Every leader can name it. There is a particular conversation they have been meaning to have for somewhere between three weeks and two years, and they could tell you exactly who it is with.
The reasons for not having it yet are usually good. The timing has been poor, the person has had a difficult stretch, the matter might resolve on its own, and there has been nothing to hang it on.
Delay is not neutral
The assumption underneath the waiting is that the situation stays where it is. It does not, and it deteriorates in four specific directions.
The behaviour becomes the standard. Every week it goes unaddressed is a week in which the organization observes that it is permitted. Eventually correcting it requires explaining why something tolerated for eight months is suddenly a problem, which is a considerably harder conversation than the original one.
Other people absorb the cost. This is the part leaders systematically underweight. Somebody is working around the problem, covering for it, or losing time to it. They have noticed that nothing is being done, and what they conclude is either that leadership cannot see it or does not care to act. Neither reading is good.
Your own account hardens. Held for months, a small operational matter accumulates into a case. By the time it is raised, the leader arrives with a list rather than a point, and the person on the other end receives what feels like an ambush about something they had no idea was serious.
The person loses time they were entitled to. Somebody who does not know their performance is in question cannot address it. Every month of silence is a month they spent not fixing something fixable, and if it eventually ends their employment, that silence is the part that was genuinely unfair.
The reason is rarely the stated one
Timing is the most common explanation and it almost never survives examination.
The honest reasons are narrower. You do not want to be disliked by this specific person. You are not certain you are right and would have to defend a position under challenge. You expect an emotional response you are not confident of handling. Or you suspect the conversation ends somewhere you are not prepared to go, which usually means somebody leaving.
Each of those has a different remedy. Uncertainty about the facts is addressed by finding out. Uncertainty about your own conclusion is addressed by talking to somebody outside the situation. Not wanting to be disliked is addressed by accepting that it is part of the job. But none of them are addressed by waiting, which is the response all four produce.
The wrong version arrives eventually
Avoided conversations do not stay avoided. They surface at the worst moment, in the worst form.
It comes out during an argument about something else, where it lands as an accumulated grievance rather than as feedback. Or it appears in a performance review months later, in writing, where the person reads it for the first time in a formal document. Or somebody else raises it, badly, and you are now managing two problems.
The conversation you choose to have is always better than the one that eventually happens to you, and that is true even when you handle the chosen one imperfectly.
Lowering the cost of entry
Much of the difficulty is that the conversation has grown in the leader’s mind into an event requiring preparation, a private room, and forty minutes.
Most of these are four minutes and should happen within a day or two of the thing that prompted them. Raised early and small, the conversation is about a specific instance and carries no weight of judgment. Raised late, the same words carry eight months of accumulated meaning.
Which suggests the practical discipline: reduce the threshold at which you say something, so that nothing has to build up. Leaders who address small things promptly rarely face large ones, and they are frequently described as easy to work for despite being more demanding than their peers.
Where waiting is correct
Two cases, and neither resembles the ordinary avoidance.
When you are angry. Nothing said within an hour of a provocation improves on what you would say the next morning, and the composure entry in this Library covers why.
When you genuinely do not have the facts. Raising a concern built on a partial account, which turns out to have an explanation, costs credibility you will need later.
The test distinguishing these from avoidance is whether you can name what will be different when you do it. Tomorrow morning, or once I have spoken to the site supervisor, are answers. When things settle down is not, because things do not.
The entries that follow deal with how to conduct these once you have decided to: the structure that works, feedback that changes behaviour, receiving it without punishing the person who gave it, saying no, and delivering a decision people will dislike.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD