Most leaders don’t avoid tough conversations because they lack courage. They avoid them because they don’t feel equipped to handle them.
Since my last carousel exploded on LinkedIn, I’ve read the comments, messages, and DMs… and a clear pattern is emerging. I’ve sent our countless one-page manager’s guides and am now developing a full-on Feedback Guide for Leaders.
Add your information in the contact us section if you want a copy when it’s ready.
Here are the 5 real reasons leaders avoid behavioural feedback:
1️⃣ Fear of the reaction “What if they get emotional, upset, angry, or shut down?”
2️⃣ Fear of getting it wrong “I don’t want to make it worse.”
3️⃣ Not having a clear model or structure When you don’t know how to have the conversation, you avoid it.
4️⃣ Mixed cultural signals Leaders say: “Challenge people.” Teams feel: “Don’t rock the boat.”
5️⃣ Past experience One messy conversation years ago is enough to create hesitation now.
Here’s the truth:
Avoidance doesn’t protect relationships. It erodes performance, trust and engagement.
To help leaders and managers take that difficult first step and get the conversation started, we’ve created a cheat sheet with 7 ways to open the conversation. We share it with them in workshops to add to their toolkit.
Coaching can be one of the most rewarding conversations you ever have with someone — even when it starts with a call out of the blue asking for help.
One of the toughest things leaders face is giving behavioural feedback to someone who has fallen short of the standard. And often, you’re only giving it because everyone else has ducked the job.
Not because they don’t care — but because they don’t have the skills, the confidence, or the nerve to handle whatever reaction comes back.
I get it. I’m usually the one people call when the conversation feels too big or too risky. I know what it’s like to deliver the message others are scared to give… and I know what it’s like to take someone who reacts badly and help them become a high-performing leader.
So when an HR Director rang to sense-check how they should tackle a difficult team leader — someone creating pressure, fear, and a steady stream of people eyeing the exit — I was happy to help.
No one should feel like that at work.
Here’s what I shared with them.
1. People deserve feedback — even the uncomfortable kind.
Don’t dance around it.
Tell them upfront you have feedback they’re not going to like. That honesty is kinder than ten minutes of waffle.
2. Use “What, So What, Now What” — simple and effective.
WHAT: Stick to specifics and facts, not judgments.
Then invite their view. Expect denial, justification, or “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
If no one has ever challenged them before, of course, they think it’s OK.
You promote what you permit.
SO WHAT: Explain the impact. Poor behaviour doesn’t stay contained — it drives disengagement, withdrawal, and anonymous resignations. Someone else inherits the mess, and the cycle continues.
NOW WHAT: Agree on what needs to change and what happens if it doesn’t.
A few weeks later, I checked in. The HR Director said the conversation didn’t feel great, but it was absolutely necessary.
And here’s the twist: the team leader was under huge pressure and didn’t realise the effect they were having. They’d operated like this for years because no one had ever stopped them.
Top performers often get a free pass because leaders fear losing their output.
We create stories that justify our inaction.
Yes, there were mitigating factors — but never excuses.
Feedback opened the door for this person to ask for support, seek help, and commit to changing.
And here’s the important bit:
A single conversation doesn’t transform ingrained habits. Especially ones we’ve allowed to calcify through silence.
But it does create a catalyst.
If you want that change to stick:
• Support them consistently
• Reset expectations with the team
• Give the team permission to hold their leader to account
• Ensure the leader has an outlet — a safe space to vent and process pressure
Because isolation makes pressure heavy. And pressure makes behaviour worse.
Real leadership isn’t avoiding the hard message.
It’s delivering it with honesty, clarity, and humanity — and sticking around to help someone become who they want to be.
The ability for anyone to keep going in stressful times – that pool of energy that we have inside us that helps us to cope – has several names.
We might call it grit, resilience or hardiness, and it has been investigated by psychologists looking to understand why some people can cope better than others.
One of the most surprising things is that this capability is not fixed: it is something we learn and can be built up. Think of it like a large tank, like a water cooler or coffee urn. As things happen, we open the tap, and some of our resilience drains away, enabling us to cope with ebbs and flows of life. With practice and experience, we can learn to quickly fill up our tank, and even upgrade the tank size, making ourselves more resilient.
