I recently stood in front of an executive team, allowing their unproductive to-ing and fro-ing to continue a little longer. It was a gold mine of examples I could use to teach them how not to have conflict. Within 10 minutes, they’d managed to take a routine issue and turn it into an all-out row, with yelling and swearing and more than a few hurt feelings and bruised egos. What they had failed to do was get to the root of the problem and get aligned around what they were going to do about it.