Anyone who has experienced insomnia knows the paradox. You lie awake knowing you need to sleep, but the harder you try, the more pressure you create and the more elusive sleep becomes. Before long, the effort to fall asleep becomes part of what is keeping you awake.
What often helps is shifting attention away from the outcome and towards creating the conditions in which sleep can happen naturally.
The same principle can apply to leadership teams, particularly when it comes to healthy conflict.
The Paradox of Healthy Conflict
Many leadership teams recognise that they need more robust discussion. They want people to challenge ideas, raise concerns earlier, bring different perspectives to the table and have the difficult conversations that lead to better decisions.
The response is often to focus on the behaviours they want: Speak up. Challenge more. Don’t avoid difficult conversations.
But asking for more challenge does not necessarily create it.
When disagreement feels risky, people naturally adopt protective strategies. They may remain silent in meetings and raise concerns afterwards, soften what they really think, defer to the most influential person in the room or publicly support decisions they privately question.
The result can be the appearance of alignment without genuine agreement.
What looks like a lack of healthy conflict may therefore be a symptom of something deeper. Instead of asking, “Why aren’t people challenging each other?”, a more useful question is: “What is making disagreement feel unsafe here?”
Creating the Conditions for Healthy Conflict
Healthy conflict becomes easier when people trust that relationships can withstand disagreement, different perspectives are genuinely valued, concerns can be raised without negative consequences, and the team can remain united without always being unanimous.
When these conditions exist, people spend less energy protecting themselves and become more willing to ask difficult questions, test assumptions, acknowledge uncertainty and change their minds.
This is the counterintuitive relationship between psychological safety and healthy conflict: the safer people feel, the more willing they are to disagree.
Psychological safety does not mean avoiding tension or making everyone comfortable. It should enable productive discomfort: giving people greater freedom to challenge assumptions, question decisions, acknowledge mistakes and raise difficult issues.
Safety without challenge can create complacency. Challenge without safety can create defensiveness. High-performing teams need both.
Focus on the Conditions
For leaders seeking more constructive challenge, the question is not simply: How do we get people to speak up more?
A better question is: What happens when they do?
When someone challenges a leader, is the response curiosity or defensiveness? When someone raises a concern, is it genuinely explored or quickly dismissed? When someone offers a different perspective, does the group engage with it? And after disagreement, does the relationship remain intact?
These everyday interactions teach people what is safe far more powerfully than simply telling them to speak up.
Leaders cannot demand genuine debate into existence. But they can create the conditions in which people feel safe enough to challenge, question and contribute fully.
The goal is not more conflict. It is to create the conditions where people can say what needs to be said, work through disagreement constructively and emerge stronger as a team.
