How to manage healthy tensions between team roles (without making them personal)

16/06/2026

Topic of this content: Manage healthy functional tensions in your teams

Who might be interested in reading: professionals and organizations

Many leaders instinctively seek to resolve team tensions to restore harmony, but this reflex can be counterproductive, as tension is often normal and necessary. For example, if sales and operations always agree, it signals one side is not doing its job properly. Healthy tension between differing priorities fosters better decision-making. Leaders should embrace these tensions, ensuring they remain functional and do not escalate into personal conflicts, as they are essential for team effectiveness.

"If two people on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, then both are useless." - Darryl F. Zanuck

Many leaders have an automatic reflex: when tension arises in the team, it must be resolved, eliminated, harmony restored. The reflex is understandable, but frequently counterproductive. It assumes that the absence of tension is the healthy state of a team — and that is false. There are tensions that are not only normal but necessary; they are the sign that the team is working as it should.

Imagine a company where the sales department and the operations department always agree on everything. At first glance, it looks like harmony. In practice, it is a sign that one of the two is not doing its job. Sales exists to say "yes" to the client, to promise, to close the deal; operations exists to ensure that what is promised is feasible, sustainable, profitable. If sales and operations always agree, either sales is leaving money on the table out of excessive caution, or operations is accepting commitments it cannot meet. The tension between the two is the mechanism that keeps the company calibrated.

This is the central idea of this article: some tensions are by design. They result from functions deliberately designed with different priorities, and the friction between them produces better decisions than either function would produce alone. The leader's job is not to eliminate these tensions — it is to keep them in the functional register and stop them from turning into personal conflicts.

Functional tension vs personal tension: the fundamental distinction

The distinction is simple to state and difficult to maintain in practice.

A functional tension is a disagreement that results from the functions, not from the people. When the finance director resists an expense that the marketing director considers essential, it is not (or should not be) because one is mean and the other a spendthrift. It is because each one's function obliges them to optimize for different things: finance for the health of the balance sheet, marketing for growth and market presence. Both are right from their post. The tension between the two perspectives is what produces a balanced decision.

A personal tension is something else. It is when the disagreement stops being about the decision and becomes about the person. When finance stops thinking "this expense is risky" and starts thinking "marketing is irresponsible and never listens to anyone". When the focus shifts from the problem to the adversary, and the goal stops being the best decision and becomes being right — or, worse, making the other person lose.

The same concrete situation — a disagreement about an expense — can be functional or personal depending on how it is lived and conducted. And the boundary between the two is thinner than it seems: healthy functional tensions degenerate into personal ones easily, especially when they recur over time and nobody tends to the boundary.

Classic examples of healthy functional tensions

It is worth naming the most common functional tensions, because recognizing them as structural — and not as faults — is the first step to managing them well.

Sales vs Operations. Sales wants to close the deal, promise short deadlines, say yes to special requests. Operations wants realistic deadlines, sustainable processes, protected margins.

Case. A B2B software company closed an important contract promising implementation in four weeks; operations knew that eight was realistic. Well managed, the tension led to a middle solution — six weeks with reinforced resources and a phasing agreed with the client. Badly managed, it would have led either to losing the deal or to a failed implementation.

Marketing vs Finance. Marketing wants to invest in brand, in campaigns, in presence — returns that are often diffuse and long-term. Finance wants to see measurable return on every euro spent.

Case. Marketing proposes a significant investment in a brand campaign whose return is hard to measure immediately; finance resists and asks for metrics. The productive tension leads to a measurable pilot before the full investment — neither the blind leap marketing wanted, nor the block finance would instinctively have preferred.

Creative vs Commercial. Creative wants to protect the integrity of the idea, the boldness, the quality. Commercial wants what sells, what the market asks for, what fits the client's budget.

Case. In an agency, the creative team defends a bold campaign it considers potentially memorable; the commercial team fears the client will reject it as too risky. The friction, well conducted, produces a version that keeps the boldness in essence and reduces the perceived risk in the client pitch.

Short term vs Long term. In almost every leadership team there are those who pull for immediate results and those who pull for investments that only pay off years from now. Both forces are necessary; an organization that listens to only one of them undermines itself.

