Drive better results for your business through healthy tension

We accept tension in the gym without question. Muscles only grow when they’re pushed, stretched, and put under resistance. Without that discomfort, there is no strength.   

The same principle applies to both teams and client relationships. Healthy tension, the kind built on mutual respect and shared goals, forces us to think harder, debate sharper, and reach decisions that hold up under real-world pressure

Healthy tension is about creating a space where tough questions are encouraged, and assumptions can be tested. It’s not about overpowering the conversation or stirring conflict for conflict's sake but about creating conditions that drive clarity and stronger outcomes. A handful of simple principles, common within many leadership and communication frameworks, can provide the foundation for both productive and constructive exchanges: 

When practiced well, healthy tension is an accelerant.  

At Gritmind, our Brass Tacks meeting is a deliberate space for healthy tension. This quarterly session brings together key client stakeholders and Gritmind’s product engineering team for open dialog on progress and key learnings. In the spirit of continuous improvement, a significant portion of this session is dedicated to a retrospective-style exchange where our team provides feedback and opportunities for improvement, and we encourage the same from our client stakeholders.  

The name of the event is intentional, driving home the point that we’re here to get into the details and drive towards outcomes. It’s where all team members come ready to respectfully challenge plans, point out risks, and pressure-test strategies. Our experience has been that by surfacing friction points and asking hard questions, we can avoid costly missteps later.  Aligning back to the exercise analogy, without a bit of discomfort there will be no growth.  

Healthy tension doesn’t stop at this quarterly client meeting. It carries through to how our teams make and keep commitments. At Gritmind, we follow Agile principles where our product teams are given autonomy to define their commitments, make decisions, and hold one another accountable for delivery.    

That means when a team commits to a feature by a certain date, it’s not a top-down directive. It’s a collective decision. The tension comes in when we ask:  

These conversations may be uncomfortable, but they are critical. Teams debate, decide, and then execute with conviction.   

Nobody questions the soreness that follows a hard workout, growth requires a bit of resistance. The same is true for high-performing product teams and healthy client/partner relationships. If we avoid tension, there is no growth. If we embrace it with respect, clarity, and accountability we will get stronger.