The adults who still cannot handle disagreement at work, and what their career trajectory is quietly telling us about professional emotional development

I have come to treat one specific moment in any meeting as one of the more reliable diagnostic instruments available to anyone interested in how professionally mature the people in the room actually are, which is the moment at which somebody disagrees with somebody else on something of genuine substance, and the room then has to decide, collectively and in real time, whether the disagreement is going to be treated as a productive contribution to the thinking or as a small social problem that needs to be managed before the meeting can continue, and the way the room makes this decision tells you considerably more about the professional development of its members than any amount of leadership training ever could, because the response to disagreement is not a skill people can perform under observation, which is to say the response is entirely honest, which is why it is so useful to watch for, although I will admit that watching for it is not necessarily the most generous way to spend a meeting and I have been quietly reprimanding myself about this for some years without, so far, succeeding in stopping.

What I have noticed, after enough years of watching the response at various levels of various organisations, is that the professional capacity to be contradicted without becoming defensive, retaliatory, or sulky is one of the most reliable predictors of career ceiling I have ever encountered, and it is also one of the least discussed, partly because nobody wants to name it as a predictor in the hearing of people who have not yet developed it, and partly because the people who have not yet developed it are frequently unaware that they have not developed it, because the small adjustments they make when they are being disagreed with feel to them, from the inside, like entirely reasonable responses to an unreasonable situation, which they are not, although I will concede that an unreasonable situation can look remarkably similar to a reasonable one from certain angles, which is part of what makes the whole thing so hard to see clearly.

The adult who has not yet developed the capacity to be disagreed with productively tends to signal this through a series of small and remarkably consistent behaviours that are visible to everyone in the room except the person exhibiting them, which is itself one of the quieter features of the phenomenon worth noticing. The slight flush that arrives before the response, which the person themselves is almost always unable to detect but which is extremely visible to the colleagues who have learned to watch for it. The small reframe at the start of the reply, in which the disagreement is subtly recharacterised as a misunderstanding of what the original point was, so that the disagreer can be gently corrected rather than engaged with. The qualifying addition to the original position, which does not acknowledge the disagreement but which quietly incorporates the disagreer’s point in a way that allows the original position to continue standing as though it had never been challenged. The suddenly discovered need to end the meeting at approximately the moment the disagreement has become difficult to deflect without appearing to be deflecting it, which is possibly my favourite of the five because the choreography involved is so consistently amateur. The slightly cooler email response three days later, which is just distant enough to signal displeasure and just professional enough to be deniable if raised directly, which it will never be, because the person on the receiving end has read the signal correctly and has already begun calibrating their next contribution accordingly, which is where the real cost of the behaviour starts to compound, although nobody at this point is calculating it.

The person exhibiting these behaviours is almost always, in my experience, entirely unaware they are exhibiting them, and would describe themselves, if asked, as somebody who genuinely welcomes disagreement and encourages the robust exchange of ideas, which is one of those sentences I have come to treat with the same cautious scepticism I reserve for people who describe themselves as excellent drivers or as unusually self-aware, on the general principle that genuine capability in a domain does not usually require constant verbal reassertion, and the people who are actually good at being disagreed with tend not to feel the need to mention it, because they are too busy demonstrating it in meetings to need to discuss it afterwards, although I do want to be careful here because the inverse is not reliably true, which is to say that not mentioning the capacity does not confirm one has it, and I have met people who were silent on the subject and still terrible at it.

What is interesting about the correlation with career trajectory is that it is almost completely consistent across the many sectors I have had the opportunity to observe, or at least as consistent as any pattern can be in a sample size that was never designed to be statistically meaningful, and it operates in a direction that most organisations would be uncomfortable admitting if the data were presented to them directly. The adults who continue to be unable to handle disagreement well into their forties and fifties tend to have career trajectories that look superficially successful for a certain stretch and then plateau in ways that are usually explained through other factors, including market timing, political misfortune, the specific difficulty of the industry they are in, and the generally insufficient appreciation of their particular qualities by whichever organisation they are currently working for. The explanations they offer for the plateau are usually elaborate and frequently plausible, and they do not often include the possibility that the plateau is being produced by their continuing inability to work productively with people who do not already agree with them, because this possibility has been quietly excluded from their internal explanatory framework at some point in their late twenties, when accepting it would have required a developmental task they chose not to undertake, which is not a choice that has become easier to revisit in the intervening decades, and in fact becomes considerably harder each year that it is not revisited, which is one of the sadder features of the whole arrangement.

The quieter version of the correlation, which I find the most interesting to watch, is that the adults who have developed the capacity to be disagreed with productively tend to accumulate a particular kind of professional advantage that does not show up in any obvious way on their resumes but which becomes visible if you ask the people around them what it is like to work with them. These are the people whose colleagues describe themselves as learning things in meetings. The people whose junior staff are willing to raise difficult issues early rather than waiting until the issues have become expensive. The people whose peers across the organisation treat them as a resource rather than as a political obstacle. The accumulated value of these small advantages over a decade is considerable, and it is almost entirely invisible to anyone who is not specifically watching for it, which is why the correlation between the capacity for productive disagreement and career progression is so rarely named explicitly, although it is operating continuously in the background of every organisation I have ever worked with, including, I notice, the ones I have been running myself.

The developmental task, for anyone reading this and wondering whether they are the subject of their own uncomfortable recognition, is considerably more boring than most leadership writing would suggest, which is probably why most leadership writing avoids it. It is not about becoming a better listener in any grand sense, and it is not about seeking out feedback through structured processes, and it is not about any of the various initiatives that are periodically launched by human resources departments to address something adjacent to the real issue. The task is about becoming genuinely interested in the possibility that the person disagreeing with you might be right, and sitting with that possibility for long enough to find out whether they are, before responding, which requires tolerating a particular kind of professional discomfort that most adults have arranged their working lives to avoid. The capacity grows through repetition, which means it grows slowly, which means it is almost impossible to produce through any kind of intensive leadership development intervention and considerably easier to produce through the slow accumulation of small moments in which the professional does not react in the usual way and instead sits with the discomfort for an additional thirty seconds before continuing, which does not sound like much and which is, in practice, quite difficult.

The capacity is also, and this is the part I find most worth saying out loud, available at any age, which is to say the plateau is not permanent and the developmental task is not foreclosed, although the longer it has been avoided the more effortful the resumption becomes, which is itself one of the small ironies of professional development, in that the people who most need the capacity are the people for whom developing it is the most uncomfortable, which is why so few of them do, which is why the correlation with career trajectory remains as consistent as it is, give or take the exceptions I have personally watched prove the rule, which were worth watching precisely because they were so rare.

I should admit, before closing, that I have watched myself fail this test with some regularity throughout my own career, in ways that are visible to me now and were considerably less visible to me at the time, and that I continue to find the subject interesting partly because I have observed myself making the small defensive manoeuvres I describe above in various meetings over the years, and have had the uncomfortable experience of noticing, afterwards, that the manoeuvres were visible to the people on the receiving end even though they were invisible to me in the moment. The capacity to be disagreed with is one of those professional abilities nobody ever fully arrives at, which is part of why it continues to be worth paying attention to, both in the people around you and in the mirror, which is where the most useful observations about these things have always lived, however reluctantly one would prefer to look, and I am aware that reluctantly is doing a lot of work in that last clause.