13 Proven Signs You're Not Burned Out, You're Carrying What Your Team Won't

Introduction

If you are exhausted, the conventional advice will tell you to sleep more, take a holiday, or practise mindfulness. That advice is well-meaning, and for most leaders who are genuinely burned out from people-pleasing and conflict avoidance, it completely misses the point. The problem is not that you need more rest. The problem is that you are carrying weight that does not belong to you. The people on your team have problems. Some of those problems are work problems. Some are interpersonal problems. Some are performance problems that have been sitting unaddressed for months, possibly years.

And somewhere along the way, because confrontation felt worse than exhaustion, because you care deeply about your people, because you wanted to be the kind of leader who made things easier rather than harder, you absorbed those problems. You became the emotional shock absorber for your entire team.

This pattern has a name. Researchers and organisational psychologists call it overfunctioning. It shows up most dramatically in principals, nonprofit executive directors, and faith-based school leaders because those roles attract people who entered leadership to serve. It shows up in corporate leaders too, particularly those who were promoted because they were the most capable individual contributor and who now find themselves doing everyone else's emotional and relational heavy lifting. A 2025 DDI Global Leadership Forecast of over 10,000 leaders found that 56 per cent reported feeling burned out, and manager engagement has dropped from 31 per cent in 2022 to 22 per cent in 2025, according to Gallup's most recent data. But the data does not tell you why those leaders are burning out. This blog does.

People-pleasing leadership exhaustion is not a character flaw. It is a pattern, and patterns can be broken. Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with principals, nonprofit executive directors, and corporate leaders across Australia and globally helping them identify exactly where they have taken on weight that belongs to their team, and how to give it back without the relationship damage they fear.

If this pattern sounds familiar, email jonno@consultclarity.org to start a conversation about what a facilitated team session or leadership coaching engagement might look like for your organisation.

Why This Matters: The Hidden Cost of Carrying It All

The CPP Global Human Capital Report documented that workplace conflict costs US businesses approximately $359 billion annually in lost productivity, based on the average employee spending 2.8 hours per week engaged in conflict. Managers and senior leaders spend considerably more: research cited by Runde and Flanagan in Becoming a Conflict Competent Leader suggests leaders dedicate 20 to 40 per cent of their working time to managing conflict and its downstream effects. That is an enormous proportion of a working week being consumed not by strategy, not by development, not by the high-value work that only a leader can do, but by the unresolved friction that accumulates when hard conversations are postponed.

The cost compounds in sectors where leaders tend to be mission-driven. The Center for Effective Philanthropy's 2024 State of Nonprofits found that 95 per cent of nonprofit leaders expressed concern about staff burnout. In the school sector, principals face compounding demands from every direction: students, parents, teachers, governing bodies, and systemic compliance requirements. DDI's research identified conflict resolution as the second most crucial burnout prevention factor for leaders, carrying a relative importance of 15 per cent, with only delegation ranking higher. When leaders avoid conflict rather than resolve it, they do not escape the energy cost. They defer it, and interest accrues.

Gallup's data from 2025 reinforces the stakes: 70 per cent of the variance in team engagement comes directly from the manager. When a leader is running on empty because they have been carrying everyone else's problems, that exhaustion flows downstream. It does not stay at the top. The team that looked to you for energy, direction, and clarity begins to mirror your depletion.

How This Pattern Develops in Leaders

Every people-pleasing leader started with a genuine strength. You care about your people. You are empathetic. You instinctively notice when someone is struggling and your first impulse is to help. In the early stages of leadership, those qualities earned you credibility. Teachers trusted you. Staff came to you with their problems. Your door was always open.

The problem is that caring and carrying are different things. Caring means staying present to someone's difficulty, helping them think it through, and trusting them to take responsibility for their own next steps. Carrying means absorbing their problem into your own load, solving it so they do not have to, and avoiding the conversation that would transfer accountability back where it belongs. Over time, if every problem that lands on your doorstep gets absorbed rather than redirected, your staff learns to bring you their problems rather than to resolve them. You have inadvertently trained them in helplessness.

