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Ask whether tension on your team is about disagreement or depletion.
If friction has been landing differently on your team lately, you’re not imagining it.
When a team runs at a demanding pace for an extended stretch, the threshold for friction to surface gets lower. Perhaps a colleague who’s usually easy to work with recently pushed back sharply over a schedule change during a one-on-one. In a calmer month, that exchange might have taken two minutes over email. This time, however, it took the rest of the meeting to work through. The disagreement itself hadn’t changed much. What had changed was how much room there was to address it.
The Diagnostic Question
Before responding to a tense moment, it helps to ask one question: is this about the specific thing we’re disagreeing on, or is this about how stretched everyone is right now?
This question works because it interrupts the reflex to respond to the tone of a moment before understanding where it’s coming from. Without it, tension that’s actually about capacity often gets treated like a disagreement—which can turn a moment that just needed acknowledgment rather than a solution into something bigger than it was. Asking this question first allows you enough space to choose the right response before reacting.
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