Article 3: What if avoiding the conversation is the rational thing to do?

We tend to talk about avoidance at work as though it is something that needs correcting. People avoid giving feedback because they are uncomfortable with conflict. Managers delay performance conversations because they lack confidence. Employees do not raise concerns because they need to become more assertive. Someone puts off telling their manager about a health condition because they are anxious about having a difficult conversation.

There can, of course, be truth in all of those explanations. Sometimes we do avoid things because they make us uncomfortable, and sometimes developing confidence or communication skills genuinely helps. But my research into difficult workplace conversations has made me increasingly uncomfortable with the assumption that avoidance necessarily represents some kind of individual deficit.

Because sometimes, when you look at the situation from the perspective of the person making the decision, avoiding the conversation makes complete sense.

We rarely ask what the conversation might cost

Imagine you have a problem with your manager. Perhaps their behaviour is affecting your wellbeing, you disagree strongly with a decision they have made, or you feel you are being treated unfairly. You know that ideally you should talk to them about it, and most workplace advice would probably tell you to do exactly that. Prepare what you want to say, choose an appropriate moment, stay calm, focus on the issue rather than the person and have an open and constructive conversation.

All perfectly reasonable advice.

Except your manager also controls your workload, development opportunities, performance assessment and perhaps your future progression. You have seen them respond defensively to criticism before. You know a colleague raised a similar concern and very little changed. You are not convinced there is anybody else you can go to if the conversation goes badly.

Suddenly, "just have the conversation" looks rather different.

The decision is no longer simply between speaking and avoiding. It involves weighing what might be gained by raising the issue against what could potentially be lost. The outcome is uncertain, the relationship matters and the distribution of power is unequal. Avoiding the conversation may not be ideal, but from the individual's position it may be entirely understandable.

That is a distinction I think we need to take much more seriously.

Avoidance is often framed as an individual problem

There is an enormous amount of workplace advice focused on helping people become more comfortable with difficult conversations. We teach feedback models, conflict management, assertiveness, emotional intelligence and communication techniques. We coach people to challenge more effectively and encourage leaders to tackle issues earlier rather than allowing them to escalate.

Much of this is useful. I am an occupational psychologist, so I am hardly going to argue that developing people's skills and confidence has no value.

The problem comes when those interventions quietly imply that the conversation would happen if only the individual were better equipped to have it.

That explanation places responsibility predominantly with the person who is hesitating. It encourages us to ask what they are lacking rather than what they are responding to. We become interested in their confidence, communication ability, resilience or willingness to tolerate discomfort, while paying considerably less attention to whether the environment around them makes the proposed behaviour sensible.

This matters because capability and willingness are not the same thing. Someone can know how to have a conversation and still decide not to have it. They can possess excellent communication skills, understand exactly what needs to be said and have rehearsed it repeatedly, yet remain unconvinced that speaking is worth the potential consequences.

At that point, another communication workshop may be addressing entirely the wrong problem.

People are constantly assessing risk

One of the clearest things I have taken from studying difficult conversations is how much happens before anybody speaks. People do not simply encounter an issue and then choose between "have the conversation" and "avoid the conversation". There can be an extended period of appraisal in which they consider the person involved, the nature of the relationship, what the conversation concerns, how the other person might respond and what could happen afterwards.

Those judgements become particularly important when the subject is personal. Asking for a pay rise is one kind of risk. Telling your employer that you are struggling with your mental health, disclosing a disability, discussing something about your identity, saying that a colleague's behaviour has made you uncomfortable, or explaining that you are no longer coping carries a different kind of exposure.

In those situations, the person is not simply communicating information. They may be making themselves vulnerable to judgement, misunderstanding or a change in how they are perceived. Once something personal has been disclosed, it cannot easily be undisclosed. The individual therefore has good reason to think carefully about who receives that information, what they might do with it and whether the environment feels sufficiently trustworthy.

We sometimes describe this hesitation as reluctance to be vulnerable. I think that can underestimate what people are actually doing. Vulnerability does not occur in a vacuum. People make judgements about where, when and with whom it feels possible.

Psychological safety does not remove consequences

This is also where I think we need to be careful with the way psychological safety is sometimes discussed in organisations. It has become a very popular concept, and rightly so, but there is a danger of turning it into another expectation placed on employees: we have created a psychologically safe culture, therefore you should feel comfortable speaking.

People may still have very good reasons to be cautious.