Research from the Chartered Management Institute found that 57 per cent of people would do almost anything to avoid a difficult conversation. For leaders, the stakes feel even higher. Principals often reason that they cannot afford to damage their relationship with the three teachers who keep everything running. Nonprofit executive directors tell themselves that their staff are already stretched and underpaid, so now is not the right time to have the accountability conversation. Corporate leaders fear being seen as cold or political. Each of those rationalisations is understandable. Together, they form a pattern of avoidance that does not protect the relationship. It corrodes it.

The 13 Signs You Are Carrying What Your Team Won't

Section 1: You Have Confused Empathy with Over-Responsibility

1. You Solve Problems Before Your Team Has Had a Chance to Struggle with Them

The instinct is kind. Your staff member walks in looking stressed about a parent complaint or a workflow issue, and you see the solution immediately. So you offer it. You help them draft the email. You call the parent yourself. You smooth the friction. What you have done, without meaning to, is denied your team member the experience of solving a difficult problem independently, and taken on a responsibility that was not yours to carry. Empathy is the ability to be present to someone's difficulty. Over-responsibility is absorbing the consequence of that difficulty on their behalf.

Over time, the leader who consistently steps in before the team has had a chance to struggle becomes the team's default problem-solver. Staff stop attempting to resolve things themselves because they know you will intervene. Your calendar fills with problems that belong to other people. You are building a learned helplessness culture one well-intentioned act of absorption at a time. The shift is not to stop caring. The shift is to ask the question rather than offer the answer: 'What have you already tried?' 'What would you do if I were not here?'

2. You Take On Harder Work When Team Members Push Back

This is one of the subtlest and most energy-draining patterns in people-pleasing leadership. A team member says they are too busy. Or overwhelmed. Or this particular task is not quite in their lane. And rather than holding the request firm, you redistribute it upward. You take it on yourself. Or you quietly find another workaround that involves you doing extra work so you do not have to have the conversation about the fact that the pushback was unreasonable. This pattern teaches your team that resistance works. The leader who gives in to pushback trains their team to push back more.

DDI's research of more than 70,000 manager candidates found that only 19 per cent are genuinely strong at delegation. Part of the reason delegation is so hard for people-pleasing leaders is that effective delegation requires holding the line when someone says they cannot or will not do what has been asked. That holding of the line feels like conflict. But it is not conflict. It is accountability. And the absence of it is costing you your energy and your team its development.

Section 2: You Are the Mediator for Every Interpersonal Issue

3. Your Staff Bring Their Interpersonal Problems to You Rather Than to Each Other

If your school staffroom or your nonprofit team office has two people in ongoing tension, and both of them are coming to you separately to vent and to seek validation, you are not the leader. You are the referee. More specifically, you are the referee both teams know they can charm. The healthy version of this dynamic is for interpersonal friction between colleagues to be worked out between those colleagues, possibly with your support in structuring an initial conversation, but ultimately with them taking ownership of the relationship.

When leaders absorb interpersonal conflict, the conflict does not go away. It simply becomes a triangulated problem that now involves you as a participant. You end up holding both sides' grievances, trying to manage the dynamic from above, and the two colleagues continue to not address their actual conflict directly with each other because they have a proxy. This is exhausting to maintain and structurally unstable. As soon as you are not in the room, the pattern reasserts itself.

4. You Have Conversations About Someone Rather Than With Them

You have noticed a pattern in a team member. A performance issue. An attitude that is affecting the room. You have spoken to other team members about it. You may have mentioned it to a deputy or a board member. But you have not spoken to the person themselves. This is a very common pattern in people-pleasing leaders, and it is one of the most corrosive to team culture. Conversations about people instead of with them circulate through a team like a slow-acting toxin. People sense that things are being said behind closed doors. Trust erodes in all directions.

For more on recognising this pattern in yourself, check out my blog post '13 Warning Signs You Are Avoiding a Difficult Conversation' at consultclarity.org.

