Hey Friend,

For the past couple of weeks, I've been deep in conflict work. I've spent time with leaders who feel stuck between competing needs, teams that have stopped trusting one another, and individuals carrying the heaviness of tensions and big feelings that have been simmering for months or even years. The details are always different, but the underlying patterns are often surprisingly similar.

A big part of my work is helping people understand the various ways we respond to conflict and tension at work. Some responses, such as expressing emotions, considering others' perspectives, reaching out, or adapting, tend to move conflict toward understanding, repair, and transformation.

Other responses, like avoiding, yielding, hiding emotions, demeaning others, or retaliating, tend to keep people stuck or create tension.

The important thing is that all of us engage in both types. Yes, you. And yes, even workplace conflict mediators like me.

The goal of conflict transformation isn't perfection. It's becoming more aware of the patterns we rely on, understanding why we're rely on them, and making more intentional choices about how we respond.

And that’s where the conversation often gets complicated.

Recently, as I've explored these responses in coaching conversations, mediations, and team cohesion sessions, some version of this question has come up over and over:

"If someone is making my life harder, threatening me, mistreating me, or creating constant discomfort, why would I share my emotions with them? Why wouldn't I just avoid them or yield? Wouldn't that actually be a constructive response?"

It's a fair and important question, and the answer isn't as simple as yes or no.

First, let's be abundantly clear: Your safety is non-negotiable.

If engaging directly with someone creates genuine risk, whether physical, emotional, professional, or psychological, please do not put yourself in harm's way in the name of conflict transformation. There is no framework, principle, or growth opportunity worth sacrificing your safety or dignity.

But safety and avoidance are not the same thing. The distinction matters a lot, and in my experience, it’s where much of the confusion around conflict transformation lives.

You can think about the difference as a guardrail versus a roadblock.

Guardrails support safety. They help us navigate difficult terrain without going over the edge, and create protection while still allowing movement.

Roadblocks, on the other hand, stop movement altogether.

Sometimes we need guardrails in conflict. Boundaries, support systems, accountability structures, mediators, allies, or distance while we regulate are really important to creating safe teams and work environments.

But when avoidance or yielding become a permanent roadblock (i.e., "I'm just not going to collaborate with her" or "I'll attend the meeting, but I won't say anything," or "I'll just do the work or solve the problem myself"), we may keep ourselves safe temporarily, while preventing any possibility of moving forward, past, or through.

Healthy workplaces need more guardrails, fewer roadblocks, and more tools to foster movement and remove barriers when things get hard.

The (hidden) cost of avoiding conflict

Avoidance and yielding are often useful short-term strategies. Sometimes they create needed distance. Sometimes they help us regulate. Sometimes they buy us time while we determine what support we need or what next step makes sense. But used alone, they rarely resolve anything, especially in the long term.

More often, they help us survive a moment while leaving the underlying dynamic untouched. In other words, avoidance often solves for immediate discomfort without addressing the underlying conflict.

The conflict may become less visible, but it doesn't disappear. It continues consuming attention, creativity, emotional bandwidth, and trust. If the elephant stays in the room, it keeps taking up space. Often, it’s the space we need to do our actual work.

The things we do to avoid conflict are often the very things that keep it alive.

What's important here is that avoidance isn't free.

It still requires energy, energy we spend anticipating interactions, managing reactions, walking on eggshells, working around difficult dynamics, replaying conversations, keeping opinions to ourselves, and carrying the emotional labor of what remains unsaid.

Sooner or later, the bill comes due.

Research suggests that workplace conflict carries a significant productivity cost. A widely cited CPP Global Human Capital Report found that U.S. employees spend an average of 2.8 hours per week dealing with workplace conflict, contributing to hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity annually. The same research found links to absenteeism, damaged working relationships, and failed projects.

Most of us don't need research to know this, because we're living it.

We sit in meetings where everyone knows what's wrong and nobody speaks up.

We watch teams tiptoe around tension rather than solving problems.

We feel the exhaustion that comes from carrying conflict that we’ve never even tried to address.

But the impact doesn't stop with the people directly involved. Workplace conflict rarely stays contained between two people. It often draws others in. As a result, teams become polarized, leaders begin managing around the tension rather than addressing it, and entire systems adapt themselves to problems nobody names.

And because conflict lives in systems, constructive responses can happen in systems, too.

This is where many people, including many of the folks I’ve been working with recently, misunderstand constructive responses.

A constructive response does not necessarily mean sitting down directly with the person creating harm. Sometimes that's appropriate. Sometimes it's not.

In workplaces especially, a constructive response may mean reaching out to trusted colleagues, mentors, managers, HR professionals, union representatives, or others with more formal authority and influence.

The goal here isn't simply to vent. In fact, venting alone often just circulates energy without changing it.

The goal is to create conditions in which understanding, accountability, healing, and change can become possible. Because none of those things can happen if the problem remains unnamed.

Which leads us to another hard truth:

Nobody will change their behavior if we haven't named it.

One reality of conflict transformation is that we cannot reasonably expect people to change behaviors that have never been identified. We cannot interrupt harmful dynamics that nobody is willing to discuss. And we cannot create accountability around expectations that were never made explicit.

