Avoidance Is Human. In a Scale-Up, it’s Expensive.
Many founders have a conversation they are avoiding, or a situation they are hoping will resolve itself. Many don’t even know they are avoiding it. Do any of the following situations sound familiar?
- A senior hire isn’t quite delivering, but you don’t want to address it and demotivate them right now.
- Disagreeing with a co-founder but pushing it aside because you have bigger priorities
- A team member’s workload has become unsustainable but you don’t have other options so you’ll deal with it at another time.
- A customer commitment no longer feels realistic but you don’t want to challenge it and damage the relationship.
- There’s some difficult feedback you could give, but its easier just to correct it or do it yourself.
- You’re so frustrated that by a team member who should know something by now, that you just don’t know how to have the conversation.
This is avoidance, and it isn’t about being careless or weak, its about being busy, under pressure or protecting the relationship. If any of these resonated, you may already be caught in an avoidance cycle.
The Hidden Reward of Avoidance
The thing about avoidance is that it often feels productive in the moment. It preserves relationships, protects confidence and allows you to focus on immediate priorities. Avoidance persists because it’s rewarding. Having a difficult conversation creates discomfort whereas avoiding it provides an immediate relief. This relief is our reward and tells us it was the right thing to do.
But the problem is still there and its costing us like compound interest, getting greater every day the conversation isn’t had. A small conversation missed about expectations becomes a performance issue, a difference of opinion that wasn’t surfaced becomes a conflict, and I argue that the greatest cost is that avoiding the uncomfortable, becomes part of the company culture. It is exactly this culture that becomes one of the biggest barriers to scaling your business successfully. Let me give you three examples we’ve seen in start-ups that demonstrate this.
How Avoidance Shapes Company Culture
Example One: Feedback Avoidance
In the early days of a start-up, a founder compensated for poor performance through sheer effort and filling the gap. As the business grew, these workarounds became unsustainable. It felt hard for the founder to start giving feedback, too awkward after all the time that had passed, so it just didn’t happen. Their senior team were watching how he operated, what he rewarded, challenged, ignored and tolerated and modelled this themselves. Avoiding challenge and feedback became the norm. Mistakes, concerns and risks were hidden because the team learnt that discomfort is something to avoid rather than work through. Standards were unclear and nobody knew if they were doing a good job. The team weren’t learning from each other, standards slipped and improvement opportunities were missed. The nice culture the founder had wanted turned into discontentment and people left.
Example Two: Challenge and uncertainty avoidance
One founder had technical expertise while the other led commercial decisions. The commercial founder didn’t feel qualified to challenge the other’s area of expertise. Without raising questions, assumptions went untested and important decisions didn’t receive enough scrutiny. As the company grew, the rest of the team noticed, challenge was rare and the team stayed silent when they were uncertain. The ripple effect created a culture neither founder had intended to create.
Example Three: Clarity avoidance
A founder noticed that decisions were becoming slower. What used to take a split-second became weeks of back-and-forth conversations and meetings. The team were hesitating and waiting for permission, escalating issues unnecessarily. The founder wanted to create a culture of empowerment but instead found themselves increasingly involved in decisions, firefighting and problem-solving. In this case, expectations weren’t clear and conversations weren’t being had: Floundering had led to a typical founder bottleneck.
Difficult Conversations Are a Leadership Capability
All these examples demonstrate how leaders protecting themselves or others cost the company culture longer term. Research into psychological safety, particularly the work of Amy Edmondson, demonstrates that high-performing teams need environments where people can ask questions, challenge assumptions, admit mistakes and raise concerns. This environment starts by modelling it yourself and creating conditions where reality can surface early enough for people to act on it. Embracing this discomfort before it becomes expensive is a key founder capability
Tips for difficult conversations
1. Notice the discomfort: What thoughts appear when you think about the conversation? What emotions do you experience? What are you worried might happen?
2. Treat discomfort as data: The discomfort is often telling you that something important is at stake, reframe it from telling you that you are doing the wrong thing to caring about the outcome.
3. Consider the other person’s perspective: Start to question how your silence might be affecting the other person, the business or a partner. Is it really in their best interests? Would you want to hear what you have to say if it was the other way around? What could be in it for them to address the issues sooner rather than later?
4. Make the conversation smaller: The first conversation doesn’t need to solve the entire problem. It’s purpose may simply be to explore, understand and agree next steps. Other conversations should happen afterwards. It doesn’t need to be perfect.
5. Put it in the diary: Most avoided conversations don’t happen because founders are waiting to feel ready, but this might never happen. Committing to having the conversation means you know it will.
Before opening your next email, joining your next meeting or reviewing your next set of numbers, ask yourself:
- What am I hoping will resolve itself?
- Who am I trying to protect?
- What’s the cost of waiting another month?
- What would a respectful first sentence sound like?
Final Thought
The conversation you’re avoiding today may be pointing directly at the leadership challenge your business needs to solve next. Scaling a business isn’t just about better systems, more people or additional investment. It’s about increasing the organisation’s capacity to face reality. Avoidance is human, but in a scaling business, it is also expensive, and more costly the more we avoid it. Founders who build healthy, high-performing organisations aren’t the ones who never feel uncomfortable. They’re the ones who learn how to have the uncomfortable conversations in spite of the discomfort, so that silence never becomes culture.
If any of this sounds like you or your team, you can turn it around. One to one executive coaching, group coaching and team coaching are all interventions that can help. Speak to us today to make your next step forward.