Politeness is a virtue but in too many teams, it’s become a problem. Leaders often mistake agreement for cohesion, harmony for productivity. But when everyone nods politely and no-one pushes back, creativity and innovation wither. What looks like a well-oiled machine may actually be a team stuck in neutral.
We think that by smoothing edges, we are making progress. In reality, we are holding ourselves back. High-performing teams thrive on something far more challenging: productive tension. They ask difficult questions, challenge each other’s assumptions and embrace the discomfort that comes with disagreement.
Who’s on the bus?
Years ago, at a posh hotel in the countryside, I worked with a financial services team. Or, rather, several teams clumped together for ‘org’ reasons. I used the metaphor of a bus to help them see what was happening. Who was driving? Who was a passenger? Who was clinging to the side, trying to keep up?
In many teams there’s a ‘daddy’ or ‘mummy’ figure – someone everyone looks to for decisions. There are uncles and aunts – advisers with influence but no direct control. And there’s the ‘other’ group, not officially part of the team, but hanging around the bus stop. You can reshuffle the seats, rebrand the departments, but the same dynamics will reappear. Harmony on the surface. Underneath? Confusion and inertia. In this case, one team even admitted they weren’t facing the same way on the bus.
If politeness were enough, teams like this would be unstoppable. But instead, too often they are stuck. No-one wants to challenge the hierarchy. No-one wants to ask uncomfortable questions. And so they wait for someone – anyone – to steer.
The belief that teams perform best when everyone agrees is persistent and dangerously flawed. Research by Dr Amy C Edmondson, Novartis professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, has shown that psychological safety is not about avoiding tension but about creating an environment where people feel safe to speak up, challenge and even risk being wrong without fear of humiliation or retaliation. She defines psychological safety as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking”, not a bubble of comfort, but a foundation for challenge.1
Why excessive politeness kills performance
Google’s deep dive into team dynamics, known as Project Aristotle, offers some of the clearest evidence that psychological safety underpins high performance.2 After studying 180 teams, it found that success didn’t hinge on who was in the team but how the team worked together. The best teams fostered environments where people could express ideas, ask questions, admit mistakes and voice concerns without fear of embarrassment. Even Google’s most brilliant minds needed that safety to contribute their best thinking.
But psychological safety wasn’t the only factor. Two other team norms stood out. The first was equality in conversational turn-taking: the best teams ensured that everyone had space to speak, rather than being dominated by the loudest voices. The second was high social sensitivity – the ability to read the emotions and needs of others.
Teams that tune into subtle cues, whether in person or over video calls, build deeper trust and collaboration. It’s a reminder that the strongest teams are built not just on talent but on trust, curiosity and open dialogue.
I’ve spent enough time with teams to know the signs of excessive politeness. The nervous laughter. The carefully worded emails. Conversations where people say what they really think, but only after the meeting has ended. That’s where ideas go to die.
“High performance isn’t about smoothing over differences. It’s about leaning into them”
There’s an irony here. Most organisations talk about innovation, agility, adaptability. But when it comes to real conversation they default to safety and predictability. They avoid conflict – and in doing so they avoid progress.
High performance isn’t about smoothing over differences. It’s about leaning into them. Professor Andy Cross, of Ashridge Business School, notes, for example, that you shouldn’t measure collaboration by the number of emails sent or hours spent in meetings. It’s measured by outcomes – by the creative energy that comes when people feel free to test ideas and challenge each other.3
This is where improvisation offers powerful lessons. Improv thrives on the principle of ‘yes, and’ – not passive agreement but the act of listening attentively, accepting the offer in front of you and building upon it. It turns tension into creation, not confrontation. In my own workshops over the past 25 years, I’ve seen how improv techniques help teams move beyond fear of saying the wrong thing. When everyone feels they can contribute without judgement, conversations become richer, ideas more diverse and outcomes far stronger. Pixar uses a similar concept known as ‘plussing’, where ideas are never shut down but refined and enhanced collaboratively.
Managing disagreement
None of this is about turning meetings into arguments. Not all disagreement is healthy, and poorly managed tension can easily spill into personal conflict. Research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development last year highlighted that, while 70% of employers believe they have effective procedures for resolving interpersonal conflict, only 36% of employees feel their conflicts are actually resolved. And while 75% of employers trust their line managers to resolve conflict effectively and at an early stage, nearly half (49%) of those same employers acknowledge that managers themselves can be the source of conflict in their teams. In the public sector, that figure rises to 61%.4 The very people tasked with creating psychological safety and fostering healthy challenge are, all too often, contributing to the problem.
This is where leaders need both skill and courage. It’s about intervening early, before issues fester, and reframing conflict as exploration rather than confrontation. Leaders need to invite challenge, and then resist the temptation to shut it down. They need to ask, ‘What are we not seeing?’ and genuinely listen to the answers.
I see it in my work: the moment when a team member hesitantly offers a challenge and the leader responds with curiosity instead of defensiveness. That’s where the magic happens. That’s when teams move from politeness to performance.
If your team feels too comfortable, too smooth, it’s probably not performing at its best. Encourage friction. Invite disagreement. Celebrate curiosity. It’s not always easy, and it’s rarely neat. But that’s where the best work begins.
Creating conditions for constructive friction
Leaders need to actively create the space for challenge. It starts with listening – really hearing what others are offering. This is the first step in what I call the LASER framework: Listen, Accept, Send, Explore, Reincorporate.
• Listen: hear what’s said, without immediately filtering it through your own assumptions.
• Accept: acknowledge the contribution as a starting point, even if you disagree. Acceptance is not agreement; it’s respect.
• Send: add your own offer – a perspective, a question, an idea.
• Explore: be curious about assumptions. Ask “what if” and “why not”.
• Reincorporate: revisit and adapt ideas as new insights emerge. It’s how teams learn to build, rather than block.
LASER turns friction into progress. It allows leaders to model curiosity and openness, transforming disagreement from personal threat into collective opportunity. I recall a senior military leader telling me how, on his MBA course, he had to learn to stop giving orders and start asking questions. At first, it felt unnatural. But he came to see that leadership isn’t about being the only person with the answer, it’s about making space for others to contribute.
Neil Mullarkey is a communications expert and author of In the Moment: Build your confidence, communication and creativity at work, which was shortlisted for The Business Book Awards 2024. He delivers keynotes, workshops and coaching to organisations including Google and London Business School.
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This article is adapted from a feature first published in the summer 2025 issue of Edge
