Great teams push back!

A hard truth for many first-time leaders to learn is that great teams push back. To be honest, it can still be a hard lesson for seasoned leaders too, as accepting pushback means embracing trust and putting the old ego into reverse for a bit!

If you lead a cross-functional/multi-disciplined team (f.e. product, marketing, design, engineering), they will almost always collectively have more wisdom and master more dimensions of building, launching, and scaling good things than you, the leader, could ever wish to know. That is the power of the hive, bringing together a diverse set of specialisms, expertise, and experience to achieve something greater than its parts. You wouldn’t expect an orchestra conductor to be both a concert pianist and master percussionist while also having the main gig locked down!

So, rather than engage in an open battle of opinion attrition with your teams —where everyone is throwing around experience and dropping names in a weekly/monthly/quarterly ego-bruising theatre of passive aggression and frustration— as a leader, you must focus on where only you can enable impact for the team.

The secret power of pushback

As a leader, you may believe that your role is to have all the answers, to make all the decisions, and to be the one in control. However, this is a misconception that can lead to missed opportunities, wasted potential, and ultimately, failure. It is also a surefire path to personal burnout, as we all have our limits to how much we can learn, experience, and share in a single lifetime! But, what does a great team do?

A great team is not one that follows blindly but one that debates, questions, and pushes back. When your team members feel empowered to voice their opinions, share their expertise, and challenge the status quo (hopefully in a respectful way!), you can tap into their collective intelligence, creativity, and problem-solving skills. You can inspire and lead the hive to work together to forge a new, smarter, faster, and more effective path forward. Great teams see a problem and each ask themselves, "What can I bring to the table?".

What an absence of pushback looks like

On the other hand, if your team members feel intimidated, ignored, dismissed, or disrespected, they will become disengaged and unmotivated. The lack of conviction and purpose leads to teams that may still show up to work, but they won't bring their best selves, their best ideas, or their best efforts. They will settle for mediocrity, follow the path of least resistance, and avoid taking risks or making mistakes. Worse still, they might just blindly start following your advice without question!

The power of pushback lies in its ability to surface diverse perspectives, highlight blind spots, and reveal hidden opportunities. When your team members push back, they are not necessarily challenging your authority or expertise but rather offering you a chance to learn from them, collaborate with them, and co-create with them.

What an absence of pushback looks like is a team that lacks trust, lacks innovation, and lacks ownership. Such a team may seem compliant, harmonious, and efficient, but underneath the surface, there may be simmering resentments, unexpressed frustrations, and unfulfilled aspirations.

Creating a culture of respectful communication

Leaders inspire, not constrain. Your job is not to dictate but to facilitate, enable, and empower. You can do this by creating a culture of psychological safety where your team members feel safe to speak up, safe to experiment, and safe to fail. Like the orchestra conductor, you establish the tempo and steer the dynamics, queuing in people and parts at the right time so that the overall output comes together harmoniously.

Leading by example, asking probing questions, and encouraging thoughtful pushback are the keys to successful communication and collaboration. Challenging concepts or ideas using data, anecdotal evidence, or simply demonstrating you’ve given careful consideration teaches others to think before they speak - and not challenge before they have a thoughtful response to why.?

It’s also important to show you acknowledge and value their contributions by giving them autonomy and accountability, and by providing them with feedback and support.

Embracing servant leadership

The managerial mindset, developed and established in business in the first half of the 20th century, has had many challenges since. New paradigms of leadership have emerged from the need for more effective ways to build, run, and retain high-performance teams. In today’s faster moving, more ambiguous, and more complex business landscape - these techniques can be the difference between success and failure, especially in technology. Many businesses today need the empowered and agile ways of working that come from confident teams that take ownership of their domains.

One such paradigm is ‘Servant Leadership’, coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970. Servant leadership states that the purpose of a leader is to work towards the greater good, to serve their teams and organisations over their own personal objectives. The goal of this approach is to establish a vision for a desired outcome, then work tirelessly to create the space for their teams to deliver that outcome in a more bottom-up fashion. In simple terms, setting the direction and creating space for action.

And the results speak for themselves, with some of the most successful companies today adopting and even advocating this approach. Some studies show that employees are more than 4x more likely to bring everything to the table (aka their A game) working under a servant leader.

Just one gotcha

You might be thinking, "This is all great! - but I’ve got this one person who just pushes back for the sake of it rather than the sake of the project / outcome / team,”... and you might even think that the individual in question just revels in the minor disruption of questioning every ask. I’m sure we’ve all come across this type of individual before. Some can be shown the light, and others will just do them no matter what we as leaders try.

A quick way of testing which path they will take is to demonstrate trust by showing them the bigger picture, and asking them to take a slice of accountability for the outcome rather than just being responsible for the input - tell them explicitly what good would look like.

Those who step up to the challenge often become some of the strongest team members, putting that creative contrarian energy into finding smarter ways of working for the whole team. Those who don’t will just need to be managed carefully, there is always damage control.

So inspire, don’t constrain

In the end, your job is to inspire them, bring them insight, remove their roadblocks, articulate a strategy, set a goal, etc. If your team is good, you’ll still get pushback, but at least now this friction is in the service of optimising bigger impact, rather than just pushing around ideas.

The best leaders spend their working hours empowering teams and removing obstacles to create the space for them not just to succeed, but really thrive! And the organisations they work for do better.

So, next time you get a challenge from the ranks, take a moment to reflect on how you respond to pushback and ask yourself, “How might I serve my team even better?”.

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About the authors:

EJ Guren is a seasoned marketing executive with a passion for crafting data-driven marketing and communication strategies that connect? consumers with the brands and services they love. With a broad experience spectrum across digital and real-world environments, she has led marketing initiatives across B2B and B2C industries from SaaS, web3 and gaming to hospitality, non-profit and B2C2B marketplaces. Specialising in integrated marketing and brand building, EJ's passion is fostering business growth and brand loyalty through impactful, human-centred experiences. She is the founder of Barefoot Marketing.

Jordan Dalladay-Simpson is a fractional product executive and strategist based in London, UK. After nearly 2 decades building, launching and scaling digital businesses, including 7 years at BCG Digital Ventures, he founded Inherent Ventures to provide fractional CPO services to start-ups and scale-ups looking to level-up their product game, from zero-to-one and beyond.

Special thanks to the Fractional Exec Community

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