It’s an EOS Level 10 meeting, and the team is working through their headlines—key updates that impact the business, including discussions around the root cause of leadership conflict. Understanding the root cause of leadership conflict is essential for improving team dynamics.
Alex, the CEO and Visionary (whose Predictive Index profile is a Maverick), just found out that a major competitor has launched a new service—a service he’s been pushing the leadership team to develop for the past six months.
Addressing the root cause of leadership conflict enables leaders to create a culture of accountability and collaboration.
Evaluating the root cause of leadership conflict should be an ongoing process in leadership development.
Feeling the pressure, Alex lashes out aggressively at Megan, the COO and Integrator (whose Predictive Index profile is an Analyzer), along with the rest of the leadership team.
- “You are always dragging your feet! Nothing ever gets done fast enough around here.”
- “You had months to act, and now the competition has beaten you to it. How do you let this happen?”
- “If you don’t start moving faster, you’re going to make this company irrelevant.”
Megan has been frustrated for weeks but hasn’t spoken up. She’s been focused on stabilizing the last two major feature launches and ensuring they perform well before adding more complexity. However, she realizes that the root cause of leadership conflict lies in the lack of communication and unvoiced concerns. Identifying the root cause of leadership conflict will enable her to address these issues directly.
- “Oh, so now it’s my fault? Maybe if you actually committed to a strategy instead of chasing every shiny object, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
- “You throw new ideas around without thinking through what it takes to execute them. Then you blame me when things don’t magically happen overnight.”
- “It’s easy to demand speed when you’re not the one dealing with the fallout.”
The rest of the leadership team watches as the meeting spirals out of control.
- Alex’s aggressive communication shuts down real discussion.
- Megan’s concealed frustration has turned into aggressive retaliation.
- The team is no longer problem-solving—they’re locked in unhealthy conflict.
This is not the healthy, ideological conflict that builds strong teams. This is reactive, emotionally charged conflict that damages trust and stalls execution.
What’s Really Gone Wrong?
Everything that Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Stephen R. Covey’s The Speed of Trust teach about effective leadership is falling apart in this moment.
- Instead of ideological conflict, they’re having heated arguments.
- Instead of talking straight and demonstrating respect, they’re attacking each other.
- Instead of listening first, they’re defending and blaming.
If this doesn’t get corrected, trust in the leadership team will erode. Team members will start avoiding difficult conversations, and issues will fester until they create bigger breakdowns in execution.
This moment doesn’t just need better problem-solving—it needs better communication.
By addressing the root cause of leadership conflict, teams can foster an environment where everyone feels heard and valued.
The Beacon Partners Approach: Turning Conflict into Constructive Communication
At The Beacon Partners, we’ve worked with dozens of leadership teams facing this same challenge. Poor communication creates bigger problems than the original issues themselves.
Our approach helps leadership teams move beyond frustration and misalignment by guiding them through:
Unpacking the root cause of leadership conflict is crucial for establishing trust and encouraging open dialogue among team members.
- Recognizing and correcting aggressive, passive, and passive-aggressive communication styles
- Integrating healthy communication and the EOS framework to drive clarity, alignment, and accountability
- Strengthening team trust by ensuring that conflicts are healthy and resolved productively
Recognizing the root cause of leadership conflict allows teams to work towards solutions rather than getting stuck in blame.
Let’s commit to recognizing the root cause of leadership conflict to create a more aligned and effective team.
When leadership teams shift their communication and decision-making, they move from blame and frustration to alignment and execution.
In This Article, You’ll Learn How To:
- Differentiate needs from strategies so leadership teams stop debating tactics and start addressing the root cause of conflict.
- Identify competing needs on a leadership team, ensuring discussions are focused on aligning individual motivators with business priorities.
- Leverage constructive communication during your leadership team’s IDS sessions to have healthier ideological conflict, increasing trust and accountability.
The root cause of leadership conflict can often be traced back to differing priorities and perspectives among team members.
The root cause of leadership conflict often stems from unmet needs and poor communication. Addressing these can lead to a more productive environment.
The Real Issue: Confusing Needs with Strategies
Alex and Megan aren’t actually fighting about whether or not to launch a new service.
They’re fighting because they have different needs—and they haven’t made those needs clear.
Understanding the root cause of leadership conflict is a critical step in improving team effectiveness and performance.
