Avoiding Conflict at Work: the Costliest Strategy of All

It is not true that people do not know how to handle conflict. They handle it constantly, and the method they use most often is the most effective one in the short term: saying nothing.

What that method costs is never evaluated, for a simple reason: the benefit lands the same day — the meeting does not go off the rails, the relationship holds, the day ends — while the bill arrives four months later under a different name. Nobody attributes it to the avoidance. They attribute it to the other person.

Avoidance is a strategy, not a weakness

The model developed by Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann describes five ways of approaching a disagreement, positioned on two axes: how far you defend your own interests, and how far you take the other party's into account. Competing defends yours and not theirs; accommodating does the opposite; compromising splits the difference; collaborating seeks to satisfy both; avoiding does neither — it withdraws the question.

That last mode has a bad reputation, wrongly. None of the five is good or bad in itself: each suits certain configurations and is costly in the others. A professional who never avoided anything would be exhausting and exhausted.

So the problem is not avoidance. It is unchosen avoidance: the kind used because it is the most comfortable option in the moment, without ever asking whether it fits the situation. The difference between the two shows up in a single question: if someone asked why you never raised it, would you have a reason, or a feeling?

What avoidance genuinely saves

We have to be honest on this point, or nothing that follows holds. Avoidance provides three things, and they are real.

Energy. A conflict conversation has to be prepared, is dreaded, and leaves you drained. Dropping it frees up time and mental load in the short term. Protection for the relationship. Many working relationships are more fragile than they look, and a badly handled conversation damages them lastingly. Not having it preserves a working arrangement, imperfect though it may be. Protection against losing. This is the least admitted and most decisive benefit. As long as the subject is not on the table, you have not lost. A great many avoidances are, at bottom, refusals to risk an explicit "no".

The five costs, within a few months

1. The disagreement changes nature

This is the main cost, and it is mechanical. A disagreement about the work or about the organisation, left unanswered, migrates into the relationship within a few weeks: from bumping into each other repeatedly without anything being articulated, each party ends up attributing an intention to the other.

And the different natures of conflict do not cost the same to treat. What could have been settled in twenty minutes by clarifying scope will, once it has become relational, require a third party and several sessions. Avoidance does not defer the bill: it multiplies it.

2. Accumulation makes the exit disproportionate

An avoided incident stays available. Two do as well. By the twelfth, the outburst is no longer about the twelfth: it is about all twelve at once, with an intensity the last one does not justify.

This is the mechanism most visible from the outside, and the most unfair to the person living it: they held out for a long time, and what people remember of them is the final scene. The person opposite has only experienced the twelfth — from their point of view the reaction is disproportionate, and they are not wrong given what they know.

3. The loss of standing to make demands

Saying nothing is endorsing. Not morally: practically. A requirement that has never been stated does not exist for the other person, and stating it late arrives in a context where the opposite practice has long been established.

Hence the sentence everyone has heard: "it never bothered you before". It is irritating, and it is accurate.

4. The quiet expansion of what has been conceded

Avoidance is not stable. An undiscussed exception becomes a norm, a norm becomes an expectation, an expectation becomes an implicit obligation — and the ground conceded expands without anyone having decided anything.

The phenomenon is very visible in out-of-scope requests: the first favour accepted without comment is a service; the twentieth is part of the job, and questioning it will be received as a withdrawal.

5. The rumination

This is the cost avoidance was supposed to prevent, and it produces it. The conversation that never happened is replayed — on the commute, in the evening, on Sunday. It takes up more mental time than the real conversation would have taken, and it produces an enriched and often harsher version than what would actually have been said.

A useful marker: if a subject comes back to you more than three times outside work, the energy saving did not happen. It merely changed form.

The four situations where avoiding is the right choice

1. The stakes are low and non-recurring

A one-off irritation, on a subject that will not come round again, with someone you rarely cross paths with. Here the cost of the conversation exceeds the cost of silence, and there is no shame in choosing not to have it. The criterion is recurrence: what repeats is never a low-stakes matter, even if each individual occurrence is.

2. The window is bad

A disagreement does not have to be handled the same day. A period of exceptional workload, a deadline five days out, a personal event in the other person's life: postponing is legitimate.

On one condition, and it makes all the difference: the postponement is dated. "I'll raise it after the delivery on the 15th" is a decision. "I'll see about it later" is avoidance that has just been dressed up.

3. The power imbalance makes the conversation inoperative

There are configurations in which raising a disagreement can produce no possible effect and exposes the person raising it. Recognising that is not cowardice: it is an assessment.

But avoidance is not then the only action available, and that is the point that matters. You can give up the direct conversation and, at the same time, record the facts: the dates, the requests, the replies, the effects on the work. That material is not there to confront anyone today; it is there so that in six months you do not depend on a memory that will have erased three quarters of it. That is exactly what ScanMyJob is for — and the team conflict case given as an example shows what thirteen weeks of exchanges reveal when you look at them in sequence rather than from memory.

4. You are leaving

If your departure is decided and imminent, opening a conflict that will require three months of follow-up yields nothing. It is the only case in which avoidance has no deferred cost, since there is no longer any deferral.

Two caveats. The departure must be genuinely decided, not merely hoped for — "I'm leaving soon" is one of the phrases that keep situations going for years. And if what is happening affects other people who are staying, the question is no longer only yours.

The criterion that separates the two

In the four situations above, avoidance shares a property that avoidance you merely suffer never has: it is dated and reviewable. There is a reason you can state, a deadline or a condition for reopening, and the person could tell someone why they chose not to speak.

Suffered avoidance has neither date nor reason. It has a feeling — I don't feel up to saying it, it isn't the right moment, it'll settle down — and it goes on indefinitely because nothing has been set up to bring it to an end.

Getting out of an established avoidance

Three things help, in this order.

Pick the subject up by its smallest end, not by the whole ledger. After six months of silence, the temptation is to lay it all out at once. That is the surest way to derail the conversation. Better to take the latest episode alone, dated, with no reference to the history: "Yesterday the request came in at 6 p.m. for the next morning. I'd like us to look at how we organise that." Accept the remark about the past. "You never said anything" will come, and it is well founded. The answer fits in one sentence, with no justification: "That's true. I should have said it earlier, I'm saying it now." It closes the subject in three seconds; defending yourself opens it for twenty minutes. Expect nothing retroactive. A long avoidance cannot be made up for: the past months are past. What can change starts today, and that is already the essential part.

To locate your own default mode in the face of disagreement — and what it makes you pay depending on the situation — the tests on the platform help you take stock. The assistant can help you word the reopening of a subject after a long period of silence.

Three things this article does not do

It does not say you should say everything. A professional who raised every disagreement would be unbearable, for others and for themselves. The point is about choosing, not about speaking. It describes no one. Avoidance is a mode of response, not a character trait, and the same person uses it differently depending on the counterpart and the period. It does not deal with situations that go beyond conflict. When what is happening involves health or falls under another regime, the trade-off between speaking and staying silent is no longer a matter of relational strategy: it is taken to the occupational physician, to an employee representative, or to a lawyer.