Louder isn't righter

How to Work With People Who Hold Strong Opinions

The good coffee was flowing, the biscuits were genuinely good and the opinions were getting louder. I was in a small glass panelled room, with a client who'd inherited a small band of consultants with very strong opinions.

Strong opinions about management, about agility, about more or less everything, delivered with immense volume, and with the remarkable certainty of people who had long ago stopped wondering whether they might be wrong.

Disagreement wasn't debated in that room. It was the only form of communication happening – and if that didn't work, they started shouting their disagreements and opinions even louder.

Somewhere in the middle of the drama, as I dunked a digestive into my coffee, I remembered a line I'd once heard, and it made me smile.

Opinionated people spend their lives going round annoying other opinionated people.

Which was the meeting unfolding in front of me, and, by all accounts, the exact same thing that every meeting with this group before had been like.

Two or three very sure people, each absolutely and categorically certain their opinions mattered more than others, and a client caught in the crossfire wondering how on earth it had come to this.

Working with people like that is exhausting – the confidence never drops, the delivery has an edge and a bite, and the client came out feeling absolutely steamrollered. But I've come to think the strong opinion itself was never the trouble, not really. A strong opinion is just energy and belief, and often it's a signal: someone cares enough about something to plant a flag in it. Or several flags.

The trouble is what tends to happen next. Everyone else in the room reaches for a flag of their own, and now you've a field full of different flags and nobody looking at the ground.

So the first move, and it's almost annoyingly simple, is to listen – properly, before saying anything back. When someone's being forceful the instinct is to defend, or to match them, or to shut down and wait for it to be over – a kind of self preservation. But listening is the reconnaissance that tells you what's actually going on underneath the opinion.

And more often than not listening opens up two things. It gives the person with the opinion something they may never have received much of before; genuine interest in their opinions. And secondly, information for you to move forward with.

What are they really arguing for, I mean really, behind the volume and the strong words? What problem are they trying to solve beneath all the certainty? What are they a bit frightened of? Because loudness is usually about something other than the topic, it's often about themselves.

Rigid certainty often masks a small toolbox for solving problems in work – one way of doing things that worked once, somewhere, and got mistaken for a law of physics across all businesses.

Volume can also be doubt played through fake confidence. And almost none of it is really about you, which is the thing to hold on to the moment you feel your own temperature starting to rise.

Once you see that, you stop reacting and start watching, and the whole encounter changes shape and form. It becomes much more interesting, if you let it. You don't have to win, and you certainly don't have to agree – but you can let a person keep their conviction while keeping your own judgement about it.

Their belief is real to them, and trying to defeat a belief head-on almost never produces learning and understanding; it produces someone who now holds the same belief, only harder, and resents you now too. Respecting a conviction without endorsing it is most of what grown-up disagreement actually is.

If you do decide something's worth challenging, the move is to understand it better than they do before you say a single word against it. Ask the questions. Follow where the argument leads. Curiosity in what they're saying does something confrontation and arguing never manages – it loosens the grip, because it's very hard to stay defensive with someone who's honestly trying to understand you.

The aim was never to be declared the winner. It's to end up, both of you, somewhere slightly more aligned than where you began.

There's a humbling fact underneath all of this, and it took me an stupidly long time to make my peace with it: an awful lot of different things work. Methods succeed in their context and fall apart out of it, and the surest people are very often simply the ones who've only ever watched their own way succeed, usually just once. Holding your own view a little lightly, while taking other people's experience seriously, isn't weakness. It's just having noticed how big the world is and how something different, done somewhere different, likely actually works.

Not every opinion deserves all of you either. We have finite resources – time, energy and attention – and some debates are a tax on it you're under no obligation to pay.

Now and then the most useful thing a person can do, especially for their own sanity, is listen, say very little, and keep moving – and let the argument run out of road on its own, usually when the opinion meets reality. Because the genuine risk, in a room full of strong opinions, is not losing the argument. It's becoming another loud voice in it: meeting certainty with more certainty, volume with more volume, until you've joined the very thing you came in to help with.

The consultant I remember most insisted on one rigid method for changing an organisation – his, naturally – and dismissed every alternative before it had finished being aired. I didn't argue. I listened, mapped out his assumptions, and told him honestly which parts of his approach I thought were right, because plenty of it was. Then I put a couple of other approaches on the table, evidence attached, and let the team sit with them. He never fully came round. But the team experimented, the outcomes improved, the friction eased, and the influence arrived without a single confrontation.

I think, at heart, he appreciated being listened to and acknowledged for his ideas. He'd have hated to be argued into it though. But when reality gives us feedback, we all learn something.

Strong opinions aren't going anywhere. Everyone has opinions, it's impossible not to. The questions becomes how strongly we hold on to them, and how forceful we are at making other people conform to them.

Opinions are the natural effect of bringing people together – people who care about their work. The skill was never to stamp them out, or to out-shout them, or to dismiss them.

The most powerful thing you can bring into a room that's all conviction and no listening is very often not another opinion at all. It's understanding. And good coffee.