it and try and be more logical. I say that like it's easy. But we can have behaviours kind of written up like that. But when people ride against those behaviours when they act out of turn, we can hold them up like, “Hey, we all agreed to these behaviours and values, so that is not an appropriate way to speak to someone”, or “Let's have a one-to-one chat about that because we need to all be on the same page”.

Really diverse group. We've got a lot of potential for unhealthy dynamic here. But let's you know, this is my job as a leader. This comes up a lot in coaching and facilitation I do, is that some people think this is a distraction from their job as a leader, as a manager, it's knowing is the job. You know, before when we had a lot of certainty, a lot of people looked and acted the same. We could have more operational management, but now we have a high degrees of uncertainty and high degrees of diversity, which means that our role is much more about facilitating difficult conversations. It's raising people's awareness of their bias. It's helping them get along, essentially. They don't have to be best friends, but they do need to better hear each other and understand that perspective. And that is your job. So part of this comes down to delegation and things as well, so that you have some of the capacity and head space to help do this facilitator role.

Adam Lacey

Yeah, and I like that. I think of it as a coaching role in many ways, isn't it? And it's coaching people. Helping them to reflect back. You mentioned biases. You know, it is really difficult for any of us to recognise one of our biases. It's so hard to say, “That's one of my biases because, you know, I was brought up this way, and that's the way I think.” It's a lot easier for someone with a divergent viewpoint or different background to say, “Oh yeah, okay. That's why they think like that because they're slightly different”. So your role is helping people identify when they are bringing some of those biases and then like you say, I really love the idea of having that set of mutually agreed values.

Let’s use the politics example. You're not saying “We're a Republican company” or “We're a conservative company” in the UK or a Labour company or a Democrat company just to cover all four bases. You're saying, “We ascribe to a set of values in how we interact with each other, how we treat each other as humans, how we listen to each other, how we empathise with each other, how we understand each other, and how we deal with things like conflict or problems or disagreements. If you are not aligning yourself to those values, it is my job as your leader, as your manager to call that out and to help you correct that.” And I guess a lot of the time it's not being done deliberately. It's being done almost as a reflex, isn't it? Because again, we're talking about how we are as humans and our background and our baggage and everything.

Ruth Farenga

So it's not easy. This is a big role, I think, for a leader to kind of lean into.

Adam Lacey

And the prize at the end of it is a psychology-safe environment where people can bring their best selves to work. But most importantly, they can bring their whole self to work. They don't feel like they need to be guarded about their background or their religion or their political views or things that they're doing maybe outside of work because they know that even if they are working with people that don't share those views or agree with them on everything, there is a level of mutual respect there that allows them to do the best work that they can do. Love that.

So, Ruth, let's move to our final section. What are your top tips to round off this conversation on diversion views?

Ruth Farenga

Yeah, I think the first one would be really to understand the working styles of your group and help them understand each other's working styles. This helps with that emotional awareness we were talking about– background, things you like doing, things you don't like doing–and maybe having that on a slide and using that to share.

The second will be to really see yourself as a facilitator, as a leader. This is your role to bring together those differences of opinion. It's not a distraction from your role; it is the role.

And thirdly, something we haven't covered so much actually, is I would really encourage you to spread your attention around the group. We did talk about equality and conversational turn-taking by also meaning the amount of attention you give each team member. Some may be very different from you, but it's really important to allow enough equity in the group and that you're not leaning into your favourites.

Adam Lacey

I like that. That's a really, really good top three to end on. Ruth, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation. We hope you join us for the rest of this series on tough leadership conversations. We'll see you in the next one.

You’re a project manager working with a cross-functional team that includes people from a wide range of cultural and professional backgrounds.

Recently, you’ve noticed that meetings have become tense. One team member, Carlos, is highly vocal and confident in sharing opinions, while another, Jade, has become increasingly quiet.

You’re concerned that valuable perspectives are being lost—not because people disagree with Carlos, but because they don’t feel comfortable speaking up.

You suspect some of this tension stems from different communication styles and unspoken biases. You want to create a space where everyone feels safe to contribute, but you also need to ensure discussions remain productive and respectful.

1. How can you structure conversations to ensure that all voices are heard equally, even in a team with dominant personalities?
2. What role do your own behaviours and preferences play in whose input you seek out, and how can you challenge any unconscious bias in yourself?
3. How can you help your team understand and respect each other’s working styles, especially when they approach problems in radically different ways?

Tough Leadership Conversations: Dealing With Divergent Views in Your Team

Dealing With Divergent Views in Your Team

Help employees understand their own working styles to improve emotional awareness and collaboration.

Employees should recognise their own emotions, regulate their responses, and develop active listening skills.

Diverse teams perform best when psychological safety is present, ensuring everyone feels safe to share ideas.

Encourage social interactions and structured team activities to build trust and understanding.

Ensure all team members have opportunities to speak, reducing dominance from louder voices.

Set clear team values.

Define shared behaviours like respect and inclusivity to guide workplace interactions and reduce conflict.

Be a facilitator, not just a manager.

Enable productive conversations.

Give balanced attention to all employees.

Avoid favouritism by ensuring equitable support and engagement across the team.

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