Learn to Disagree More Effectively

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Communication, Business, Harvard, Strategy, Business/management, Teams, Business/marketing, Management, Leadership, Finance, Marketing, Hbr, Economics, Innovation, Business/entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship

4.3 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2026

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Disagreement is essential to better decisions—but most of us either avoid it or handle it poorly. Julia Minson is a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and she's spent years studying disagreement and what we get wrong. She explains why intent matters less than behavior, how leaders can model “receptiveness,” and why the goal of a good disagreement isn’t to win—but to keep the conversation going. Minson is the coauthor of the HBR article "A Smarter Way to Disagree" and author of the book How to Disagree Better.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A new digital reading experience from Harvard Business Review is here.
0:05.0	It's the HBR Interactive Issue.
0:07.0	Swipe through pages, search each issue, and listen to articles with audio narration.
0:12.0	The interactive issue is available now to all HBR Print Magazine subscribers.
0:17.0	Not yet a subscriber to the HBR Print Magazine?
0:19.0	Subscribe today at HBR.org slash interactive issue.
0:37.3	I'm Alison Deard.
0:39.0	And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HPR Ideacast.
0:49.5	Adi, how do you like to handle disagreement at work?
0:52.7	I don't think I handle it very well.
0:54.8	I'm very conflict-avoidant.
0:57.1	So I do an end run around disagreement and try to resolve the issue in some other way.
1:03.1	Hmm.
1:03.5	That's the opposite of me.
1:04.9	I think that I'm sort of, it's not that I welcome disagreement, but I don't mind it.
1:09.3	And so if I have an opinion, even if I know it might raffle some feathers, I express it.
1:15.0	And I sometimes worry it's going to get me fired, but it hasn't yet.
1:18.3	So the point is, though, we know that conflict and debate is good for teams and organization.
1:26.5	So it's useful for all of us to figure out how to
1:30.5	embrace conflict in your case and then do it in a nicer way in mind. And disagreeing is really,
1:37.3	really hard. In a workplace, there are different power dynamics. There are different relationships.
1:42.9	So we wanted to talk to today's guest because she has
	...

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