5. You Have Tried to Manage Colleague Conflict by Adjusting Rostering, Tasks, or Structures

This is a particularly revealing sign. Rather than having the conversation that would address the interpersonal issue directly, you have reorganised around it. You have changed the timetable so the two teachers are never in the same room for planning time. You have restructured the reporting lines so the antagonistic staff member is now your direct report rather than their former manager's. You have added a structural buffer. These structural workarounds are expensive in their own right, but their more serious cost is what they signal to the people involved: that their behaviour has consequences, and those consequences are for everyone except them.

Section 3: Your Standards Have Drifted Because of Your People-Pleasing

6. You Accept Work from Your Team That You Would Not Have Accepted Six Months Ago

This one requires a specific and honest audit. Think of a deliverable, a behaviour, or a standard that you expected of your team a year ago and no longer actively enforce. Not because the standard changed. Because enforcing it would require a conversation that you have been avoiding. This is standard drift, and it is one of the clearest signatures of people-pleasing leadership burnout. When leaders tolerate lower standards to avoid conflict, those lower standards become the new baseline. The team does not know where the actual line is because the line keeps moving.

Step Up or Step Out addresses this dynamic directly through the three-step conversation framework Jonno White developed to help leaders reset expectations without creating unnecessary confrontation or relationship damage. A three-step conversation that takes fifteen minutes is almost always better than months of seething frustration and drifted standards. Bring Jonno White in to facilitate a team offsite or workshop on exactly this topic. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Step Up or Step Out is available at https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD.

7. You Give Vague Feedback to Avoid Discomfort

'Keep up the good work' to someone whose work is actually problematic. 'I just want to check in on how you are finding things' when what you mean is 'there is a specific behaviour that is affecting the team and we need to talk about it.' Leaders who people-please often become very skilled at soft language. The feedback sounds supportive. The team member leaves the meeting with no clear picture of what needs to change. And the leader has technically had the conversation without actually having it at all.

Research from the Center for Creative Leadership found that leaders who give vague or overly positive feedback to avoid discomfort actually undermine team performance more than leaders who give no feedback at all, because vague feedback creates a false impression that performance is acceptable when it is not. Clarity is kindness, even when it is uncomfortable to deliver.

For practical techniques on how to structure feedback conversations, see my blog post '25 Crucial Tips for Handling Difficult Conversations' at consultclarity.org.

8. You Over-Explain Decisions to Preempt Pushback

When you make a decision and feel an instinctive need to justify it extensively, to anticipate every objection in advance, and to pre-emptively apologise for the inconvenience, you are not demonstrating humility. You are performing appeasement. Good leaders explain the reasoning behind significant decisions. People-pleasing leaders over-explain because they are trying to avoid having to deal with the discomfort of someone being unhappy with a decision they have every right to make.

This pattern is particularly visible in school principals who have experienced aggressive pushback from staff or parents in the past. It is also common in nonprofit executive directors who are managing a board with strong opinions about operational decisions. The exhaustion of constantly pre-justifying your own leadership calls is a slow energy drain. Confident leaders make decisions, communicate them with appropriate clarity, and are willing to hear concerns without pre-emptively dismantling their own authority to smooth the path.

Section 4: You Are Protecting Your Team from Reality

9. You Absorb Bad News from Above Before It Reaches Your Team

Your organisation is going through something difficult. Budget constraints. A restructure. A difficult parent situation. Performance concerns from the governing body. And your instinct, driven by genuine care for your team, is to sit in between your team and this bad news and absorb as much of it as possible so they can focus on their work. This protective instinct is admirable in small doses. In sustained doses, it is another form of carrying what your team actually needs to share with you.

Staff who are shielded from the reality of their organisation's situation cannot fully contribute to improving it. They are being managed like children rather than trusted as professional adults. The leader who absorbs all the bad news ends up isolated, managing a fiction that the organisation is healthier than it is, while quietly carrying the full weight of the institutional challenge alone. Honest leaders find age-appropriate, context-appropriate ways to share difficulty with their teams and to invite team contribution to the solutions.

10. You Have Made Yourself Available to Everyone at the Cost of Your Own Strategic Time

If your calendar has virtually no protected thinking time, if you are perpetually in reactive mode responding to whoever last knocked on your door, and if the work that only you can do, the strategic and directional work that requires sustained focus, is perpetually deferred, then your availability has become a tax. Not a service. People-pleasing leaders often confuse accessibility with care. The best thing you can do for your team in the long run is to protect the time required to lead them well. That means some doors need to stay closed sometimes.

