What if I told you that this quarter, you could reduce overhead by 20%?

Interested?

What if that reduction also brought lower employee turnover, fewer customer complaints, and decreased workers’ comp claims?

And what if, without doing anything else, you’d likely experience a lift in revenue?

What could all of that mean for your bottom line—or your peace of mind?

Curious?

Keep reading: Learn why leaders must relate to conflict productively. And why they need to teach their teams to do the same.

Leaders Need to Learn to Engage Conflict

If you’re a leader, you’re responsible for outcomes—and for the culture that produces those outcomes.

How you personally relate to conflict—and how the culture you create handles it—has a direct, measurable impact on company performance.

Conflict competency isn’t optional.

You should view it as a skill as essential as reading your financial statements.

Because if your culture handles conflict poorly, it’s extracting a high cost —even if those costs are rarely given lines in your P&L.

Leaders who practice avoiding conflict pay a hidden tax in trust and speed.

The Hidden Cost of Unskilled Conflict

Most research suggests the average manager spends 20% of their time addressing conflict—staff issues, management tension, customer complaints, vendor disputes.

That’s 20% of their payroll.

That doesn’t include:

• Other employee’s time
• The cost of poor decisions
• Lost deals
• Rehiring and onboarding
• Mistakes from new or untrained staff
• Delayed projects
• Increased workers comp claims and premiums
• Legal exposure
• Workplace sabotage

But all of those happen. And research consistently ties those outcomes (they are outcomes) to how you and your team relate to conflict.

In tight markets, avoiding conflict often masquerades as kindness but quietly erodes performance.

Conflict Is an Opportunity—If You Know What You’re Looking At

Ken Sande puts it well: Conflict happens when two or more people disagree over something important to them.

That last part matters: something important.

That means:

• I might not even be fully aware of what’s important to me.
• I almost certainly don’t know what’s important to them.

But once we start surfacing what actually matters—beneath the surface—we can begin to relate to conflict productively.

Most of the time, what matters fits into one of three buckets:

• Significance – We want to feel valued
• Security – We want to feel safe
• Satisfaction – We want to feel happy

Because people only have conflicts over things that matter, you have their attention. We can to begin to address deeper issues – if we learn to unconcover what really matters to them.

This is your opening.

For founders, avoiding conflict usually stalls needed role clarity and accountability.

The Four Opportunities of Conflict

Conflict shows up in four areas. Sometimes it only shows up in a couple. Often it shows up in all. If you address it well, each becomes a growth point:

1. Personal

Conflict helps us see ourselves.

Do I tend to avoid it? Deny it? Attack? Mollify?

Or do I practice my ability to respond more effectively?

Humans learn best thorugh either repitition or intense emotional experiences. Either anchors the lesson into our brians. Conflict tends to be both – it keeps happening and it creates some strong ‘feels.’

It’s a perfect learning environment.

So every time I’m faced with a conflict and I choose to enter it with respect, to listen more deeply, to ask a better question, I grow.

In executive teams, avoiding conflict turns strategy debates into hallway politics.

2. Relational

Conflict threatens trust.
Most people haven’t had good experiences with it. So when conflict occurs, their fight, freeze or flight responses kick in.

But as a leader, if you can stay grounded in conflict, choose to listen well, and seek mutual benefit. If you do, there is a high change that ‘the other side’ will be exposed to a differet approach to conflict then they’ve ever experienced before.

That builds trust.

And because misunderstandings and differing priorities will always happen – the next time there is a conflict – they will remember you treated them well last time. Their emotions don’t spike as high. It’s easier to talk.

Conflict starts feeling less like combat and more like conversation.

When growth slows, avoiding conflict frequently shows up as delayed hiring or fuzzy standards.

3. Systemic or Structural

Chronic conflict often reveals broken systems. My experience is that, maybe, 70% of organizational conflict stems from structure or culture (below), not personalities.

The symptoms of broken (or ambiguous) systems and poor culture show up in relational dynamics. But those aren’t the source of the problem, most of the time.

Think traffic engineers.

They design roads to be safe and navigable for everyone—including all the awful, distracted drivers.

They use lighting, lines, signage, and design to reduce accidents. They don’t count on every driver being skilled. They rely on structure.

Work place examples:

• Confusion about who is responsible for what? Clarify roles and responsibilities.
• Sales hires don’t fit the culture? Rework hiring or onboarding.
• Decisions get made and forgotten? Build accountability into your meeting cadence.

Recurring conflict is often solved by improving (or installing) basic systems and structures.

Across departments, avoiding conflict multiplies decision cycles and drags execution.

4. Cultural

Culture is how your team makes decisions and behaves.

You already have a culture. The question is:

• Is it the one you want?
• Do you know how to attract and onboard people aligned to it?
• Do you protect and reinforce it?

A strong, healthy culture is like an immune system. Conflicts happen less. And when they do, the system self-heals.

But strong cultures don’t emerge—or survive—by accident.

You might be a kind, generous leader. But if your culture avoids conflict, tolerates unclear roles, or doesn’t address poor performance—it’s costly.

Or maybe you run a high-performance, high-pressure team. But if the only thing that matters is performance, and hierarchy is rigid—same problem. And you aren’t performing as well as you think.

Just like with systems, recurring conflict is usually a sign your culture needs a tune-up.

In hiring and onboarding, avoiding conflict lets poor fits persist far too long.

To Avoid Conflict Is to Abdicate Leadership

Most leaders wait too long.

They hope it resolves itself. Or they try to smooth things over and keep the peace.
Or they make themselves ‘big’ and try to dominate and control.

These feel like they work. But they don’t work well and they are expensive. Leaders shouldn’t make habits out of doing expensive things that don’t work well.

Avoiding conflict is a leadership failure because:

• It lets discomfort—not what’s best—drive decisions
• It leaves vulnerable people unprotected
• It assumes your team knows how to handle conflict (they don’t)
• It wastes a key opportunity to lead real change
• It’s expensive

In client work, avoiding conflict trades short-term comfort for long-term churn.

Your Next Move

When conflict arises, don’t just look at the people involved.
Ask yourself:

What’s this revealing about me?

How can this relationship be improved?

What does this say about how we function?

What systems—or cultural norms—are feeding it?

If it’s managed well, it creates movement in four areas:

In safety-sensitive roles, avoiding conflict increases risk while masking root causes.

Want Help?

I’ve created a free tool: The Four Opportunities of Conflict Diagnostic.
Download it. Use it. Share it.

Want to go deeper?
Get a copy of Conflict and Leadership. It’s the only book that looks at workplace conflict through a truly holistic lens—personal, relational, systemic, and cultural.

When coaching leaders, I’ve seen avoiding conflict block otherwise simple fixes.

Call to Action

Pick one area where you’re currently avoiding conflict—personally, relationally, structurally, or culturally.

• What is one question you need to ask?
• What is one change you need to make?

If you’re serious about leading well, you need to get good at conflict.

Contact me if you’d like help.

Take good care,

Christian