Conflict Avoidance in Leadership: The Cost of Keeping the Peace

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The meeting ended without a decision. Again.

There was a lot of tension. Everyone could feel it. Two people in the room had fundamentally different views on the direction, and those views were not going to resolve themselves on their own – they needed help.

That’s where the leader of the meeting needed to step in. But they didn’t. They kept the conversation rolling by talking about process – next steps, timelines, who would own what. In the process, they avoided the actual disagreement like you avoid telling the person in your business meeting that they have food in their teeth.

On the way out, you can here somebody mumble: “Same conversation, different week.”

She is right.

Conflict avoidant leaders almost never think of themselves as conflict avoidant leaders. They think of themselves as diplomatic. Or collaborative. Or the kind of leader who doesn’t make people feel attacked in meetings.

While those things might even be true – it doesn’t matter. When there is conflict avoidance in leadership, somebody is going to get hurt.

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What Conflict Avoidance in Leadership Actually Does

Conflict avoidance in leadership is rarely about refusing to engage. In fact, most conflict avoidant leaders are active and engaged. They participate in the meetings, they listen and they ask insightful questions.

The challenge isn’t what they are doing, it’s what they’re not doing.
And what they’re not doing is addressing the elephant that is taking up a ton of space in the room.

If you want to spot conflict avoidance in leadership, look at how the leader acts during conversations.

  • They usually reframe disagreements as misunderstandings instead of genuine differences.
  • They tend to table hard conversations for a follow-up discussion. But that follow-up discussion rarely addresses the hard conversations.
  • They give feedback that’s so carefully softened it actually sounds more like a reward.
  • And they make decisions by consensus even when a consensus isn’t possible, which means the decision never actually gets made.

They do all of this while genuinely believing they’re maintaining a healthy team dynamic.

The thing is that the team can see right through it. They’ve been watching the leader do it for months, sometimes years. They already know that the hard thing won’t be said in the meeting. So the real conversations, the more impactful ones, are the ones that happen in the hallway or on Slack, after the official meeting has ended.

Two parallel conversations now exist in the organization: the one that happens in the room, and the one that actually matters.

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The Cost Nobody Is Counting

Conflict avoidance in leadership creates a specific set of organizational symptoms that are easy to misdiagnose if you’re not paying attention to the nuance of it all.

Decisions that don’t stick. When a decision is made without actually resolving the underlying disagreement, it won’t hold. The people who weren’t convinced in the meeting, won’t be convinced after the meeting either. They’ll put in the least amount of effort to get it done, or complain that there are obstacles. Ultimately, the decision has to be revisited. Then revisited again. And again. Meanwhile, the conflict avoidant leader wonders why nothing seems to move forward.

Problems that arrive late. When the culture doesn’t bring conflict to the forefront, it brings silence to the forefront. People learn that bringing a problem to leadership doesn’t resolve the problem as much as it just makes everyone uncomfortable and frustrated. So they hold the problem longer. They wait until it’s about to explode. That means that conflict avoidance in leadership is really about creating crises, and then wondering why nobody brought the problem up earlier.

A team that goes quiet. The most capable people in the room will eventually stop trying to address the real issues. They’ve tried over and over again, but nothing changed. The conflict avoidance in leadership led to avoiding the problems instead of honing in on them. Over time, people will disengage – not dramatically, but enough for you to notice. People who used to push back will stop pushing. That silence is the sound of defeat.

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Why Conflict Avoidant Leaders Avoid Conflict

If you ask leaders why there is conflict avoidance in leadership, you’ll be surprised with the answers. It’s rarely as simple as “I don’t like conflict.”

Conflict avoidance in leadership is usually due to more specific reasons. Sometimes it’s a genuine belief that camaraderie is created by avoiding disagreement. Sometimes it’s an unconscious pattern about how being direct cost is somehow bad. And a lot of times it’s that they’ve confused being liked with being effective – and their primary focus is on being liked.

Usually, they just don’t know how to have the hard conversations skillfully, so they avoid them. Not because they’re weak, but because nobody ever showed them how. The skill was never developed, so the behavior default is avoidance. They don’t know how CARE Conversations work.

And here’s the part that hurts the most when somebody understands they have conflict avoidance in leadership: the avoidance doesn’t protect the team. It doesn’t even help the team. In fact, it hurts them.

Conflict avoidance just delays the problem and makes it larger. The tension that wasn’t named in March is still there in June – but it’s compounded by 3 months of resentment, workaround, and accumulated frustration from people who needed a decision and still didn’t get one.

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What Conflict Avoidance Actually Is (And What It Isn’t)

The conflict avoidant leader has a specific model of conflict in their head. It’s loud. It’s personal. It damages relationships. It’s the kind of thing that happens when people lose control of their emotions and say things they can’t take back.

They’re wrong. That’s the least common kind of conflict avoidance in leadership.

The more common kind is just focused on two people who genuinely have different views on how to solve a real problem. That’s not a threat to the team. That’s the team doing its job. In fact, there are 4 types of team conflict, and most of them are positive types of conflict. The leader’s role isn’t to prevent conflict – it’s to facilitate it’s resolution in a productive way. Their job is to identify what’s actually happening, bring the disagreement to the forefront and address it directly.

People who are victim to conflict avoidance in leadership usually believe that conflict has to be combative. It doesn’t. It’s just the opposite. And when they realize this (like with the CARE Toolkit), they get a lot of clarity. And that clarity, plus the direct acknowledgement that accompanies it, is a game change for all teams.

Teams don’t break under disagreement. They break under unresolved disagreement that everyone is pretending doesn’t exist.

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The Thing Worth Sitting With

If you’ve got conflict avoidance in leadership, the question isn’t whether or not to become someone who picks fights. Don’t do that. It’s whether the cost of avoiding one specific conversation is greater than the cost of exploring the disagreement.

Avoidance feels like peace. It’s not. It’s just delaying and amplifying the problem.

The leaders who’ve shifted out of conflict avoidance in leadership consistently say the same thing: the conversation they dreaded was never as bad as they thought it would be. The team didn’t break. The relationship didn’t end. The world didn’t fall apart. And the thing they’d been avoiding for months got resolved in a fraction of the time it would have taken to keep avoiding it.

If conflict avoidance is a pattern showing up in your leadership and you want to understand what’s driving it – and what a different approach actually looks like in practice – that’s a useful conversation to have. The pattern is common. It’s also very addressable once you can see it clearly. Feel free to contact me, or go here to learn a little about how to have the tough conversations you’re avoiding.

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Jeff Matlow is a leadership coach, mentor and 3x entrepreneur who helps senior leaders spot the unconscious patterns keeping their teams dependent on them – then redesign the environment so everyone can actually perform. He’s spent 25+ years working with leaders at Disney, Porsche, Nestlé, and hundreds of high-growth companies. Think Ted Lasso meets Brené Brown meets a Navy SEAL. Learn more about working with Jeff or subscribe to The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever.