Receptiveness: How to Disagree Better at Work

I used to be very good at being right. The evidence was occasionally optional, but the commitment was absolute.

In my first big corporate role, I was trusted with significant projects and took full ownership of them. I created the strategy, built the project plan, set the direction and decided how everything should come together. By the time the wider team saw the work, most of the important thinking had already been completed.

Other people were welcome to contribute, ideally by finding a spelling mistake and confirming that I had nailed everything else. I genuinely believed this was what ownership looked like: take responsibility, develop the answer and drive the work forward. Changing direction felt dangerously close to admitting that I had failed to do the job properly in the first place.

I listened to alternative views, of course. I would sit there looking attentive while a small courtroom assembled inside my head, complete with supporting evidence, opposing counsel and a judge who had already ruled in my favour. The conversation could influence the edges of the work, but the centre was heavily protected.

That began to change when I encountered the concept of diversity of thought through my studies with the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. I started involving people earlier, while we were still interrogating the brief, defining the problem and developing the strategy. This was initially inconvenient because other people had opinions, and some of them had experience, context and knowledge that I did not.

Involving more perspectives did not mean feeding every passing thought into a corporate blender and serving the resulting grey paste as “alignment.” It meant giving credible views enough space to shape the work before my own answer became immovable. Once I had properly considered what other people could see, it became much harder to assume that mine was the only reasonable interpretation.

Sometimes my original view was perfectly defensible. It simply was not the best response to that particular situation. Ownership began to mean creating enough room for the project to become better than my original answer.

Protecting my plan had also restricted the information available to the decision. What appeared decisive from my side could create a narrower view of reality for everyone involved. Learning how to disagree better at work depends on receptiveness: our ability to let opposing information influence the decision before reality performs the correction for us.

Why our own view feels so convincing

I have recently been reading Julia Minson’s How to Disagree Better as part of the Gray Feather Community’s July book club. It is the sort of book many of us would benefit from reading and a large number of us probably will not, largely because the title suggests we may bear some responsibility for the quality of our disagreements.

Minson describes constructive disagreement as disagreement that increases both parties’ willingness to speak to one another again. Winning tells us who landed the final blow; constructive disagreement asks whether the relationship can survive another round. Plenty of arguments produce a decisive final sentence while leaving behind less trust, less curiosity and very little appetite for the next conversation.

One reason this happens is naïve realism: our tendency to experience our own perception as an objective account of the world. We rarely experience our interpretation as an interpretation; we experience it as reality. When somebody reaches a different conclusion, we naturally begin searching for the defect that prevented them from seeing what appears so painfully obvious to us.

Perhaps they are poorly informed, hopelessly biased, intellectually limited or deliberately difficult. Perhaps they possess the moral character of a damp dishcloth. Whatever explanation we choose, it usually places the problem safely inside them. There is the arrogance, although I am placing myself firmly inside the accusation.

Many of the beliefs producing this certainty were shaped before we stopped to examine them. Family, culture, religion, education, early managers, formative experiences, fear and the people whose approval mattered to us all helped construct the lens through which we now interpret the world. We experience the result as reasoned judgement, even when substantial parts of it arrived pre-installed.

The information reaching us reinforces that confidence. Hans Rosling argues in Factfulness that dramatic decline, conflict and failure attract more attention than gradual improvement, ordinary competence and cooperation. Our worldview can feel well-evidenced while being drawn from a distorted sample of reality.

Emotion adds another layer. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt developed the elephant-and-rider metaphor. The elephant represents our emotional and intuitive side, while the rider represents the rational mind attempting to provide direction from a precarious seat on top.

By the time somebody has finished presenting their view, the elephant may already feel threatened, the rider may have judged their character, and both are now constructing an impressively detailed defence of the position we arrived with. Our perspective feels objective because we rarely see all the assumptions, influences and reactions that helped construct it.

What receptiveness looks like at work

Self-awareness helps us recognise our assumptions, reactions, behavioural patterns and blind spots. Active listening helps us understand what another person is actually saying rather than waiting for the first available gap in which to launch our rebuttal. Receptiveness goes one step further by asking whether their perspective is allowed to influence our thinking.

Minson and her research partners define receptiveness to opposing views as the willingness to access, consider and evaluate supporting and opposing information relatively impartially. Receptiveness does not demand agreement. It asks us to understand the competing view well enough to assess it properly, even when our conclusion remains unchanged.

The research identifies four components:

• Emotional equanimity: Can you remain steady enough to think while somebody challenges something you care about?
• Intellectual curiosity: Do you genuinely want to understand how they reached their conclusion, or are you gathering material for your reply?
• Respect towards opponents: Can you challenge the argument without reducing the person making it?
• Tolerance of taboo issues: Can difficult subjects be examined without treating the discussion itself as evidence of bad character?

Diversity brings different perspectives into the room. Receptiveness determines whether those perspectives are allowed to change the decision. An organisation can become very good at inviting contribution while remaining remarkably poor at using it.

Naturally, I took the test

Minson and her colleagues developed an 18-item survey to measure receptiveness across those four components. Because reading a book about the quality of my disagreements was apparently not exposing enough, I took the Receptiveness to Opposing Views survey as well.

I approached it with a quiet expectation that academic science would confirm I was a calm, intellectually curious beacon of reason. Science arrived with a clipboard and no apparent interest in preserving my self-esteem.

My overall receptiveness score was 5.8 out of 7, placing me towards the more receptive end of the comparison group. The individual scores were:

• Emotional equanimity: 6.5
• Intellectual curiosity: 6.6
• Respect towards opponents: 5.0
• Tolerance of taboo issues: 5.0

I am generally able to remain emotionally steady and genuinely curious about how other people’s beliefs have formed. The scores also expose a gap between being interested in somebody’s reasoning and maintaining respect for the person holding the view, particularly when I believe the subject should no longer be open to reasonable debate. Apparently, I am very interested in understanding how you became wrong.

That is where I still have to catch myself. I can ask thoughtful questions while having already categorised the person answering them, which means the conversation continues while part of my receptiveness has quietly left the building. An encouraging overall score can flatter the ego while hiding the component that most affects our decisions and relationships.

The unevenness is where the work begins. Receptiveness can disappear quickly when disagreement touches identity, competence, authority or something we use to feel secure. Awareness helps us notice the reaction; receptiveness gives us a chance to choose what happens next.

When leaders protect the answer

At work, receptiveness shapes the information available to the organisation and therefore the quality of the decisions leaders can make. Scaling Leadership distinguishes between Creative and Reactive leadership. Under pressure, leaders can move towards controlling, complying or protecting, with the Protecting pattern expressed through distance, criticism and arrogance.

A leader in this mode assumes superior understanding, finds fault in the challenger and creates distance from information that threatens their position. People learn quickly from these responses. A leader may encourage honest feedback, invite challenge and repeatedly insist that their door is always open, but the real signal is sent when somebody walks through it carrying information the leader does not want to hear.

One defensive response can teach an entire team how carefully the truth needs to be packaged. Careful messages become edited messages, and edited messages eventually become silence. Leadership then mistakes the absence of disagreement for alignment and continues making decisions from an increasingly narrow version of reality. The disruption appears sudden only because the earlier signals were unable to travel.

An organisation cannot anticipate what its people have learned not to say.

Psychological safety may help a concern reach the room, but receptiveness determines whether it affects the decision. Speaking up creates little value when the response is dismissal, defensiveness or a polite meeting followed by the original plan continuing untouched.

An organisation can recruit people with different backgrounds, experiences and expertise, encourage them to contribute and describe itself as inclusive. Every meaningful decision can still emerge from the same narrow set of assumptions. Diversity then becomes decorative: the perspectives are present, but the thinking remains unchanged.

Receptiveness releases more of the capability already sitting inside the team. It allows experience, expertise and context to improve the organisation’s ability to notice weak signals, challenge assumptions and adjust before an outdated plan becomes an expensive problem with its own steering committee.

Purpose provides direction. Leaders need clarity about what the organisation exists to serve and which principles should guide its decisions, while receptiveness improves the information used to make them. Purpose tells us where we are trying to go; receptiveness helps us see more of the terrain.

Receptiveness therefore sits inside organisational resilience. Anticipation weakens when contradictory signals are dismissed, design becomes narrower when disagreement is interpreted as disloyalty, and implementation grows brittle when the original plan is protected long after circumstances have changed. A resilient organisation needs people willing to speak honestly and leaders capable of using what they hear.

Stop. Challenge. Choose.

The score becomes useful during the next conversation in which somebody challenges a view we care about. Scaling Leadership offers three helpful words: Stop. Challenge. Choose.

Stop before the reaction becomes the response. Challenge the explanation you have immediately constructed about the other person – that they are ignorant, biased, difficult, disloyal or simply unable to comprehend the obvious brilliance of your plan. Then choose whether your next move is designed to understand, defend or defeat.

Before responding, explain the other person’s position in a way they would recognise as fair. When we cannot describe their argument accurately, we are arguing with a weaker version of their position that we created ourselves. That small act of receptiveness changes the quality of the disagreement before anybody has changed their mind.

Simon Sinek’s concept of the worthy rival offers another way to view the person challenging us. They may be exposing a weakness in our thinking that supporters cannot see, which makes winning one exchange a poor trade when the price is losing access to that perspective in future.

We may still reach exactly the same conclusion. Our values may remain intact, our strategy may survive and the other person may still be wrong. Receptiveness means that our certainty has survived contact with another perspective, and the decision is better for it.

Learning how to disagree better at work begins with noticing the moment our receptiveness starts to close. Resilience depends on our ability to reopen it before reality arrives and performs the correction for us.