“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.” - Dale Carnegie
To say that the implicit message of today’s Corporate approved workplace culture encourages and even values conflict avoidance is to grossly understate a gross understatement.
By enabling social conditions on the job that have more in common with 1692 Salem than MLK’s “I have a Dream” speech, many organizations have inadvertently (I’m optimistically assuming) engineered cultures of palpable mistrust and suspicion not only of the organization, bosses and, of course, HR, but of everyone working with and around them. Employees, incapable of accepting criticism (something they have never experienced before thanks to the warm, perpetually welcoming cocoon of righteousness and self-denial provided upon request by woke-liberalism at all levels of our educational systems, news, politics, locker rooms, families etc.), without the emotional fortitude, coping skills or appetite for meaningful introspection and with childhood insecurities deeper than the Mariana Trench, exercise one of two options, tantrum or avoidance (the modern adaptation of the millennia old instinct for fight or flight) when presented with conflict.
Under these conditions, communication between employees resembles a well-practiced dance executed diligently but without consideration for the tone and timing of the music that’s being played or the movements of one’s partner. The result is an exchange of banal niceties that primarily seek to preserve the manicured façade of harmony, inclusion, and safety while wholly unconcerned by the lack of substance, meaning, reason or progress.
By so drastically redefining the purpose of communication, CA has redefined the very meaning of the word and concept itself. Employees look and sound more like children playing “manager”, “HR”, “CEO”, “factory worker” etc. than they do a group of educated, experienced and paid professionals capable of responding to the VUCA inherent to today’s crushingly competitive global marketplace. This granular governance of every utterance, email, vocal inflection, and facial expression imposed by CA has companies using twice the resources at three times the cost and half the efficiency while returning status quo goods and services and proclaiming success with the same resounding, hollow applause that have accompanied the presentation of participation trophies across the country for the past 20 years. Under these conditions meaningful collaboration cannot be achieved, groups of individuals cannot evolve into teams and the whole can never be greater than the sum of its parts.
When words like “candid”, “conflict “, “competitive”, and “assertive” are considered expletives in the workplace when used to describe a co-worker, organizations cannot feign surprise or deflect blame when those ‘5-percenters’ among us ready and willing to engage in TRW of healthy conflict management simply leave the company. DEI initiatives be damned, CA culture is clear that there is no place in their vision of Utopia for anyone who fits into one or more of these maligned and rapidly diminishing demographics.
For those in this growing majority, retreating to the safety of acquiescent silence in the interest of their reputation, career, income, and general wellness is not an option. Over time this cycle leaves organizations well-staffed with long-tenured, compliant, status quo thinkers and doers laughing and smiling broadly, fist bumping and munching on Doritos as they eagerly take their place on the company bus ready to go along for the ride to .... wherever the bus is going. It is not until the last ROAD (Retired On Active Duty) warrior takes their seat, locks their seatbelt in place, eyes forward in child-like anticipation of the wonders to come, the bus doors close and Tim or Nancy asks, “Who’s got the keys?”. By now we know the answer.
All of this is more than unnecessary, frustrating and disappointing though. There are measurable business and personal consequences associated with conflict avoidance.
In a recent survey, 30% of employees believe that they will be perceived as overly competitive or aggressive if initiating conflict resolution in the workplace. These are not enviable monikers in today’s self-described collaborative, inclusive organizational cultures. Results from the same survey indicate that when experiencing conflict, 56% of employees try to simply restore the peace. That means even when we accidentally stumble into conflict, we quickly realize the error of our ways, excuse ourselves and retreat to the safety and dysfunction found in perpetual tongue-biting and silence. More telling and concerning, research done by Crucial Dimensions indicates 95% of the workforce struggles to speak up to their bosses and co-workers at all. This considered, it’s not surprising that experts estimate 2.8 hours/week/employee and almost $360B/year is lost to our inability to effectively manage (i.e., avoid) conflict in the workplace. The correlation between our inability to effectively engage in conflict and the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees reaching a record low of 1.8 (32%) to 1 (18%) in 2022 is neither incidental nor coincidental.
Could this constant need to avoid conflict at all costs, act and interact in an increasingly constrained, non-confrontational, inauthentic, and conforming ways contribute in any part to 94% of employees reporting stress at work or the 25% of employees reporting that their jobs are the primary source of stress in their lives?
How about the 63% of employees that report that they are ready to quit their jobs at any time due to mental and emotional health issues associated with their employment? Do we think that may be due at all to the fact that they have something to say that they simply cannot for fear of offense being taken or being labeled as a “something” or “someone”-ist?
Does conflict avoidance and the accompanying perceived powerlessness and learned helplessness contribute in any way to the 550 million workdays and more than $1trillion (with a ‘t’) lost each year to work-related stress, depression, and anxiety in the US?
This is where the implications of conflict avoidance go beyond being novel or curious. Conflict avoidance is a measurable and truly key KPI affecting people, processes, progress, culture, morale, engagement, and the bottom line of every company and every employee.