Ever have meetings where your team is stuck on a topic? Worse yet, you can feel when it’s about to happen because it’s happened so many times before.

Every entrepreneurial team experiences this during the course of growing their business. But to move forward as a business, you need to stop beating the dead horse!

At the beginning of a journey with a new client of mine, the leadership team was stuck on an issue about how to grow their service business over the coming year. Multiple members of the leadership team were passionate about different approaches, causing a seemingly endless repetitive discussion. Every time the topic came up, they started beating the dead horse again.

In any organization, there will be conflict. Knowing how to channel opinions and conflict the right way to get to the bottom of issues and move forward is key.

There is a way to have a healthy conflict without disrupting the core foundation of the organization. Here are four ways to do this effectively.

In film making, the 180-degree rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. However, I recently learned about a 180-degree rule which can  be applied to business.

I learned it from Rich Lucia who has built his speaking and consulting brand around the term Selling in the Now. Rich has applied the knowledge we have about our lizard brain, the amygdala, and it’s bias towards negativity, to harness it in a positive way in brainstorming and solution creation.

The Elephant in the Room. The Sacred Cow. The skeleton in the closet. Every company has certain issues that they avoid bringing up at all costs. Sometimes the issues are too uncomfortable to confront. Or the same issue has been discussed many times in the past and still nothing is being done about it. Sometimes it’s because we’re afraid that someone will get personally offended just because we brought it up.

The issues that are most often avoided are people-related issues. Someone is underperforming, but because they’ve been with the company forever, their lack of performance becomes the norm or status quo.