Updated: Sep 8
Most senior leaders can tell you, without much hesitation, what the most important conversation in their organisation is right now. It might be about the underperforming business unit. Perhaps it’s regarding the executive who excels in their role but disrupts the team dynamic. It could also be about the strategy the board has approved, which half the leadership team privately believes is flawed. Or it may concern the relationship between two senior colleagues that everyone can see is broken, yet no one is addressing.
They can name it. They know exactly what needs to be said and to whom. Yet, in the vast majority of cases, they are not having it.
In my twenty years of coaching senior executives, I have come to believe that the single biggest constraint on leadership performance is not a lack of intelligence, strategic insight, or technical capability. It is the absence of courage in conversation. Not the dramatic, once-in-a-career kind of courage, but the quieter, more demanding kind required in ordinary working weeks, in ordinary meetings, with people who are not going anywhere. You will have to work with them tomorrow, regardless of what you say today.
This article explores what gets in the way of those conversations, the costs of avoidance, and what I have witnessed when leaders stop waiting for the right moment and simply engage.
Why the Conversation Does Not Happen
The most common explanation leaders give for avoiding a difficult conversation is timing. They believe it’s not the right moment. The person is under pressure. A major deliverable is looming. The relationship is already strained, and pushing now will only make it worse. While these reasons are often partially true, they are frequently used to delay indefinitely something that would be better done promptly.
Beneath the timing explanation, there are usually more honest reasons.
Fear of Damaging Relationships
The first is the fear of damaging the relationship. At a senior level, relationships are genuinely difficult to repair once they are significantly damaged. The stakes of a conversation going poorly are real. This is a legitimate concern. However, the unspoken version of the conversation is also damaging the relationship, slowly and invisibly, through distance, reduced trust, and the resentment that accumulates when important things go unsaid. The question is not whether to pay a relational cost. It is whether to pay it now, in a form you can manage, or later, in a form you cannot.
Fear of Being Wrong
The second reason is the fear of being wrong. Leaders who have built their identity around good judgment find it particularly challenging to raise a concern that the other person might credibly rebut. If I name this and they explain it away convincingly, what does that say about my read of the situation? This fear often produces silence or an overly aggressive version of the conversation, neither of which is what is actually needed.
Fear of Future Obligations
The third, and least often admitted, is the fear of what becomes required next. If I tell the underperforming executive directly and honestly that their performance is not good enough, I am then obligated to follow through, to support the change, to hold them accountable, and ultimately to act if nothing shifts. Raising the conversation closes the option of continuing to hope it resolves itself. Some leaders, at some level, are not yet ready for that obligation, and avoidance is a way of not having to meet it.
“The question is not whether to pay a relational cost. It is whether to pay it now, in a form you can manage, or later, in a form you cannot.”
What the Avoidance Costs
The costs of the avoided conversation are rarely invisible to the organisation, even when the leader believes they are being managed discreetly.
Cost to the Individual
The most immediate cost is to the person who needed to hear it. A senior leader who is underperforming and is not told directly is being failed by the organisation, not protected by it. They are denied the information they need to change, improve, or make a realistic decision about whether this role is the right fit. The compassionate instinct that drives the avoidance—wanting to protect someone—produces the opposite of a compassionate outcome. It leaves the person in a situation that is not working for them, without the honest feedback that would empower them to change it.
Cost to the Team
The second cost is to the team. People notice what their leader does not say. When an underperformance is not named, when a broken relationship is not addressed, or when a strategic concern is not raised, the people around the leader draw conclusions about what the leader is willing to do. Those conclusions tend to be limiting. The space for honesty in a team contracts to the size of the space that the leader is visibly willing to occupy.
Cost to the Leader
The third cost is to the leader themselves. Avoided conversations accumulate. Each one that is deferred adds a small but real cognitive and emotional load—the background awareness of something unresolved, the slight awkwardness in interactions that carry the weight of the unsaid. Leaders who carry a significant number of these tend to describe a sense of low-level depletion that they find difficult to account for. The connection between the depletion and the avoidance is almost never obvious from inside it.
“The space for honesty in a team contracts to the size of the space that the leader is visibly willing to occupy.”
What Gets in the Way Is Not What You Think
When I work with leaders on this, the instinct is almost always to focus on the mechanics of the conversation itself. How do I say it? What words do I use? How do I manage their reaction? These are not unimportant questions. However, in my experience, they are not usually the real obstacle.
The real obstacle is almost always internal. It is the story the leader is telling themselves about what will happen if they have the conversation. That story is often more catastrophic than what actually occurs. The person who will be devastated turns out to be uncomfortable but professional. The relationship that will be destroyed often becomes strengthened by the honesty. The strategic disagreement that will cause an irreparable rift is one the board has been waiting for someone to articulate.
This is not to say difficult conversations are not difficult. They are. But the difficulty that leaders anticipate is almost always significantly greater than the difficulty that materialises. The gap between the imagined conversation and the actual one is where most of the avoidance lives.
Perfectionism of Timing
The second internal obstacle is what I would call the perfectionism of timing. Leaders who are skilled communicators tend to hold out for ideal conditions—the perfect moment, the right setting, the version of themselves that is fully prepared and at their best. This is understandable but also self-defeating. The ideal conditions for a difficult conversation almost never arrive. The conversation that happens imperfectly, at a reasonable moment, is almost always more useful than the one postponed in pursuit of a version that never comes.
What Happens When Leaders Have It
I have watched senior leaders have conversations they had been avoiding for months, sometimes years. The pattern of what follows is consistent enough that I can describe it with confidence.
Short-Term Relief
In the short term, there is almost always relief. Not just for the leader, but for the person they spoke to. The thing that was not being said was frequently not being said on both sides. The person who needed to hear it was often aware, at some level, that something was wrong and was experiencing the silence as worse than the words.
Medium-Term Changes
In the medium term, something changes in the quality of the relationship. Not always in the direction the leader feared. More often, it shifts towards greater honesty, more directness, and less managed politeness. The relationship becomes more useful, even when it becomes temporarily uncomfortable.
Organisational Culture Shift
At the organisational level, something shifts in the culture. Not because one conversation transforms a culture, but because people notice when their leader is willing to say what needs to be said. That willingness creates permission. Others begin to have the conversations they have been avoiding. The cumulative effect, over months and quarters, is a measurable shift in the quality of information that flows through the organisation and the speed at which real problems surface rather than accumulate unseen.
One Thing Worth Doing This Week
If there is a conversation you have been meaning to have and have not yet had, the most useful question is not how to have it. It is what specifically is stopping you from having it now.
Name the real obstacle. Not the timing, which is almost certainly a proxy. Identify the actual concern underneath it. Is it the fear of the reaction? The fear of being wrong? The fear of what you will be obligated to do next? The belief that you are not yet certain enough to speak?
Whatever the real obstacle is, it is worth knowing clearly. In almost every case, the obstacle is more manageable than the leadership cost of continuing to work around it.
The conversation you are avoiding is almost certainly the most important leadership act available to you right now. Not because confrontation is good for its own sake, but because clarity is. The people around you deserve a leader who is willing to provide it, even when, especially when, it requires some courage to do so.
—
Ton de Graaf is the founder of Quest Coaching International and a *Chartered Business Coach™ with over 20 years of experience coaching senior leaders in Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 organisations across 30+ countries. His background in the Royal Dutch Military Police and Royal Dutch Airforce informs a coaching practice built on precision, directness, and accountability
To explore working together: coachton@qci-coaching.com | www.qci-coaching.com
