(Illustration by Nancy Marks)
The stakes of professional development are well documented and often framed in terms of career ownership and individual responsibility. But professional development also unfolds within relationships and institutions that shape how people learn to exercise voice, authority, and disagreement. While many organizations promote the value of disagreement rhetorically, leaders often lack the skills to steward constructive disagreement themselves or, importantly, teach others how to disagree well.
Amid today’s rapid organizational, social, and technological change, leaders across sectors often observe that it has never been harder to lead. But it may also be harder to be a professional more broadly, as discontent with organizations and institutions becomes increasingly visible, particularly among younger workers. The question is not whether disagreement will emerge in organizations. It will. The question is whether leaders and teams will develop the capacity to engage with it constructively.
Developing this capacity is possible, and the necessary tools are at hand. Leaders can cultivate it by recognizing how power and influence shape interpersonal relationships, designing the conditions for voice, modeling the relational practices that make disagreement productive, and embedding these practices into everyday organizational routines.
Power, Dependence, and Influence in Work Relationships
Many early-career professionals enter organizations assuming that working hard, staying agreeable, and avoiding tension will lead to growth and recognition. However, these instincts can limit development and learning, both for individuals and for organizations that need diverse perspectives to adapt to the dynamism of even the most stable external environments.
This is not simply a matter of individual confidence or ambition. As decades of social science research show, context shapes agency. Unspoken rules about cultural norms determine who feels able to speak up, ask questions, or challenge assumptions. Left unaddressed, organizations inadvertently train people to stay silent precisely when they need to engage with and learn from constructive disagreement.
At the same time, recent societal-level tension has prompted debate. Sociologist Richard Emerson’s seminal work on power-dependence relations is helpful for leaders and team members alike in making sense of these tensions and how to move forward. Emerson emphasizes that power in organizations is rooted in patterns of dependence between people, and that power is neither inherently good nor bad. Rather, it describes a reality: To the extent that one party controls access to resources that another values, a power relationship exists.
In most organizations, power is strongly correlated with authority—the formal structures and roles that legitimize and shape power. But power and authority are not identical. Authority confers power, but power can exist without formal authority. Emerson also distinguishes influence from power as the use of power in relationships. Whether influence stabilizes trust and cohesion or deepens distance depends on how people exercise it.
Because influence shapes how others experience dependence in organizations, it also shapes whether disagreement feels possible, risky, or futile. For leaders, navigating these dynamics requires empathy—the ability to take on others' perspectives and understand their experiences, motivations, and concerns.
Importantly, leaders are not the only people who exercise influence within organizations. Team members also shape the dynamics of disagreement by how they interpret events and frame concerns, especially in moments of disagreement informed by intergroup differences. If they use influence carelessly—or weaponize it by attributing moments of interpersonal tension primarily to structural dynamics, bypassing the relational interaction itself—they can stifle other voices, even among those with formal authority.
Balancing Candor and Psychological Safety
Many organizations try to encourage openness by promoting norms of candor and straightforwardness, asking people to set aside ego and prioritize team outcomes over personal discomfort. However, promoting candor in ways that support both individual and collective well-being requires more deliberate effort. Disagreement does not emerge fully formed, nor does it improve simply because leaders grant team members permission to speak up. People learn how to disagree by observing what leaders reward, ignore, or subtly discourage.
Normalizing disagreement is a core tenet of creating a learning organization, one that facilitates the creation, acquisition, and transfer of knowledge through open discussion and systemic thinking. Although generally embraced as a management best practice, the specific ways organizations design and structure effective learning over time vary by context and by leadership approaches. One design principle in question is the extent to which organizations and leaders should support psychological safety—the shared belief that people can take interpersonal risks—alongside the evaluative pressures and accountability structures that sustain effort, candor, and direct feedback.
The investment management firm Bridgewater Associates illustrates this tension. Under the leadership of founder Ray Dalio, the firm built a culture explicitly designed to institutionalize disagreement across levels of hierarchy. The company implemented systems that supported “radical transparency” and “radical truth-telling,” with the aim of surfacing the best ideas and producing stronger organizational results. Managers frequently recorded meetings, which were archived and made broadly accessible within the organization; employees rated one another and their ideas in real time; and systems encouraged the acknowledgement of mistakes as a way to normalize learning from failure.
While many employees remained for decades and described the environment as intellectually rigorous and generative, others found the consistency of public feedback destabilizing, particularly early in their careers. Turnover among new employees was high, and those who stayed often described needing significant time to adapt to the firm’s norms of radical transparency.
A compelling comparison comes from the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Wikipedia volunteer community. The foundation relies on deliberative norms and encourages contributors to publicly debate sources and interpretations, often through extended dialogue. While this can slow decision-making, it ensures that disagreement remains grounded in evidence and shared standards rather than personal conflict. It also speaks to the importance of designing for disagreement with organizational strategy and operating models in mind. Wikimedia’s approach to disagreement is well-suited to its work on public knowledge sharing.
These cases raise design questions rather than verdicts: What leadership and staff practices best support the conditions under which disagreement remains productive?