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that only 30 per cent of leaders feel they have sufficient time to do their job well. Leaders who are perpetually reactive because they have made themselves available to every team interruption are not leaders. They are human help desks. The help-desk function is important, but it is not the function that drives organisational direction, culture, or performance.

Hire Jonno White to work with your leadership team on clarifying roles, time architecture, and the specific conversations that would redistribute the help-desk workload more evenly. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Section 5: The Physical and Behavioural Symptoms Are Appearing

11. You Feel Responsible for Your Team's Emotional State

This one sits at the heart of people-pleasing leadership burnout. You walk into a meeting and immediately scan the room for who is unhappy. If someone seems flat or disengaged, you feel a pull to fix it before anything else gets addressed. If there is tension in the room, you feel responsible for dissipating it rather than naming it and allowing the team to work through it. If someone is frustrated with a decision, you carry that frustration as though it were a reflection of your failure rather than a normal feature of organisational life.

Leaders who feel responsible for their team's emotional state never switch off. Every Monday morning begins with an emotional audit. Every team interaction carries the background hum of threat surveillance: is everyone okay, is anyone upset, is someone about to resign, does this person like me. This is an exhausting way to lead. The leader who is hypervigilant about team emotion tends to suppress difficult feelings rather than surface them, which means genuine team issues go unaddressed while the leader exhausts themselves managing the surface-level emotional atmosphere.

12. You Are the First Person Your Team Calls, Including on Your Days Off

If you routinely receive calls or messages from your team on weekends, evenings, or during leave, and you routinely respond to them, you have established a behavioural contract that your team did not consciously negotiate but that they have learned to rely on. This is not an indication that your team is demanding. It is an indication that you have not set the limits that would teach them appropriate channels, appropriate hours, and appropriate levels of self-reliance. Setting those limits feels like letting people down. It is not. It is giving your team the dignity of managing things themselves, and giving yourself the recovery time that makes the rest of your leadership sustainable.

Bring Jonno White in to facilitate an honest conversation with your leadership team about communication norms, availability expectations, and the difference between genuine emergencies and matters that can wait until Monday. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

13. You Feel More Exhausted After Delivering Good News Than You Did Before

This is the clearest signal that something structural has gone wrong. You just ran a wonderful professional development day. The feedback forms were positive. Your team seemed genuinely energised. And yet you are sitting in your office afterwards feeling hollow and depleted rather than refuelled. This happens to leaders who have been carrying too long. The good moments no longer replenish. This is because the energy system is running on deficit. The good experience happened on top of an unresolved foundation of absorbed tensions, unspoken conversations, and accumulated weight that even a great event cannot address.

When you have reached this point, the answer is not more wellness activities. It is an honest audit of what you are carrying that does not belong to you, and a plan for how to give it back in a way that is fair, structured, and sustainable.

Jonno White provides one-on-one leadership coaching and executive offsite facilitation specifically for leaders at this point. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect. Whether virtual or face to face, reach out to jonno@consultclarity.org.

Common Mistakes Leaders Make When They Try to Change This Pattern

The most common mistake is trying to overcorrect overnight. A leader who has spent three years absorbing every team problem, avoiding every difficult conversation, and making themselves available to every request suddenly decides to change. They become hard. They push back on everything. They close their door. And within two weeks, the team is in shock, trust has evaporated, and the leader retreats to their previous pattern because the overcorrection felt worse than the original problem.

The second common mistake is trying to address the symptom rather than the pattern. Leaders often start with specific tactics. I will stop responding to texts on weekends. I will delegate three tasks this week. I will have the difficult conversation with the team member who has been underperforming. Each of those is valuable. But without understanding the underlying pattern of over-responsibility and conflict avoidance, the specific tactics tend to slip. The weekend texts start again. The delegation retreats. The difficult conversation was had but followed up with so many reassurances that the accountability message was softened back into ambiguity.

