Fostering Healthy Conflict, Accountability, and Purpose: An Engineering Manager’s Guide to a Resilient Team
Setting up your talent for success is foundational, but even top individual performers need a strong team environment to thrive. The next step in Inside Leadership is to create a team environment where healthy conflict, accountability, and ownership can thrive. Here’s where job design continues to play a vital role.
Building Trust to Foster Healthy Conflict
Trust is the foundation of any successful team. It allows members to feel safe sharing ideas, admitting mistakes, and taking risks — essential elements for a culture of growth.
Here are a few suggestions to actively build trust within your team:
- Show vulnerability when it comes to your own challenges and mistakes to create a culture where others feel safe doing the same.
- Follow through on commitments: Reliability is a key trust-builder; do what you say you will.
- Provide autonomy as a sign of your confidence in their judgment. If you’ve hired the right talent, trusting their abilities and intentions becomes natural. (More on autonomy in the next section)
- Be transparent in your communication to help everyone feel connected and respected. However, be mindful — oversharing can create unnecessary turbulence. Choose your words thoughtfully.
How Trust Enables Constructive, Growth-Focused Feedback
With trust established, feedback becomes our next focal layer. Think of feedback as the GPS for an employee’s journey through their career. Without it, they’re guessing the best route. With clear and consistent feedback, employees understand when to adjust, accelerate, or refine their approach.
In a trusting environment, feedback is viewed as a growth tool rather than criticism. Team members who trust each other are more likely to embrace feedback constructively. Employees with a growth mindset value leaders who provide regular, constructive feedback.
Feedback should be part of our daily routine as leaders — not something reserved for annual reviews when it’s often too late for impactful change. Failing to provide regular, useful feedback to growth-oriented employees will lead them to leaders who are better equipped to understand their needs.
Healthy Conflict: The Product of Trust & Constructive Feedback
When trust and feedback are strong, healthy conflict arises naturally. Team members who feel safe and know each other’s intentions aren’t afraid to challenge ideas or engage in productive debate. This kind of conflict is essential for driving innovation, refining strategies, and preventing complacency.
In the absence of trust, team members avoid conflict to keep the peace, leading to disengagement or “quiet quitting.” Conversely, in a culture where trust and feedback are valued, teams feel empowered to test ideas, find solutions, and grow stronger together.
I’ve seen competent leaders shy away from conflict, often saying, ‘That’s not my [team, problem, etc], so I shouldn’t intervene,’ or ‘It’s not worth the drama.’ While some conflicts may not be worth engaging in, anti-cultural patterns often worsen when ignored.
Lead by example by encouraging open dialogue and making sure all voices are heard. Normalizing constructive conflict drives teams towards a meritocracy, which values accountability, transparency, and results.
Warning signs of low trust, limited feedback, and suppressed conflict
- No one ever questions your ideas or direction.
- A general reluctance to share ideas or concerns.
- Lack of collaboration and teamwork.
- Employees second-guess their decisions or seek constant approval.
- Frequent misunderstandings and miscommunications.
- High or often unexplainable attrition.
Healthy conflict allows your team to challenge assumptions, sparking resilience and creativity as they tackle problems from new perspectives. With trust and growth-oriented feedback as a foundation, your team is now well-positioned to turn conflict into a powerful driver for performance.
Empowering Accountability Through Autonomy
Autonomy is about giving your team the freedom to make their own decisions and learn through experience. Just like in learning, when people discover solutions for themselves rather than being told what to do, they take greater ownership of the outcomes. The image below illustrates this well: when team members have the space to figure things out on their own, they naturally hold themselves accountable for the results, whether good or bad.
I often see newly minted leaders defaulting to micromanagement. It’s understandable; you’ve built your reputation by being hands-on and ensuring things get done right. But as a leader, your role shifts to empowering others to take charge.
You also won’t always be in the details like your engineers. I’ve had moments where I thought, “That won’t work,” only to be proven wrong. Now, I let them try their approach — after all, we’re not dealing with nuclear codes here. Let them take the lead, learn from their mistakes, and grow — this is how accountability is built.
Trust your team to make the right decisions and hold them accountable for those choices. If you find yourself questioning their decisions too often, it might be a sign to reassess how you’re managing or hiring, not how they’re performing.
Here are some of the warning signs for lack of autonomy:
- Constant approval-seeking for minor decisions.
- Little room for creativity or independent problem-solving.
- Stifled innovation; projects become overly rigid.
- High dependence on leaders for direction and guidance.
When your team is empowered with autonomy, they hold themselves accountable to the expectations surrounding their work. But accountability alone isn’t enough to create a truly mission-driven team. The next step is fostering task identity, where team members don’t just meet expectations — they see the work as their own, taking full ownership of its success and impact.
Encouraging Ownership with Task Identity
The goal of task identity is to ensure your team is engaged in every phase of their work’s lifecycle, from initial planning through to post-launch feedback.
In large organizations, it’s easy for silos to form — whether in DevOps, design, analytics, or other specialized domains. This siloed structure often mirrors traditional waterfall practices and even some “scrumfall” approaches today.
These silos can limit your team’s understanding of how their work fits into the larger organizational context. As leaders, our role is to build bridges of understanding. When a team’s involvement is confined to just the technical implementation, they miss the broader context that gives meaning to their work. Help them to see the bigger picture.
For instance, I often see user feedback sent to product managers. These PMs devise solutions addressing the feedback in isolation and pass down the requirements to their teams. The teams, who are responsible for implementing the changes, are left out of the decision-making process. This not only results in worse software but also diminishes the team’s sense of ownership over the project.
Instead, involve your team in every stage — from design discussions through development, testing, deployment, production monitoring, and customer feedback — to ensure they gain a comprehensive understanding of how their contributions impact the bigger picture.
This doesn’t mean your team needs to be involved in every detail. The key is finding the right balance of involvement that fosters a stronger sense of ownership without overwhelming them. Most importantly, act as the counterweight to the natural forces in large organizations that push everyone deep into their own rabbit holes.
Here are some of the warning signs for task identity:
- Employees only see fragments of a project, never the whole picture.
- Lack of involvement in planning, design, or post-launch stages.
- Minimal involvement in decisions that affect the scope/direction of their work.
- Struggles in understanding the broader purpose of their work.
- Inconsistent quality due to disconnect with customers.
When we give our teams full visibility into their work’s lifecycle, they can make smarter decisions that align with the organization’s larger strategy. The more connected they are, the more effective they can be.
Empowering a Culture That Lasts
Creating a high-performing team isn’t a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing commitment to building the kind of culture that can sustain impact over the long haul. We’re not setting rules or mandating behaviors — we’re creating the conditions where individuals can come together and flourish.
Ultimately, this approach doesn’t just build better teams; it builds resilience. You’re not there to solve every problem or steer every decision, and you shouldn’t be. Instead, you’re creating a system that empowers people to lead from within, adapting to challenges and growing stronger as a unit. This is the true payoff of Inside Leadership: a team that thrives not because you’re constantly guiding them, but because they’ve internalized the principles that drive success.
If you happened to arrive here out of sequence, here’s the starter post for this series and part one on talent.
