Increasing Conflict Tolerance: Building Stronger Teams Through Healthy Tension

By: Stephanie Bickel

Why Senior Leaders Struggle With Team Conflict

Senior leaders often tell me their teams “avoid conflict.”

Meetings end too quickly, real opinions stay quiet, and progress stalls. When tension finally surfaces, it is too late. It gets personal, emotional, and harder to repair.

The truth is: the higher you rise in leadership, the more your success depends on how much conflict you can tolerate.

How Increasing Conflict Tolerance Builds Stronger Teams

Leaders who increase their conflict tolerance create psychological safety and performance.

They encourage open disagreement, stay steady during heated conversations, and separate emotions from ideas. These leaders do not need everyone to be comfortable. They need everyone to be honest.

Why Avoiding Conflict Hurts Team Performance

Many leaders believe that keeping the peace keeps the team productive. But peace built on silence is not peace, it is avoidance.

Conflict does not destroy teams.

Avoiding it does.

How Leaders Can Build Conflict Tolerance Skills

The bad news: the discomfort never fully disappears.

The good news: you can train yourself and your team to handle it better.

Conflict tolerance is a leadership muscle. It grows every time you pause before reacting, stay curious instead of defensive, and model calm under pressure.

Research supports what many leaders have experienced firsthand: teams that face conflict directly perform better than those that avoid it.

A Harvard Business Review article, Conflict Is Inevitable. Deal with It. (2025), highlights that when leaders handle disagreements directly and calmly, they strengthen trust and improve decision-making. Constructive conflict allows teams to clarify ideas, uncover risks, and reach stronger conclusions together.

According to Gallup’s research on psychological safety (Create a Culture of Psychological Safety), when employees feel their opinions count, organizations experience a 27 percent reduction in turnover, a 40 percent decrease in safety incidents, and a 12 percent increase in productivity.

Teams that can disagree productively perform better and stay together longer.

Real-World Example of Conflict Tolerance in Leadership

One executive I coached led a leadership team that avoided confrontation. Decisions dragged. Frustration grew.

During one of the meetings, two department heads finally clashed, voices raised, tension thick. Instead of shutting it down, the executive paused and said, “Let’s slow down. Both of you care about this deeply.

Let’s get to the core of the disagreement.”

The conversation that followed was the most productive they had in months. By allowing discomfort, he unlocked progress.

How to Lead Calmly Through Conflict

Conflict tolerance does not mean you enjoy tension, it means you can stay calm, listen deeply, and make clear decisions while others lose composure.

Ask yourself:

What tension are you avoiding right now?

How might you invite a difficult conversation instead of postponing it?

Strong leadership is not about avoiding storms. It is about standing steady through them so your team learns they can, too.

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Are you looking to strengthen your communication skills while under pressure?

During the entire month of November, Speak by Design University is focused on Increasing Conflict Tolerance.

Join Speak by Design University to practice the skills that help you stay calm, confident, and clear when the stakes are high.