Real conflict transformation requires us to surface what isn't working. Not with blame or finger-pointing. Not with punishment. Not to "win." But to make reality explicit and open to discussion.

Most organizations don't struggle because nobody knows there's a problem. They struggle because everybody knows there's a problem and nobody feels safe, supported, or empowered enough to name it or move through it.

We MUST do the hard, uncomfortable work to surface the issue and give people the opportunity to change, because without that opportunity, we all remain stuck.

Unfortunately, I've learned that simply naming a problem isn't enough when it comes to conflict at work. Naming creates awareness, but awareness alone doesn't create change.

Change only becomes possible when people begin understanding and relating to the conflict differently.

Which brings me to one of the most important ideas I teach:

Conflict is energy

I often remind people that conflict itself is a form of energy.

It takes at least two people to generate and sustain it. Even when we are doing our very best, we are still contributing energy to the situation. Sometimes that energy is constructive. Sometimes it's destructive. Sometimes it's protective. Sometimes it's reactive.

The question is not whether we're contributing energy. It's whether we're contributing energy that moves the situation toward greater understanding, accountability, and possibility.

Transformation happens when all involved people become aware of the role they're playing in maintaining a conflict and begin making different choices about the energy they bring to it.

This is where many people get stuck. The moment we start talking about our role in a conflict, people often hear blame. But responsibility and blame are not the same thing.

Blame asks, "Whose fault is this?"

Responsibility asks, "Given where we are now, what influence do I have over what happens next?"

Those are very different questions. The former keeps us focused on the past while the latter creates possibilities for the future. Roadblocks vs. Guardrails.

Responsibility expands our options, and the moment we stop asking whose fault something is and start asking what influence we have, new possibilities begin to emerge.

To be clear, that doesn't mean everyone shares equal responsibility for harm. It is critical that we pay attention to power, impact, safety, and the systems of oppression that hold us all back. It's also important to hold people who create harm accountable.

Conflict transformation is not about ignoring the past or absolving people of their sins. It's about understanding the past and the conflict well enough to create something different.

Even in the most complex situations, meaningful change becomes more likely when people can identify where they have agency and how they might contribute differently to the tension they're experiencing.

It's not about getting our way. It's about contributing our unique energy toward creating a future that works better for everyone involved.

The question then becomes: what kind of future are we trying to create?

The future isn’t "win-win."

I'm increasingly more interested in gain-gain outcomes because the language of winning implies it's a competition.

What if we're not competitors?

What if the goal is not for someone to win, but for everyone involved to gain something important: understanding, safety, dignity, accountability, healing, clarity, or a more sustainable way of working together?

Gain-gain solutions become possible when people consciously take responsibility for the energy they bring, recognize their influence, and look for ways to strengthen the health of the whole system.

My invitation is not to rush toward every conflict, but to pause long enough to ask different questions.

• What would it look like to protect my safety while still contributing energy toward transformation?
• What would need to change for everyone involved in this tension to walk away with something meaningful?
• What would help this team, relationship, or system function better than it does today?

That's where real change begins, and it's the work I have the honor of doing with people and teams every day.

This is hard.

American culture often teaches us to avoid conflict, appease it, win it, endure it, or simply manage around it. Very few of us were taught how to truly transform it.

And honestly, it's hard to practice conflict transformation in environments that don't support it. Which is one of the reasons I spend so much time working not just with individuals, but with teams and organizations.

When people don't feel psychologically safe, avoidance becomes a rational response.

When speaking up carries social, emotional, or professional risk, silence makes sense.

When accountability is inconsistent or nonexistent, trust erodes.

And when trust erodes, people naturally begin protecting themselves (and yielding or avoiding) rather than engaging with one another.

That's why conflict transformation requires more than individual skill.

It requires cultures that support honesty, repair, learning, and accountability, leaders who are willing to model those behaviors, and systems that make it safer to surface tension than to suppress it.

Without those foundations, people learn that silence is safer than honesty.

With them, addressing conflict becomes less risky, more productive, and more likely to create lasting change.

***

If you're spending energy managing conflict that never seems to actually change, you're not alone.

Whether you're an individual navigating a difficult workplace relationship, a leader trying to support a struggling team, or an organization that's adapted itself around tensions nobody quite knows how to address, I'd love to help.

Reply to this email or schedule a connection call. I'm here for you!!

Cheering you on always,
Marissa

Thanks for reading and following along! If you appreciate what I have to say or have learned something new, please consider sharing this newsletter with others, and be sure to check out our current initiatives! ​Reloveution (ree-love-oo-shun), a consulting and professional development services provider focused on strengthening team culture, deepening leadership effectiveness, and catalyzing professional well-being. ​RepairWorks, a subpractice of Reloveution that provides mediation and conflict transformation services for individuals, teams, and established groups. ​The Millennial Manager Collective, a virtual professional development community built for millennial-aged professionals who want to grow boldly in their careers and rewrite the rules of modern work with peers who truly get it. ​ChatGMB: Wisdom & Insights for Modern Leaders, a "podcast" production of Reloveution with episodes focused on the leadership and workplace culture topics/challenges that come up again and again in my consulting, coaching, and facilitation work. ​ Interested in working together? Book a connection call below or shoot me an email at marissa@truereloveution.com