When Politeness Becomes the Enemy of Team Growth—Escaping the Conflict Avoidance Trap | Mohini Kissoon

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"Conflict isn't the enemy. It's when we're avoiding conflict that it becomes an issue for teams." - Mohini Kissoon

Mohini shares a story about the worst self-destructive pattern she has witnessed: teams that are overly polite to avoid addressing conflicts. She worked with a team that prided themselves on being collaborative and drama-free, but beneath that politeness was a hesitancy to have difficult conversations. It started small—in sprint planning, the Product Owner would propose unrealistic scope, and people would just nod and accept. Someone might say "that's quite ambitious," but no one would actually push back. In retrospectives, feedback was always wrapped in layers of positive framing. When a developer consistently delivered work that didn't meet the Definition of Done, no one called it out directly—they just quietly fixed it or worked around it. After three months, side conversations started emerging where people would pull Mohini aside to share concerns they would never voice in the room. The team was skipping the storming phase of the Tuckman model, and this avoidance eventually led to missed deadlines and frustrated stakeholders. The key learning: healthy conflict brings the energy teams need to innovate and grow.

In this segment, we talk about the Tuckman model and why the storming phase is essential for team development.

Self-reflection Question: Is your team's harmony genuine collaboration, or is it a facade hiding unspoken frustrations that will eventually surface at the worst possible moment?

Mohini discovered Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet at a time when she was working with multiple teams and feeling exhausted from being the person everyone looked to for answers. She thought that's what servant leadership meant, but she was actually creating dependency rather than capability. The book tells the story of how Marquet took command of the worst-performing submarine in the US Navy and transformed it into the best by fundamentally changing how leadership worked. "Instead of the traditional leader-follower model, he built a leader-to-leader structure where everyone was expected to think, decide, and own their work," Mohini explains.

The key insight was that we don't just empower teams—we need to build an environment where they can grow and don't need permission to excel. This shifted Mohini's approach: instead of saying "here's what I think we should do," she started asking "what have you tried so far? What do you intend to do next?" The book also emphasizes that pushing decision-making down requires providing the knowledge and context teams need to make good decisions.

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🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.

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About Mohini Kissoon

Mohini is an Agility Lead with over eight years of experience as a Scrum Master. She is passionate about building high-performing, self-managing teams that delight customers. Mohini improves flow and collaboration across systems, meets teams where they are, and co-creates environments enabling adaptability, meaningful interactions, and continuous improvement and learning.

You can link with Mohini Kissoon on LinkedIn.