Research in the early 80s into hardiness identified the traits that help us top up the tank. Salvatore Maddi and Deborah Khoshaba identified three underlying beliefs or attributes that come together to create the pool of coping behaviours required. They called them the three Cs:
Commitment – This is all about being aligned to a purpose, having a belief in what you are doing
Control – a belief that you can influence your surroundings, make a difference to how events transpire
Challenge – that the struggles and pressures allow you to grow. This is as much from the bad things that happen as the good.
Increasing focus
This is where I think the problem lies. If you look at how leaders manage through times of change or when the ‘chips are down’, they become laser-like in their focus on what they want and how they can get it. That is normal. It is actually what negative emotions like fear and worry are designed to do: they reduce attention and focus it on the problem at hand. Really useful when the problem was getting away from something that might eat you!
However, in modern working life, this focus can cause them to do three things:
They focus on the ‘what’. What needs to be done, what they want, what they want others to do. This focus on the ‘what’ drowns out the ‘why’, removing the connections that help people maintain or rebuild purpose through the difficult times.
They take control. It is just easier for everyone concerned if a small group make all the key decisions; everything will get done faster. This is inevitable and probably the right thing to do for some key decisions, but it is never true for all decisions.
They only focus on the next problem. The conversation goes from one problem to the next, without ever taking stock of what has been done so far. It starts to feel like that whatever is done will not be good enough, no learning, no gratitude.
Building resilience
So, if you want to be a leader that builds resilience and not be a walking cause of stress then think about how you might be able to consistently stimulate the three Cs.
Connecting people to the ‘why’. Partly this is about starting every ‘what’ conversation with reminders of the ‘why’. However, to be successful at this you will have to help people make the connections between their role and the higher purpose of the team or organisation. Some people do this naturally for themselves, but you should not leave it to chance.
Create opportunities for people to take back some control. You don’t need to make all the decisions, so focus on the ones you need to make and give up the rest. If you need to, create choices for people so that they have a sense that they have a say in how this affects them, even if that means they get there in a less efficient way.
Stop and reflect. Remind the people around you how far you have come so far, and what that says about their skills and abilities. This might be building in time for formalised structured reviews, but it can be as easy as asking a question that creates a moment of reflection. Reminding people to think about their growth and learning will help them to build their resilience.
Just in case you think that the people around you just need to ‘man up’, then a word of caution. If you allow their resilience to drain away, they will burn out. This means that you need to pick up more of the responsibility, so you may be putting your own wellbeing on the line as well – unless you are lucky enough to have someone helping you recharge.
When senior managers drive change, they can get stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, they may not be able to share certain, sensitive information. But if they don’t give their workforce enough details about what’s happening, people will become dissatisfied, suspicious and unproductive.
In this podcast, Rob and Ricky discuss how and why this happens, and the impact that a growing perception that senior managers are keeping secrets can have on an organisation.
In the absence of any clarity or information about change in the workplace, people start to fill in the blanks. Sometimes, it’s with information that may be true – but more often than not, it’s massively assumptive and untrue.
There are many reasons why senior managers do not share information with their people. Some information is confidential or sensitive, or may be withheld because of the perceived reaction it would cause. Sometimes, managers are trying to protect their people.
During times of change, there will be people who embrace it and are proactive about asking questions. They’re a breeze to manage. But there will be others who start to fill in the blanks and – worse still – go recruiting others who are easily influenced by their opinions. Why do they do it? Because they are looking for meaning and certainty when they have a lack of information. They want that classic ‘comfort blanket’. This links to our previous podcast about why people look for evidence that supports their point of view.
Everyone is making assumptions: Employees are filling in gaps with information they don’t know to be true, and managers are deciding what information they think is relevant to their people.
So how does this impact the workforce? Effects can range from falling engagement levels and rising dissatisfaction to people asking difficult questions and spreading false information. Some employees will cause a fuss while others may withdraw into themselves. All of this can lead to a drop in productivity and efficiency.
What can senior managers do about it? It’s crucial to keep people informed and engaged, to tell them what’s going on and why. And involve people in the journey, especially the most cynical or critical ones!
