Many of us do not enjoy conflict, but tensions are bound to arise in workplaces filled with differing personalities, perspectives, working styles, and priorities. Sooner or later, different vantage points will create friction and collide.

It might be simple. An inappropriate comment. A passive aggressive e-mail. A turf war between colleagues. A standstill disagreement between departments. An accumulating history of poor performance by a team member. But it can be challenging to confront.

Maybe your early experiences wired you to freeze, flee, or fawn. Many of us tend toward being conflict-avoidant. But as a leader, you can’t turn your gaze the other direction, sweep difficult conversations under the rug, or exit the room when things get uncomfortably heated.

Unresolved conflict compromises work culture and takes a costly toll on the bottom line for organizations. Since conflict in the workplace is inevitable, leaders must develop the relational skills of confronting issues and navigating disharmony—especially if facing it runs against the grain of your comfort zone.

Catalysts for Workplace Conflict

At its core, workplace conflict is often more structural than it is personal. According to 3×5 Leadership, five common reasons conflict arises in the workplace are:

• Functional differences – Tensions arise from different functions with different purposes, priorities, and pressures.
• Information asymmetry – Differing views clash when people don’t have the same information, or interpretation of it, at the same time.
• Competing priorities and trade-offs – Tensions occur as different people seek to optimize for competing priorities or factors (efficiency vs thoroughness).
• Interpersonal differences – People bring different triggers, communications styles, and interpretations of behavior which create relational conflict alongside process conflict.
• Ambiguity and unclear expectations – When roles, responsibilities, or decisions are unclear, people create assumptions which often breed conflict.

Not all conflict sounds like a heated argument. Conflict can also look like water cooler conversations on the side, silent withholding in meetings, passive resistance, emotional reactivity, repeated misunderstandings, territory-guarding, or a tense atmosphere.

Why Leaders Avoid Conflict

In what has been called an epidemic of conflict-avoidance in the workplace, today’s leaders are more hesitant to confront conflict and have tough conversations than previous generations of leaders.

• According to Bravely, 70% of workers avoid difficult conversations, a trend that is also growing among (especially Millennial and Generation Z) leaders.
• A recent study revealed that nearly 50% of emerging leaders struggled with conflict management skills in the workplace.
• Another study showed that only one-third of global leaders feel confident in their ability to manage conflict.

Conflict competency is one matter. But Conflict EQ asserts that what often inhibits leaders from addressing conflict, even when they know it needs addressing, are the competing pressures they experience.

The more relationship-oriented you are, the more you may experience discomfort and complexity in approaching conflict. So you hesitate. You hold out for more information. You wait and hope it washes over.

You might anticipate the possibilities of getting the difficult conversation wrong, facing intense negative reactions, losing approval, creating more tension, or causing unwanted consequences.

Many leaders care not only about resolving the conflict, but also about their relationships. Difficult conversations carry an emotional, cognitive, and relational load that gets in the way of taking action.

Why Negating Conflict Backfires On You

It can be tempting to try to maintain a guise of harmony. But holding tightly to a harmony-outlook when a problem is present is like waiting for the lid to blow off Pandora’s box instead of admitting there’s a box.

Avoiding conflict can provide short-term relief from discomfort: you set the issue aside to focus on other matters. At times, it can even be wise to pause, assess the situation, and hone your approach. Some conflicts do require space: but there’s a limit. While navigating conflict is not about speed, it is about working for resolution.

Habitual delay in tackling difficult conversations means the conflicts will fester, the issues will compound, and the collateral damage will spread—including the damage to your leadership.

The longer you wait, the bigger the problem grows, the greater the pressure to do something, and the harder it may become to address it. It starts as factual and specific but begins to feel more personally loaded as you hesitate.

An uncomfortable conversation today will not be easier in a couple months’ time. It will become more complicated, carry more emotional weight, and be more time-consuming, meanwhile your credibility has worn down.

Say a problem begins with one underperforming employee. But unattended, the issue expands to affect the entire team. The hidden cost of the conflict gets passed on. Others have to absorb and compensate for the discomfort you avoid.

It takes courage, judgment, and skills to intervene in the right moment, but not doing so creates wider, more significant issues and impacts the workplace on a broader scale. What you leave unattended says as much about your leadership as the things you attend to.

The Specific Leadership Costs of Avoiding Conflict

Leaders diminish leadership effectiveness and team effectiveness when they habitually avoid the discomfort of resolving conflict:

Erosion of Trust

A willingness to engage with difficult issues is an expectation of leadership. When it doesn’t happen, employees may lose respect, lower their standards, or feel like speaking up does not matter. Who is holding the anchor of accountability?

Team members are left to flounder about in uncertainty as a situation festers. Leaders may seek to avoid conflict to protect relationships, but instead may irreparably damage them.

Reduced Psychological Safety

When there’s an elephant hanging out in the room, and the leader is avoiding the risk of acknowledging it, how can the team feel safe to be honest, admit mistakes, challenge others, or take interpersonal risks?

Avoiding conflict communicates that difficult conversations are unwelcome. Members may begin to edit themselves, drop candor, become quiet, or be overly agreeable, meanwhile talking candidly in side conversations. New problems begin to take root.

Poor or Delayed Decision-Making

When a leader is uncomfortable with managing conflict, they may unintentionally convey that harmony is implicitly rewarded—but harmony for harmony’s sake doesn’t make for the best decisions. Productive disagreement is necessary for effective team dynamics.

A leader’s own discomfort with interpersonal conflict may incline her to harmony-rewarding behaviors that inhibit the emergence of debate, dissenting perspectives, probing questions, and counterarguments—resulting in compromised quality around decision-making.

Unclear Standards and Weakened Accountability

Accountability creates safety and sets clear expectations and standards. Avoiding conflict by not addressing problematic behaviors, dynamics, or decisions can create distance in connecting actions to repercussions. The longer it waits, the more lines begin to blur around what’s tolerated and what’s unacceptable.

Avoiding conflict makes it harder to convincingly draw boundaries: what goes unchecked becomes a new informal standard, implicitly endorsed by passivity. It can also lead to dissatisfaction amongst team members who feel held to a different expectation.

Performance and Morale Drops

Unresolved conflict sits heavily on team dynamics, and begins to strain interpersonal relationships, lower levels of engagement, and reduce team efficiencies and performance.

High-performing team members may be especially attuned to observing what leaders address and what they bypass, and may choose to leave environments littered with unresolved conflicts to find healthier dynamics where conflict is addressed and rewards are clearer.

Reduced Leadership Confidence

When people observe a leader ignoring problems and allowing issues to go unresolved, they begin to question how things are being handled. Perceived credibility around judgment and decision-making drops.

As unspoken tensions rise in the team, confidence in leadership falters, team interactions become messier, and the leader ends up carrying the added emotional labor being created by the avoidance.

“The Only Way Out is Through”

The real path to greater coherence in the workplace does not result from avoiding addressing conflict altogether, but by accepting it exists and addressing it directly and skillfully as and when it arises.

The moment you notice yourself negating the tough conversations, remind yourself that your leadership is ultimately as strong as your willingness to approach and manage conflict.

Conflict isn’t distraction from leadership: it’s your opportunity to rise up and create it.

By: Aimee Hansen is a long time writer and heart coach with theglasshammer.com. Her recent work includes “This Book is a Retreat” co-written with Marianne Richmond.

If you would like to work with Aimee or any of our coaches including Nicki Gilmour our head coach and founder, please click HERE for a free, exploratory call with Nicki who can match you with the right coach for you.