The team lead asked if anyone had any questions before the meeting had adjourned. The room fell silent as a few people scribbled notes. Someone quietly replied, “Looks good.” Meeting over, except it wasn’t. The real meeting began in the corridor by the coffee machine in hushed conversations that sounded something like: “I actually don’t think this is going to work.”, “I wanted to say something, but…”, “The boss wasn’t going to listen anyway.”
If you’ve worked long enough in Tanzania, chances are you’ve witnessed this scene. I certainly have. We often mistake quiet meetings for healthy teams, but perhaps silence isn’t always agreement, it’s fear wrapped in ‘good manners.’
Across much of Africa, we’re raised to value harmony and taught not to embarrass our elders or to challenge authority publicly. These are wonderful values that strengthen communities and relationships. But when those same values are carried unquestioningly into the workplace, they can produce an unintended consequence: organisations where everyone agrees in the meeting and disagrees everywhere else.
Recently, I came across a TEDx Talk by leadership coaches CrisMarie Campbell and Susan Clarke that gave language to something I had observed for years. Their message was surprisingly simple: conflict isn’t the problem, avoided conflict is.
They argue that many teams spend enormous amounts of energy trying to “defuse” disagreement because conflict feels uncomfortable. Yet in doing so, they often sacrifice the very things organisations need most: innovation, creativity and honest collaboration.
For more than two decades, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has studied what makes teams perform well. Her findings consistently show that psychologically safe teams learn faster, innovate more and make better decisions because people spend less time protecting themselves and more time solving problems.
Google reached a remarkably similar conclusion. Through its well-known Project Aristotle, the company studied more than 180 teams to understand what separated high-performing teams from average ones. Researchers expected the answer to be intelligence, experience or technical ability. Instead, they found that the strongest predictor of team success was psychological safety. This means that the strongest teams were the ones where people felt safe enough to speak honestly.
That finding made me wonder how many brilliant ideas never leave the corridors of Tanzanian workplaces. I wondered about how many problems could be prevented if employees simply felt safe enough to say, “I don’t think this is the right decision”?
Disagreement is not disrespect, yet many of us still treat it as though it is. Perhaps that is the mindset we need to challenge, especially those of us in positions of authority. Can someone disagree with you without you seeing it as a challenge to your status?
The second component Campbell and Clarke stress is curiosity. Curiosity asks, “Help me understand what I’m missing.” It assumes that another person’s perspective may reveal something we cannot yet see. It replaces the need to be right with the desire to get it right.
If people repeatedly leave meetings only to express their real opinions in corridors, WhatsApp groups and private phone calls, it is worth asking whether the workplace genuinely feels safe for honest dialogue.
Perhaps the truest measure of a workplace culture isn’t what people say while the boss is in the room. It’s what they say after the boss leaves.
If the most honest conversations are happening in corridors, WhatsApp groups and private phone calls, then the organisation isn’t suffering from too much conflict. It may be suffering from too little psychological safety.
Leaders can foster physiological safety by inviting dissent before making decisions, responding to questions with curiosity instead of defensiveness, and publicly thanking people who challenge ideas respectfully. Employees, too, have a role to play by taking initiative and raising concerns constructively while assuming positive intent. The main focus being to improve the idea rather than winning the argument. When disagreement becomes a normal part of collaboration rather than a threat to authority, the best conversations no longer wait for the corridor.