If you want to have an innovative, collaborative, high-performing organization, then you need people with different perspectives who feel comfortable sharing their ideas. But what if those perspectives end up being damaging to your working environment? If performance drops because of the sharing of ideas, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Open communication in the workplace can add a lot, but it can also destroy a good working culture. Where do you draw the line?

On the one hand, you want people to feel free to express themselves. If you stifle creative thought and the expression of those thoughts, then you will miss out on new ideas that could be very useful. Your organization may get stuck doing things as they have always done them because people are afraid to suggest something new, and you end up falling behind your competitors. Openness to a range of ideas and a free discussion of those ideas is the reason that diversity and inclusion are so important, because they can create a lot of business value.

On the other hand, sometimes people’s views can disrupt the workplace. Google saw an example of this recently with an employee who internally published a 10-page document in which he explained why he thought women are biologically unsuited for the kind of work Google does. That’s going to make it pretty close to impossible for any woman to work with him (or, even more, for him). Given the collaborative nature of Google’s work, the incident significantly reduced his value to Google, and his attitude of “you don’t belong here” toward some of his co-workers (and leaders) contributes to negative stereotypes that are damaging to the work environment. Google’s response was to fire him for violating their Code of Conduct, a move that many people applaud while many others question.

So, when do you want to encourage the free exchange of ideas, and when do you want to shut it down?

We can probably all agree that when it comes to products and processes, everything should be open to discussion. The things we create for our customers, and the manner in which we create them, are the kinds of things we should always be eager to improve, and that means we need to encourage an open exchange of ideas about them.

We could probably also agree (though, as the Google case shows, many people still don’t) that words and actions about co-workers that create a hostile work environment should be discouraged and limited. As a leader you need to create a high-performing workforce, and if someone is bringing that performance down – whether because they are bad at their job or because they make it more difficult for other people to do theirs – you need to correct their behavior or let them go.

Anytime you encourage people from different backgrounds to exchange ideas, you’re going to have disagreement. When that disagreement, and the discussion around it, helps make your business better, then that’s a good thing and it should be encouraged. When it creates problems, it needs to be shut down. The line between the two is not always obvious, and so that’s why we have leaders, to try to keep some control over the process. Good luck.