Imagine somebody you like comes to you and says, “Hey, I’m looking for a job right now, and I noticed there’s an opening in your organization. Should I apply? What do you think? I’m really qualified for it.”
What would you say?
If you hesitated just now—if you thought “Well, you know, it’s not bad” or even “Maybe don’t bother”—that tells you something important. And chances are, it’s not about the money. The person knows what the company pays, understands the market rate. That stuff’s pretty much taken care of. They’re asking you for a feel for what it’s actually like working there.
If your answer comes back with some equivocation, that’s a symbol of something: the experience of working in your organization is not pleasant at best, or toxic at worst. And more often than not, the culprit isn’t strategy or structure or compensation. It’s the cost of avoiding difficult conversations.
The Real Source of Toxicity
Probably the number one cause of toxicity—or at least one of the top two—is management’s unwillingness to deal with difficult or uncomfortable conversations.
If somebody in your organization is causing a poisoned atmosphere, it’s not up to their peers to fix that. The blame lies squarely at the feet of the manager who’s unwilling to sit that person down and address it. Maybe it isn’t even toxicity. Maybe there’s someone who’s underperforming and their underperformance impacts everybody else because the team has to pick up the slack. The boss is unwilling to deal with it. Not willing to coach the person up.
These are just a couple of places where an unwillingness—a cowardice, really—on the part of a manager to just sit down and have a conversation with somebody who needs it has a direct cost to the team and to the organization.
Not to mention that if a person is underperforming, chances are they might know it and might be frustrated and not understand why. I often say: “If I’m just as dumb after a year of working for you as I was at the beginning, then that’s on you.”
One of our responsibilities as leaders is to help the people who work for us develop and get better at the work we’re giving them. If they don’t, more often than not, that’s because we didn’t work hard to help them grow.
What You’re Actually Paying For
The costs of avoiding difficult conversations aren’t abstract. They include:
- Creating a toxic atmosphere where good people leave and difficult people stay
- Developing a working environment where motivation dies (because there’s no incentive to work harder if the person slacking off never gets reprimanded)
- Fostering resentment among high performers who watch underperformance go unaddressed
- Driving turnover and all manner of difficulties for the organization
The problem is, these costs are hidden for the most part. You don’t see a line item in the budget for “manager’s unwillingness to have hard conversations.” But you do see it in your attrition numbers, in your engagement scores, in the quiet exodus of your best people.
The Skill You Can’t Avoid
One of the skills we have to learn as leaders and people managers is how to actually have a challenging conversation. To be willing and courageous enough to take the bull by the horns and really have the conversation that needs to be had, regardless of how embarrassing or emotional it might be for us.
And let’s be clear: you’re not being kind to people by avoiding these conversations. You’re being kind to yourself. You’re protecting your own comfort at the expense of the person who needs feedback, the team that’s suffering, and the organization that’s paying the price.
Anyone who’s managed people for more than a month knows that feeling—the knot in your stomach before you have to tell someone their work isn’t meeting expectations. The dread of addressing a behavior that’s affecting the team. The temptation to just… let it slide this time.
But here’s what happens when you let it slide: the problem doesn’t go away. It compounds. The person doesn’t improve. The team’s resentment grows. And six months later, you’re having a much harder conversation about why someone’s being performance-managed out, when you could have coached them up back when it still mattered.
The real cost of avoiding difficult conversations isn’t just what it does to your team. It’s what it does to your credibility as a leader. Because your team sees it. They see who you’re willing to hold accountable and who gets a pass. They see what behavior you’ll tolerate. And they draw conclusions about what you actually value.
So the next time someone asks you if they should apply to work in your organization, what do you want your answer to be?
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