The third common mistake is mistaking the absence of conflict for the presence of trust. A team that seems happy on the surface is not necessarily a team that is functioning well. Research from G. Damon Wells and others documents the concept of peace fatigue: the chronic exhaustion that staff experience when they are working in an environment where genuine tensions are suppressed rather than addressed. The pleasant surface of a well-managed conflict-avoidant team conceals significant emotional labour being performed by everyone in the room. Staff know who the difficult people are. They have adapted to work around them. They are quietly waiting for the leader to do something.

The fourth common mistake is waiting until the situation reaches crisis before acting. The calculus that makes avoidance seem rational, the idea that the relationship is too important to risk and the timing is never quite right, is always eventually overruled by the reality that unaddressed situations escalate. The team member whose performance has been tolerated for eighteen months reaches a point where a formal process is unavoidable. Every conversation that is avoided today becomes a harder conversation tomorrow.

For more on 21 practical tools for navigating conflict and difficult dynamics, check out my blog post '21 Keys to Resolving Conflicts' at consultclarity.org.

Implementation Guide: Redistributing the Weight

The goal of this guide is not to make you a harder or less empathetic leader. It is to make the weight distribution sustainable. Here is how to begin.

Start with an honest audit. For one week, keep a simple log of every problem you solved that someone else could have solved. Every conversation you had on behalf of two people who should be talking to each other directly. Every piece of work you absorbed rather than redirecting. Every time you responded to a message outside of working hours. You do not need to act on any of this in week one. Just observe.

In week two, identify the three conversations you have been avoiding the longest. These are almost always identifiable. You know who they are with. You know roughly what they need to be about. Rank them in order of accumulated cost to the team, not in order of difficulty to have. The one with the highest accumulated cost is the one that should happen first. This is counterintuitive. People-pleasing leaders tend to attempt the easiest conversation first. But the hardest avoided conversation is usually the one that is costing the most, and addressing it will have the largest positive effect on your energy.

In week three, practise redistribution rather than rescuing. When a staff member brings you a problem, before you offer a solution, ask them: 'What have you already tried?' 'What do you think the options are?' 'What would you do if I were not available this week?' These questions are not dismissive. They are respectful of the person's competence and they gradually shift the cultural expectation from the leader-as-solver to the team-as-problem-solvers.

After the initial audit and first conversations, consider a team conversation about norms. Not a punitive one, and not a public airing of grievances, but a genuine team conversation about how you want to function together. What is the expectation for peer-to-peer conflict resolution before escalating to leadership? What are the communication norms for out-of-hours contact? What does genuine accountability look like on this team?

Jonno White delivers exactly these kinds of facilitated team conversations as part of his executive offsite work globally. Organisations consistently find that international travel for a facilitator is far more affordable than expected. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Finally, build in a monthly self-check. The question is simple: what have I carried this month that I should not have? Sustainable leadership requires regular, honest maintenance of the weight distribution. Without that check, the pattern reasserts itself gradually and you find yourself six months later in the same state of exhaustion, wondering how you ended up here again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between people-pleasing leadership and empathetic leadership?

Empathetic leadership involves genuinely understanding and caring about the experience of your team members without absorbing responsibility for their outcomes. You can acknowledge that a situation is difficult for someone while still expecting them to own their response to it. People-pleasing leadership collapses that distinction. The people-pleasing leader feels that caring about someone requires taking away their difficulty, which means taking on the consequences of their problems as their own burden. Empathy expands capacity. People-pleasing drains it.

Is leadership burnout always caused by people-pleasing?

No. Burnout in leadership has multiple causes, including structural under-resourcing, excessive workload, organisational dysfunction, and lack of systemic support. However, the specific pattern of exhaustion described in this blog, which presents not as an inability to cope with genuine volume but as a chronic depletion that persists even when the workload is theoretically manageable, is strongly associated with the people-pleasing and conflict-avoidance pattern. If you have taken holidays and returned depleted, or if you regularly feel more exhausted after positive events than before them, this pattern is likely a significant factor.

How do I start having difficult conversations without damaging important relationships?

