Quiet Conflict Is Not the Early Conflict

A leader I worked with had a problem with a colleague, and he was handling it the way he handled all conflict.

He wasn't having it.

He hadn't raised his voice. He hadn't sent a sharp email. If you asked him where things stood, he would have said nothing had really happened yet. In his mind, because no conversation had occurred, the conflict was still young.

Still small. Still waiting patiently at the starting line for whenever he felt ready.

Meanwhile, a third colleague two desks away could recite the entire grievance from memory. Because that is where the conversation had been happening for months. Not with the person. About the person.

Here is the trap. Leaders measure a conflict's age by its noise. No blowup, no tense meeting, no ultimatum, so it must be early. But avoided conflicts are silent by definition. That is what avoidance means. Which leaves most leaders using an instrument that cannot detect the very thing they are trying to measure.

The Conflict Speed Curve keeps moving through its stages whether anything audible happens or not, and this leader was much further along it than he believed. The tell wasn't in the room with his colleague. Nothing ever happened in that room. The tell was that someone else knew.

So here is the diagnostic, and it has one rule: stop reading the conflict and start reading yourself. Your own behaviour records your position on the curve with more honesty than your memory of events ever will. Three places to look. Listen for a date in your own sentences.

▪️After the holidays.

▪️Once the quarter closes.

▪️When his workload settles.

One owner I worked with postponed a conversation about an employee's dangerous working hours until after the holidays, and the date felt to him like a plan. A date attached to a conversation is not a plan. It is a receipt. It proves the override already happened, that you noticed the thing and chose later, which means the curve is already moving.

Check the grammar of your complaints. Early on, your private sentences are about events: the orders didn't go out, the deadline slipped. Further along, they quietly change subject to character: she doesn't take ownership, he doesn't respect the partnership. When your sentences switch from what happened to what they're like, you have crossed into interpretation, and you are now in conflict with a story you wrote, one that recruits evidence daily.

Count who knows. This is the marker that caught our leader.

If a spouse, a peer, a colleague at another desk can summarize your grievance and the person it concerns cannot, the conversation is not unstarted. It is fully underway, in every room except the right one. Triangulation feels like restraint. It is actually the loudest signal on the curve, because you have proven the conversation matters enough to have, repeatedly, with everyone who can't resolve it.

When he ran the three checks, he found a date in his sentences, character in his grammar, and an audience of one who wasn't the colleague. Three for three. The conflict he thought hadn't started was most of the way to its expensive ending. That accuracy, uncomfortable as it was, changed his move entirely. He stopped preparing the twenty minute version of the conversation and prepared the real one, which had to begin by owning the months, not just the issue.

You cannot come back from a position you won't admit you hold.

Take the tension you are quietest about. Don't ask how bad it is. Ask who else knows.

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In all that we do, let us seek wisdom, discipline, courage & justice.

Be well,
Keita

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