- Alex’s Unmet Needs Driving His Emotions: Company Survival, Progress, Effectiveness, Innovation
- Megan’s Unmet Needs Driving Her Emotions: Consideration and Stability for the Team, Effectiveness, and Patience
Instead of acknowledging these needs, they are arguing over strategies—pushing competing ideas instead of identifying the underlying need that must be met.
This is why leadership teams get stuck in unproductive conflict.
Before debating strategies, teams need to:
- Clarify the real business needs at play
- Recognize the competing needs of individual leaders and their teams
- Explore multiple strategies that could meet everyone’s needs
By identifying the root cause of leadership conflict, leaders can facilitate more constructive discussions that lead to resolution.
Ultimately, addressing the root cause of leadership conflict can transform a team’s dynamic and enhance overall performance.
When teams fail to do this, conversations turn into personal conflict instead of productive problem-solving.
How to Use Constructive Communication to Reframe Unproductive Conflict
Instead of leading with blame, leaders can use the Constructive Communication Framework to shift the conversation from vague, subjective debates to healthy ideological conflict.
- Observation – A factual, non-judgmental description of what happened
- Feelings – Expressing the shift in emotions
- Story I Tell Myself – The internal narrative shaping the response
- Unmet Need Driving the Emotions – The underlying need fueling unpleasant emotions
How Alex Could Have Communicated More Effectively:
- Observation: “On March 15th, our competitor, InnovateTech, launched their new AI-powered analytics platform on their website. This is the exact type of service I’ve proposed as a rock candidate at each of the last two quarterly offsites.”
- Feelings: “I’m feeling a range of emotions—from disappointed and annoyed to frustrated, fearful, and angry.”
- Story I Tell Myself: “The story I’m telling myself is that the leadership team isn’t listening to me when I’ve raised the importance of this service in the past. If they were taking my input seriously, we would have moved faster. And if they aren’t listening to me about this, maybe they don’t respect my role as the Visionary. I keep playing it out in my mind, and it leads to a worst-case scenario: we keep falling behind, we lose market share, revenue slows, and eventually, we have to start laying people off because of slow growth.”
- Unmet Needs: “I have a need to be heard, as well as a need for progress, survival of the company, and innovation.”
Leaders must identify the root cause of leadership conflict to pave the way for better collaboration and understanding within the team.
How Megan Could Have Communicated More Effectively:
- Observation: “In the last 24 hours, we’ve received seven customer complaints about performance issues with the last two feature launches. In the last week, we’ve logged 22 total customer support tickets related to unresolved functionality problems. Our team has worked a combined 140 overtime hours in the past month just to stabilize these launches. We still have five key milestones left before these projects are fully implemented and performing as expected.”
- Feelings: “I’m feeling a range of emotions—from frustrated and overwhelmed to concerned and exhausted.”
- Story I Tell Myself: “The story I’m telling myself is that if we continue adding new services without fully implementing the last ones, we’re going to create major quality and customer retention issues. If things go wrong, frustrated customers will start leaving for InnovateTech, and my best employees, who are already stretched thin, will quit under the pressure. And then, I’ll be left picking up the slack, doing their jobs on top of my own, and this whole cycle will repeat itself.”
- Unmet Needs: “I have a need for stability, effectiveness, consideration, and patience.”
The Next Step: Formulating Clear Requests
Once the leadership team has fully surfaced the key elements of the issue, they are finally in a position to debate solutions productively:
- Fact-Based Observations – The team has anchored the conversation in objective data, removing assumptions and ensuring everyone is working from the same reality.
- Internal Narratives – Each leader has owned and revealed the story they are telling themselves, creating an opportunity for the team to acknowledge and empathize with each other’s perspectives.
- Unmet Needs – The real motivating needs driving frustration have been put on the table, allowing the team to focus on solutions that address the root of the conflict rather than surface-level disagreements.
With these critical steps complete, the leadership team can begin debating potential strategies that are more likely to meet a greater number of stakeholder needs. Once there is alignment on strategy, the team can move forward with clear requests, ensuring that solutions are well-defined and actionable.
In the next article, we’ll explore how leadership teams can leverage their ideological conflict to formulate clear requests and truly commit to decisions that drive real results.
Only by understanding the root cause of leadership conflict can teams find effective strategies to mitigate it.
The journey towards resolving the root cause of leadership conflict starts with open communication and active listening.
