What to Do When your Leadership Team Avoids Conflict Instead of Resolving It
Overview
Every team experiences workplace conflict–the real problem is when teams and leaders avoid it.
Leadership teams can shift from conflict avoidance to conflict resolution by implementing structures that improve communication, dialogue, and trust.
When approached effectively, workplace conflict can lead to stronger relationships, clearer decision-making, and better business outcomes.
Leaders, how do you and the rest of your leadership team feel about conflict? If your response jumps to negative words such as “stressful”, “frustrating”, “uncomfortable” or “time-waster", conflict is likely being avoided on your team. Conflict-averse leadership is a common thread across workplaces and it's fueled by associating conflict as a negative problem, while lacking the right skills and structures to effectively handle conflict as a leader. Believe it or not, 49%(!) of managers said they lacked effective conflict management skills in this survey.
The result? Leadership teams burying issues to create fake “harmony” rather than learning how to manage and resolve team conflict.
Workplace conflict actually isn’t the real problem—how your leadership team manages (or avoids) the conflict is. Without the right structures in place, even good intentions can escalate rather than resolve conflicts.
Leaders, I want you to start leaning into conflict. When handled well, conflict can be a catalyst for shared understanding, team unity, growth, and innovation.
Let’s go over a few conflict management tactics you can use to shift from conflict avoidance to conflict resolution.
Client Story: From “Throwing Tables” to Real Team Alignment & Cohesion
“Workplace conflict actually isn’t the real problem-how your leadership team manages (or avoids) the conflict is.”
One executive team we worked with bluntly described their team dynamic as “basically throwing tables,” a metaphor for the way their team was experiencing raw, unmanaged conflicts in their inter-team conversations and relationships.
The leadership team came together with us for an intentional two-day off-site retreat where they were able to slow down and truly hear each other thanks to a safe, structured process where they could speak honestly.
Before we started any strategy work we began with an important check-in question we asked each leader to answer: how have these team dynamics affected you personally?
Then the team explored in deep dialogue:
Where assumptions and judgments were forming
Fears and concerns about the future
What support from the team would look like
What started to shift on this highly talented team wasn’t just what was said—but how it was said.
And it led to explicit team commitments to listen to each other more deeply, share information more proactively, ask for more context from each other before making judgements, and show up with greater self-awareness and accountability.
This wasn’t surface-level alignment. It was a reset in how they worked together, and a result of leaders facing rather than avoiding conflict in the workplace.
4 Leadership Tactics to Stop Avoiding Conflict at Work
Unresolved conflict doesn’t just repair itself. Handling conflict well on teams requires intentional structures to increase communication, dialogue and trust – the foundational backbones of conflict resolution. Let’s break down what we mean by “structure” in the guidance below.
1. Create a Safe Container for Conflict Conversations with Structure & Facilitation
Team conflict should first be addressed by developing simple (not easy) structures for any dialogue to take place. Structures include processes, boundaries or communication norms that the team fully owns.
This creates the necessary psychological safety for conflict conversations to happen as the team works together to find a win-win path forward.
If the conflict is big enough, bringing in an outside facilitator is key. Facilitation helps ensure the process is protected and the right questions are being addressed to move the team past their conflict.
2. Improve Communication with the Council Process
Structuring conversations with the council process is a powerful method for navigating conflict in the workplace.
The council process (inspired by Indigenous practices) uses a symbolic object, also called a “talking piece”, that each team member takes turns holding when it is their turn to speak.
Only the team member holding the object can speak, while everyone else must listen. It helps teams slow down conversations, stay focused, and not talk over each other.
When deep listening improves, misunderstanding decreases—and so does unnecessary conflict.
3. Evaluate and Build Trust with a Simple Framework
Trust on teams shows up in three key dimensions: reliability, competence, and benevolence. When these are strong and aligned, teams experience less friction.
One practical way to assess trust on your team is through four simple questions from The Trusted Advisor:
Do I believe what you say is accurate?
Do I trust you’ll do what you say?
Do I trust your discretion?
Do I trust you’ll act with my best interests in mind?
These questions help pinpoint where trust is strong, and where it may be breaking down.
Without the right balance between communication and trust, even well-structured conversations fall short.
As Emily Levada says in her article on the trust-communication trade-off, “If you have a lot of trust between team members, you need relatively little communication. If you have little trust, you need a lot more communication to accomplish the same goal.”
3. Incorporate Dialogue (Not Just Discussion)
Most teams don’t know how to have productive conversations; instead, they default to open discussion when what is really needed is dialogue.
Drawing from Peter Senge’s work, there’s an important distinction:
Discussion is about deciding
Dialogue is about understanding
Dialogue creates a “shared pool of meaning”, which is essential for true alignment on a team.
To practice dialogue, teams should:
Balance advocacy (sharing your perspective) with inquiry (genuinely seeking others’ perspectives)
Suspend assumptions instead of immediately defending them
Treat one another as colleagues, not opponents
Even a short “teaching moment” on dialogue can depersonalize tension and equip teams with practical tools and frameworks they can apply in conflict situations.
Conclusion
Workplace conflict is inevitable for every leadership team, but dysfunction around the conflict doesn’t have to be.
When leaders avoid conflict instead of resolving it, issues compound, trust erodes, and alignment slips, impeding real results and joy at work.
By implementing structures to improve communication, trust, and dialogue tactics, healthy conflict will lead to improvements such as increased clarity, team alignment and better results.
The shift from conflict avoidance to healthy conflict resolution doesn’t happen by chance—it happens by design.
If you need support putting these blog ideas into practice, working with one of our coaches is a great next step.
