The real reason your team avoids conflict – and why it’s costing you

Most teams don’t have a conflict problem. They have an honesty problem.

I say that in rooms all the time, and there’s always someone who stiffens – usually the leader who insists, proudly, “We don’t have conflict here.”

With the greatest of respect, bollocks. How’s that for a conflicting view?

What “we don’t have conflict here” actually means: the team’s scared. People have stopped speaking plainly. The truth has gone underground and the conversations that matter are happening everywhere except in the meeting you’re sitting in. Psychological safety has evaporated and been replaced with polite smiling and emotional withdrawal.

Silence in an executive team isn’t a sign of harmony. It’s a sign of fear.

And fear kills performance far faster than conflict ever will.

I’ve seen this in dozens of businesses over the years, and the frustrating thing is that the leaders who most need to hear it are often the ones most convinced it doesn’t apply to them.

The best teams we work with – the ones genuinely performing at the top of their industry – argue all the time.

Not personal warfare or factions. Real conflict. Productive disagreement. The robust debates that produce better decisions, more clarity, tighter alignment, and stronger execution.

Those are also the teams that enjoy working together the most.

Top leaders don’t avoid conflict – they use it

We work with an outstanding set of clients. Firms that don’t just participate in a market, but dominate it. And one pattern is consistent: none of them pretend everything is fine all the time.

Not Just Travel is the number one travel franchise. Tedaisy, who I spent time with only last week – the UK’s top pet insurer. UP3 dominates managed services in the ServiceNow ecosystem. DataBarracks leads business resilience as a service in the UK.

Unforgettable Travel runs the number one cruise operation in Croatia. FX Digital is top of the pile for smart TV apps. Actionstep is the fastest-growing mid-market SaaS legal platform. Synextra owns Managed Azure for legal. ASKBOSCO® leads their niche in e-commerce adspend optimisation. Peggo is number one in commercial cleaning optimisation.

It’s a ridiculous roster of companies doing exceptional work, and that’s not even the full list.

What these category leaders have in common:

• They don’t avoid conflict.
• They challenge ideas.
• They push each other.
• They get emotional.
• They say the uncomfortable thing because they care enough about performance to get it on the table.

Some of the teams we coach have worked together for twenty years. They bicker like siblings. I’d say like a married couple but I don’t want to get in more trouble than usual. They know every button, every trigger, every blind spot. And they still show up ready to argue in good faith because they understand something most businesses never manage to grasp:

The real risk isn’t robust debate. It’s festering issues no one will name.

What makes these high-performing teams great isn’t that they’ve “solved” conflict, it’s that they’ve normalised honesty.

Even then, even with teams like this, there’s always work to do. Human beings are messy. Expectations get crossed. Resentments build. A comment lands wrong and lodges somewhere it shouldn’t.

Twenty years of history doesn’t protect you from the occasional explosion. It just gives you more practice in cleaning up afterwards.

The real reason conflict erupts: Buried expectations

One of the biggest misconceptions about workplace conflict is that it’s about the thing being argued.

It almost never is.

Ninety per cent of the time, the row is about the thing that didn’t get discussed months ago – the slight that wasn’t addressed, the assumption no one clarified, the expectation that sat quietly in someone’s head and started fermenting.

Psychologists call some of this attribution error. Leaders often call it “being blindsided”. You know the moment. Someone erupts out of nowhere and you think:

Where the f*ck did that come from?

They don’t know either, by the way.

Something broke in the relationship a while back – a piece of trust, a feeling of competence, a belief that the person sitting opposite them cared. And rather than talk about it, they swallowed it.

Then another thing happened. And another. And today’s agenda item becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

This is exactly why my three-legged stool model of trust resonates with so many teams. It’s simple – deliberately so – because simple is memorable when tempers flare.

Trust = character + care + competence.

And a three-legged stool isn’t forgiving. Take away one leg and it doesn’t wobble – it goes straight over.

That’s what happens in teams. Lose trust in someone’s character, or their care, or their competence, and the whole thing collapses instantly. The relationship doesn’t decline gradually. It fails in a moment.

Unless you talk about it, that break stays hidden and bleeds into everything else until it shows up later in a completely different argument.

Most leaders don’t notice when the damage happens. There’s no dramatic moment. No big betrayal. Just a slow erosion until one day the person opposite you reacts like you’ve walked into their house on Christmas day and pissed in their slippers.

Fixing that requires something many teams simply don’t have: the courage to tell the truth before it’s too late.

Psychological safety isn’t soft – it’s steel

There’s this deeply irritating trend in HR circles where “psychological safety” gets treated like some warm, cuddly thing. A soft blanket of endless niceness. A promise that no one will ever feel discomfort.

Absolute nonsense.

Psychological safety is not about being nice. It’s about being real. It’s the freedom to speak plainly without being punished. It’s the willingness to challenge someone because you want the team to succeed. It’s having the spine to say the hard thing in the room, not in the pub afterwards.

