When Agreement is Bad for Leadership

Have you ever had someone that was extremely agreeable with all of the feedback you provided them? Here’s how that’s keeping them, and you, stuck. If you stay long enough in the leadership game, you’ll start to notice particular patterns for the ways that people get stuck.

The most challenging types of behaviour for leadership development are the ones that look, on the surface, like real progress, but underneath are actually keeping things safely in the status quo.

The distinction we’re talking about today was first introduced to me by my coach, teacher, mentor and friend, Christopher McAuliffe. This pattern is called Agree/Disagree.

In this pattern, the person we’re developing has two polarized approaches to receiving feedback.

On the one hand, they listen to the feedback they receive, and then disagree with it.

Their disagreement may be well-reasoned, or it may be quickly done out of hand. The particularities of it are not so important, simply that the feedback is heard, then set aside, because it doesn’t agree with their current perspective.

At other times, the person in question listens to the feedback they receive, and then agrees with it.

Often, when you’re the one who’s responsible for developing the leadership of someone with this strategy, they unconsciously put you on a pedestal. You are the “wise leader” with valuable insights to offer, and as a result, they will tend to agree with most of what you have to say.

Seems super simple — how could this present a problem? Even better, they’re listening to everything their leader says, and they never take issue with it.

There are a couple of problems with this approach.

The first is that the only feedback that ever really lands and makes an impact with this person is the feedback they agree with, and this tells us that it aligns with what they already know. The other feedback gets discarded because it doesn’t agree with what they already know.

There is an absolute safety?with letting in only the feedback that aligns with what we already know, and worse yet, this ensures that we only ever get feedback that confirms where we are.

There’s no possibility to learn anything outside of our existing range of knowledge and experience down this path. It simply falls into “Disagree with” and then is set aside.

The second problem is that there is a fundamental lack of sovereignty being exhibited by the person that is always in agreement with their leader.

Leadership is not a smooth path. It’s a bumpy road filled with confrontation between what we have already concluded about the way the world is, resisting the idea that things could be different, and then slowly easing off that resistance to uncover a greater perspective that allows more than our current one.

Something’s wrong if you’re always in agreement with what is being provided. Leadership should be confronting, not as an end unto itself, but because that’s part of the abundance of life. If you never experience any moment of confrontation, then something is missing (both in your leadership, as well as your life).

The only way to perpetually be in a state of agreement is to set aside the part of ourselves that experiences conflict with what you are being provided.

In truth, it is often in our resistance and disagreements with what is being provided that the richest leadership work can be done.

Agree/Disagree is so pernicious because it masks itself as being someone eager to transform, while simultaneously hiding from both the leader and the leadee the fact that things are staying comfortably in the status quo.

To work with this we must:

1. Distinguish it — recognize when this is showing up in your direct reports, so you can start to point to it.

2. Get curious about it — share that you notice this tendency, and ask them about it. It’s weird that they’re always in agreement. What’s going on?

3. Have people try things on — Invite those you lead with this tendency to notice when they want to set something aside, and instead practice sitting with the reflection. Instead of asking “Do I agree with this?”, ask the question “Let’s assume this is true. What then would it reveal to me?”.

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