A team can be broadly supportive while an individual conversation remains risky. A manager can genuinely care about their employees while still having formal authority over them. An organisation can encourage disclosure while being unable to guarantee that disclosure will have no consequences. A workplace can value challenge while certain challenges remain more acceptable than others.

Feeling safe enough to speak does not require believing that nothing uncomfortable will happen. Difficult conversations are, by definition, often uncomfortable. What matters is whether the individual believes the possible consequences are proportionate, manageable and unlikely to threaten something they cannot afford to lose.

That judgement will not be identical for everybody because people do not enter workplace conversations with equal power, security or vulnerability.

Sometimes the stakes really are different

This is why generic advice about courage can become particularly problematic.

Telling someone to "speak truth to power" sounds admirable when we focus on the act of speaking. It sounds rather different when we consider who carries the consequences afterwards. A senior employee with organisational status, financial security and strong professional networks may be able to challenge a decision with relatively limited personal risk. Someone in a precarious role, early in their career, dependent on a particular manager or already feeling marginalised may make a very different calculation.

The same applies to personal disclosure. "Bring your whole self to work" sounds positive until we consider that some parts of ourselves are more socially and professionally risky to reveal than others. Telling colleagues about a weekend hobby is not equivalent to disclosing a stigmatised health condition, asking for disability-related adjustments or discussing an aspect of identity that has previously exposed someone to discrimination.

If we ignore those differences, we risk celebrating speaking as courage while quietly requiring the person with the least power to carry most of the risk.

That does not feel particularly psychologically informed to me.

Avoidance can protect something important

None of this means avoidance is always helpful. Avoided conversations can become heavier over time. Problems can escalate, resentment can build and relationships can deteriorate. Important concerns may never reach the people who need to hear them. In some circumstances, silence can allow genuinely harmful behaviour to continue.

But recognising those consequences does not require us to label the original decision irrational.

Sometimes people avoid conversations because they are protecting something: a relationship, their privacy, their reputation, their employment, their emotional energy or simply themselves. Sometimes they decide that the likely benefit of speaking does not outweigh the anticipated cost. Sometimes they are waiting for better conditions, more information or additional support. Sometimes they have tried speaking before and learned that it changes very little.

Understanding avoidance in this way does not mean endorsing it. It means becoming interested in what the behaviour is telling us.

If somebody repeatedly recognises that an important conversation needs to happen but cannot bring themselves to initiate it, the useful question may not be "How do we make this person have the conversation?" It may be "What is making this conversation feel too costly to have?"

Those lead to very different interventions.

Training cannot solve an unsafe environment

If the barrier really is capability, training makes sense. Someone who struggles to structure feedback, regulate their emotions during conflict or communicate clearly may benefit enormously from developing those skills.

But if the barrier is that their manager retaliates when challenged, communication training will not fix it.

If employees have repeatedly raised concerns without seeing action, another workshop on speaking up is unlikely to restore trust. If someone believes disclosing a health condition will alter how their competence is perceived, teaching them a better disclosure script does not address the stereotype they are anticipating. If a team has learned that disagreement is welcomed only until it becomes genuinely uncomfortable, encouraging more constructive challenge without addressing leadership behaviour misses the point.

We need to become much better at diagnosing the reason behind avoidance before deciding how to intervene.

Sometimes the individual needs support to act. Sometimes the relationship needs attention. Sometimes leadership behaviour needs to change. Sometimes organisational processes make speaking unnecessarily risky. Sometimes the culture itself is teaching people that avoidance is the safest available strategy.

Treating all of those as communication problems is unlikely to get us very far.

What is the avoidance telling us?

Perhaps this is the shift I find most useful. Rather than immediately treating avoidance as the problem, we can treat it as information.

If someone has something important to say and repeatedly decides not to say it, what is shaping that decision? What are they anticipating? What have they experienced previously? What do they believe could happen? What might they lose? What would need to change for the conversation to feel possible?

Those questions do not remove individual responsibility. There will still be times when people need to tolerate discomfort, take interpersonal risks and say things that are difficult. Workplaces cannot make every conversation completely safe or guarantee that every interaction will end well.

But neither should we pretend that every act of avoidance can be solved by asking the person to become braver.

Sometimes the hesitation itself is telling us something important about the relationship, the leader or the organisation surrounding it.

And perhaps, before we teach someone how to have the difficult conversation, we should be willing to ask whether we have given them enough reason to believe that having it is actually a sensible thing to do.