We talked about this today with the exec team on site. I asked them a simple question:

“Would you tell someone they’ve got spinach in their teeth?”

One person said no. Too awkward. Too emotional. Another said yes, but only privately. Someone else said they’d absolutely tell me, whether it’s spinach, BO, bad breath or a zip left down.

It sounds silly, but those micro-examples reveal macro-behaviours. If you can’t say, “Mate, your fly is down,” how on earth are you going to give feedback about poor execution, sloppy thinking, missed targets, or behaviours that undermine the whole organisation?

This is where Kim Scott’s Radical Candor comes in (and we’ve had her on the podcast discussing exactly this). Radical Candor is simple: “Care personally, challenge directly.”

It’s not about going in two-footed. It’s a practical way to combine care with blunt honesty so people actually hear you.

The team today embodied this. No fake harmony. No polite avoidance. Proper friction. Proper emotion. Once they’d thrashed it out, they built one of the cleanest, tightest 90-day plans we’ve seen from a first-time offsite.

That’s psychological safety. Courage plus care, not endless calm.

Leaders either model honesty or kill it

If the CEO flinches at tension, the team will lie to them. Maybe not deliberately, but they’ll smooth edges, downplay issues, and keep the real problems quiet because it’s safer that way.

If the CEO welcomes challenge, the team will be braver. They’ll speak up when something’s broken. They’ll disagree in the open. They’ll tell the truth at the moment it matters.

Every single breakthrough I’ve seen in a strategy offsite has happened because the CEO went first. They admitted something. They showed vulnerability. They asked for feedback. They modelled the bravery they wanted from everyone else.

This is why the stop, start, continue exercise is so transformative. It forces specificity. It removes the sugar-coating. It gives everyone a structured way to say, “Here’s what you’re doing that makes us better, and here’s what’s getting in the way.”

Most leaders take this feedback and feel simultaneously relieved and gutted. Relieved to finally hear the truth. Gutted that no one told them sooner.

Some leaders then take it a step further.

They go back to their own teams and share the exact feedback they received from the exec. No filtering. No softening. Just honesty.

“This is what my peers told me. This is what I’m working on. Tell me what you see.”

That’s leadership. Not pretending to be perfect, but committing to get better.

Most conflict isn’t conflict – it’s misalignment

Leaders often treat workplace conflict as an emotional grenade, when in fact most tension is a product of poor preparation. Hard conversations go wrong because leaders turn up half-baked. They’re unclear, emotional, vague, or hoping the person will interpret the message magically via osmosis.

When you prepare properly – clarify the message, ground yourself in facts, choose the right moment, listen deeply before responding – the whole dynamic changes.

Conflict stops feeling like confrontation. It becomes collaboration around a problem you’re both trying to solve.

Handled properly, a difficult conversation becomes the moment when trust deepens rather than breaks. Handled poxorly, it becomes another data point in someone’s head that says, “You don’t get it,” and from there the relationship slowly drifts off course.

If you haven’t read that guide, it’s worth revisiting. It includes the step-by-step process we now teach everywhere from the UK to the Philippines, because it just works.

Words matter more than leaders think

Karin Hurt and David Dye hammered this point home when we had them on the podcast. Their book Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Workplace Conflict isn’t interested in theory. It’s not a mediation textbook. It’s a practical toolset with over 300 real phrases to use in real conversations with real humans who are stressed, confused, or pissed off.

Their core framework – connection, clarity, curiosity, commitment – mirrors what I see every day in exec teams. The moment one of those four fails, conflict escalates. The moment you restore them, conflict drops and progress resumes.

Their global research across 5,000+ people backs up what we see everywhere: conflict is rising, particularly in hybrid workplaces where tone, clarity and context get lost. People haven’t become more difficult – communication has become more fragile.

We’re all typing more and talking less. Misreading more and checking less. Assuming more and clarifying less.

When leaders use better language – clearer, calmer, more curious – relationships strengthen. Meetings get shorter. Decisions get cleaner. Tension reduces. Productivity rises.

Conflict isn’t the enemy. Pretending everything’s fine is.

The moment you build a culture where honesty is normal, where challenge is welcomed, where feedback flows freely up and down the organisation, where leaders model vulnerability, you unlock an entirely different level of performance.

You get teams who speak the truth early. Teams who solve problems before they fester. Teams who tell each other about the metaphorical spinach in their teeth, fight productively, recover quickly, and respect each other enough to argue like adults.

Every CEO wants high performance. Very few create the conditions for it.

But the ones who do? They’re the category leaders. The market shapers. The ones whose competitors quietly study them and wonder how they always move faster, align quicker, execute cleaner.

The answer isn’t magic. It’s honesty. Honesty before conflict. Honesty before resentment. Honesty before things break.

Because in the end, it’s not conflict that destroys companies. It’s the things that no-one dares say.

---

Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. You can order your free copy of his new book, Mind Your F**king Business here.