The fear that a difficult conversation will damage the relationship is understandable, but research consistently shows that the relationship is already being damaged by the avoidance of it. The Chartered Management Institute has documented that the longer an issue remains unresolved, the more resentment builds on both sides. The practical starting point is to separate the issue from the person. You are addressing a behaviour or a situation, not making a judgement about the individual's worth or character.

Jonno White's book Step Up or Step Out provides a practical three-step framework for exactly this type of conversation. It is available at https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD.

Why do principals and nonprofit executive directors seem particularly susceptible to this pattern?

Both roles attract people who entered leadership for reasons of genuine service and vocation. Principals typically came from teaching, where care for students and relationships with colleagues are the primary currency of success. Nonprofit executive directors are almost always deeply mission-driven, which creates an implicit cost to confrontation: every difficult conversation feels like it risks the collaborative culture that the mission depends on. In faith-based school settings, there is an additional layer: leaders may feel that setting firm limits with a staff member is in tension with their values of grace and compassion. The result is that the leaders in these sectors tend to absorb more and for longer before the pattern becomes unsustainable.

Can I hire someone to help my team navigate these dynamics in a facilitated environment?

Yes. Jonno White, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries), works with school leadership teams, nonprofit executive teams, and corporate leadership groups specifically on the dynamics of accountability, difficult conversations, and team ownership. He delivers facilitated executive offsites, leadership workshops, and keynote presentations across Australia and internationally. Whether your team is in Brisbane or across the world, email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss what the right engagement looks like.

How was this framework compiled?

The 13 patterns described in this blog were compiled from published research on leadership burnout, conflict avoidance, and organisational psychology, combined with the accumulated practical experience of working with leaders across schools, nonprofits, and corporations. Every statistic cited is sourced and confirmed. The patterns are drawn from the real dynamics that show up repeatedly in leadership teams regardless of sector or geography.

How do I know if I am burned out from people-pleasing or from something else?

The most reliable indicator is the source of your exhaustion. Burnout from overload tends to respond at least partially to rest and recovery. Burnout from carrying what your team will not tends not to: you return from leave depleted or re-depleted within days because the underlying pattern is still in place. If you find that the most exhausting part of your work is not the tasks but the relational and emotional weight, and if you notice that you feel responsible for managing everyone's emotional state, this blog's framework is likely highly relevant to your situation.

Final Thoughts

The leaders who are carrying what their team will not are not bad leaders. They are often exceptional ones who got to where they are because of their empathy, their care, and their ability to absorb difficulty without complaining. That same quality, when it runs unchecked, becomes the thing that eventually breaks them.

The shift this blog is inviting is not a shift toward hardness or coldness or political calculation. It is a shift toward honest, sustainable, adult-to-adult leadership: the kind where you trust your team enough to expect something of them, where difficult conversations happen in a timely and respectful way, and where the weight of running an organisation is distributed across the whole team rather than pooling in the person at the top.

Jonno White has worked with school principals who had not had a difficult conversation in four years and were one term away from resignation. He has worked with nonprofit executive directors who were carrying so much of the institutional burden that the organisation had become structurally dependent on their personal over-commitment. He has worked with corporate leaders who knew exactly which conversations needed to happen and had been rationalising their delay for over a year. In every case, the conversation happened. The relationship survived. The exhaustion began to lift. And the team, given the chance to be genuinely accountable, rose to meet it.

If you recognise yourself in this blog, the next step is the simplest and the hardest one available: have the conversation. If you want help preparing for it, or if you would like Jonno to work with your leadership team directly, email jonno@consultclarity.org. Whether you are in Brisbane, New Zealand, London, Singapore, or anywhere in between, Jonno works globally and international travel is consistently more affordable than clients expect.

Step Up or Step Out is available at https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 13 Warning Signs You Are Avoiding a Difficult Conversation

You already know the conversation you need to have. You have known for weeks, maybe months. You can picture the person's face. You can feel the knot in your stomach when you think about sitting down and saying what needs to be said. But you have not done it. And every day you do not, the problem gets a little worse. You are not alone. Research from the Chartered Management Institute found that 57 per cent of people would do almost anything to avoid a difficult conversation.

Keep reading: consultclarity.org/post/signs-avoiding-difficult-conversation