Four Disciplines for Productive Disagreement
Managing disagreement well is not a one-time leadership intervention; it requires developing specific skills and abilities over time. The following four disciplines highlight areas where leaders and team members can build the habits and relational capacity that make disagreement a teachable practice.
1. Understand power, not just authority. For leaders, this means being curious about and cognizant of what team members value. For staff, it means understanding what colleagues, managers, and the organization value. Without this awareness, leaders and staff may misread where they or others have influence and raise concerns in ways that generate frustration rather than change.
In our work with organizations, we often see younger team members contest their organizations’ response to high-profile social issues. In many cases, they quickly gain peer support through internal forums or informal channels but bypass the leaders or structures responsible for decision-making. This limits their influence and can invite defensiveness rather than engagement.
Leaders face similar constraints in navigating power dynamics. A senior manager, for example, may privately agree with a team’s concern about a policy but lack unilateral authority to change it. Rather than dismissing the concern or promising action they cannot take, effective leaders should explain how the decision-making process works and where team members can apply their influence, ideally early on. By helping team members understand the distribution of authority and responsibility across the organization, leaders make latent power dynamics visible and help employees exercise voice more strategically and effectively in their context.
2. Practice inquiry before persuasion. It is important that leaders and team members approach disagreement with disciplined inquiry rather than immediate persuasion, and be honest and self-aware about their motivations for expressing dissent.
John Dewey, a foundational scholar of reflective thinking and individual and organizational learning, emphasized the importance of disciplined and honest inquiry and of discussing reflections with others. Without discussion, people are susceptible to their own biases about intentions. These and associated assumptions can lead people to engage others in ways that escalate disagreement into destructive conflict rather than supporting repair and shared learning.
A core question for staff to reflect on before expressing dissent is whether, by voicing their concerns, they intend to further the goals and work of a broader collective—the team, the organization, one or more formal or informal groups to which they belong, or some combination of these—or their own?
In our work with one organization, a long-tenured team member initially planned to criticize leaders in an organization-wide meeting for failing to listen to staff concerns. After discussing his concerns with colleagues newer to the organization, he recognized that most team members did not share his frustration and that it stemmed largely from how leaders had communicated prior decisions rather than the decisions themselves. Raising the issue as a question about how future decisions could better incorporate team input led to a far more constructive conversation with leadership.
3. Build and sustain trust through repair. Navigating and teaching disagreement requires that leaders first build a foundation of interpersonal trust—an environment where people feel known, respected, and taken seriously. Investing in meaningful conversations before conflict arises and consistently demonstrating curiosity, care, vulnerability, and follow-through create the conditions for people to express and listen to dissent in good faith.
Leaders can build trust between team members by handling tension well. Even when trust erodes, they can rebuild and even strengthen it by acknowledging the importance of relationships, repairing harm, and taking deliberate steps to create or restore the interpersonal capacity for candor, collaboration, and future disagreement.
Conflict-avoidant leaders may be inclined to simply forget moments when it is clear that trust has eroded, such as when someone bursts out during a verbal disagreement, does not feel accountable for a mistake, misunderstands expectations and intent, or causes relational harm. But leaving these moments unaddressed allows tension to accumulate, making future disagreements more difficult and personal. Rather than asking, “How do we move on?” leaders should ask, “What would it take to repair the relationship?”
4. Turn disagreement into deliberate practice. Leaders reinforce learning by creating opportunities to reflect with honesty after difficult conversations. They talk to team members about what worked and what did not, and what they would do differently next time. These debriefs turn isolated experiences into shared knowledge and build organizational muscle to navigate differences over time. Whether leaders can do this work depends greatly on their organization’s learning and development systems. Equally important is how leaders model engagement in these moments. Vulnerability and curiosity are not soft skills; they are leadership and instructional tools. When leaders acknowledge uncertainty, ask genuine questions, and share the areas in which they would like to grow to support their team and organizational goals, they make disagreement more possible and constructive for others. This does not mean oversharing or abandoning authority. Rather, it means that leaders demonstrate learning alongside their team members.
Turning Disagreement Into Collective Capacity
These disciplines help build interpersonal capacity, but they matter only if organizations treat that capacity as part of the system itself. Governance, compliance structures, strategic alignment, and cultural context all shape how organizations navigate disagreement. But none of these operate independently of human capacity.
Without the ability to engage with disagreement constructively, governance becomes performative, systems become punitive, alignment becomes coercive, and culture fractures under strain. At its core, disagreement is where power and influence become visible in everyday organizational life. Capacity does not replace structure. It makes structure viable.
By treating disagreement as an ongoing practice to develop and a teachable skill, leaders can turn moments of friction into opportunities for learning. Questioning, dissent, and uncertainty become signals that people are taking responsibility for the work they share.
Organizations are among the most influential civic classrooms that adults encounter, and the workplace is one of the few remaining institutions where people regularly interact with others who have different perspectives and interests. What people learn about dissent, authority, and repair in the workplace can travel into communities, institutions, and democratic life more broadly. Teaching disagreement well is, therefore, both an organizational leadership responsibility and a civic one.
Read more stories by Ahmmad Brown, Danielle Loevy & Robert Corbett.