The Conversation Teams Aren't Having — And What It Costs
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Team conflict avoidance | Team coaching Geneva | Leadership team dysfunction
Every team has a conversation it isn't having.
Sometimes it's about a person — the senior team member whose style is generating friction but whose performance makes the conversation feel too risky. Sometimes it's strategic — the direction that most people privately doubt but that no one challenges because the leader's investment in it is visible. Sometimes it's structural — a role overlap, a resource tension, a decision-making ambiguity that everyone is working around.
The content varies. The pattern is the same: the thing that needs saying isn't being said. And the meeting after the meeting — the corridor debrief, the WhatsApp thread, the candid conversation in the taxi — carries more of the real organisational thinking than anything that happened in the room.
In high-performing creative and agency environments, this dynamic is almost universal. And it is extraordinarily costly.
Why smart teams avoid the real conversation
The assumption is usually that conflict avoidance is a personality issue — that certain people are just less comfortable with direct communication. This is partly true and largely insufficient.
The more useful frame is systemic. Teams avoid real conversations because the relational environment makes honest communication feel unsafe. Not dramatically unsafe — no one is imagining being fired for speaking up. But subtly unsafe: the possibility of disrupting an important relationship, of being seen as difficult, of triggering a response in a senior person that makes your working life harder.
These are entirely rational calculations. And they become self-reinforcing. When no one names the real issue, everyone learns that the real issue is not named. The implicit rule becomes part of the culture.
Transactional analysis describes this kind of dynamic through the concept of games — repeating patterns of interaction with predictable outcomes that serve a defensive function, allowing people to avoid more honest but more threatening contact. The game isn't chosen consciously. It's a collective adaptation. But its cost is entirely real: the intelligence in the room is never fully applied to the actual problem.
The Drama Triangle in leadership teams
One of the most recognisable game patterns in leadership teams is what TA theorist Stephen Karpman described as the Drama Triangle — a three-position dynamic between Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim that loops without resolution.
The triangle is seductive because each position provides a psychological payoff. The Persecutor feels righteous. The Victim feels misunderstood. The Rescuer feels needed. And nothing changes.
What interrupts the triangle is honest contact — the willingness to name the dynamic directly rather than play a role within it. This is what team coaching creates the conditions for. Not the confrontation of individuals, but the surfacing of the pattern itself, in a way that allows the team to see and choose differently.
What becomes possible
Teams that learn to have the real conversation don't become conflict-prone. They typically become less dramatic, not more — because the low-level tension that was being managed through avoidance and triangulation dissipates when the actual issue is on the table.
What opens up is something that's hard to create any other way: genuine collective thinking. The capacity to bring what you actually believe into the room, to build on each other's real views rather than the acceptable version of them, to make decisions that reflect the team's actual intelligence rather than a negotiated compromise between defended positions.
In creative and agency environments, where the quality of collective thinking is often what determines the quality of the output, this shift is directly and visibly commercial.
A question for leaders
Think about the last significant decision your leadership team made together. How much of the thinking that led to it happened in the meeting — and how much happened in conversations afterwards?
The gap between those two is the measure of what's not yet available to your team.
Fleur Jaworski-Richards Team Coaching
Fleur Jaworski-Richards is an executive coach and psychotherapeutic counsellor based between Chamonix and Geneva. She works with senior leaders in creative, digital, and technology sectors, bringing over 25 years of industry experience together with ICF coaching certification and UKCP psychotherapeutic training.