In all these cases, the tension is the mechanism that prevents the organization from falling into the extreme of one of the functions. A company with only sales drowns in unkept promises; a company with only operations never grows. Health lies in the friction held in balance.

How functional tensions degenerate into personal ones

Understanding the mechanism of degeneration helps to prevent it. There are a few recurring patterns.

Repetition without resolution. When the same tension recurs meeting after meeting without a way of managing it being found, frustration accumulates and starts to stick to the person who represents "the other side".

Personalization of language. When you move from "this proposal carries this risk" to "you never consider the risks", the boundary has been crossed. Language that describes character traits, rather than functional positions, is the first symptom.

Accumulated history. Unresolved past disagreements create a narrative ("he is always against me") that contaminates every new disagreement, however legitimate it may be.

Absence of a visible shared goal. When the parties lose sight of the fact that they want, deep down, the same thing — the success of the organization — the disagreement stops being between colleagues on the same side and becomes one between adversaries.

Five practices to preserve healthy functional tension

First: name the tension as structural, out loud. Tell the team explicitly that the tension between these two functions is expected and desired — that it is part of the design. When people understand that the disagreement is structural and not a relationship defect, they stop taking it to heart.

Second: keep the shared goal always visible. Before each difficult discussion, restate what both parties want in common. "We all want this launch to go well" places the disagreement back on the plane of means, not ends.

Third: make people swap chairs. Ask each party to articulate, out loud and fairly, the argument of the other. Someone who can defend the "adversary's" position better than they can themselves will hardly turn them into an enemy.

Fourth: watch the language — functions, not traits. Step in whenever the conversation slides from "this decision" to "this person". Reframing in real time ("I think you mean the operational risk worries you") returns the tension to the functional register.

Fifth: create decision mechanisms for when disagreement does not resolve. Not every functional tension resolves by consensus. Define in advance who decides in case of deadlock, and by what criterion. Knowing there is a tie-breaking mechanism reduces the pressure of "having to win" every discussion.

How to intervene when the boundary is crossed

When, despite everything, the tension becomes personal, the leader has to intervene — and the manner of intervening matters. First, separate the planes: in private, with each party, help distinguish what is legitimate functional disagreement (which should remain) from what is accumulated personal resentment (which should be dissolved). Second, bring back the shared goal, placing both back on the same side of the table. Third, if necessary, use an explicit diagnostic matrix so that each one sees, objectively, where the tension stopped being healthy.

The following matrix helps the leader — and the team itself — to diagnose which kind of tension is in play:

Closing — the mature team tolerates tension without personalising it

There is a persistent myth that the best teams are the most harmonious. It is not true. The best teams are those that can disagree deeply about the work without it denting the relationship between the people — those that tolerate high functional tension without converting it into personal tension.

This capacity — sustaining disagreement about the ideas while preserving respect for the people — is one of the marks of a team's maturity, and it is also the non-delegable responsibility of whoever leads it. The leader who eliminates all tension produces docile, mediocre teams; the leader who lets tension become personal produces toxic teams. The leader who keeps tension in the functional register, tending to the boundary with care, produces the teams that make the best decisions.

Tension, well managed, is not the enemy of a good team. It is its engine.

Final note

At Seikatsu Equilibrium, the way we think about organization starts precisely from the recognition that distinct domains, with their own priorities, work better in conscious interdependence than under uniform command. That is the principle of a distributed structure, in which each lead holds their own domain and the tension between domains is a source of balance, not of conflict. Managing these tensions well — keeping them functional, stopping them from becoming personal — is a leadership competency we work on in depth. To explore further, you can visit our Systemic Approach section or our Executive and Leadership Coaching section.

This content seeks to incorporate, partially (resulting from a deliberate option of simplification), existing knowledge and/or perspectives (from the author and from various sources), on the date of first publication on publicly accessible platforms and is not intended to constitute any type of legal, scientific or medical recommendation, nor does it have any prescriptive or binding nature.

The author reserves the right to change this content at any time in the future and all elements contained therein, including texts, images, videos, photos, graphics, shapes, sounds, narratives, knowledge and/or perspectives presented therein.

#leadership #conflictmanagement #teams #teammanagement #SeikatsuEquilibrium #businesscoaching #organisation #management