The Conversation New Managers Avoid Most — And Why That's Dangerous

Shelley Lewis
May 5
11 min read

Early in my career, I managed someone who had been in his role for a long time and made sure I knew it.

The Conversation New Managers
Avoid Most

He was experienced, knowledgeable, and quietly resistant. Every time I got close to the way he worked, he pushed back, not loudly, but in the subtle way that experienced people do when they have outlasted several managers and expect to outlast another.

I told myself I was being respectful. He knew his job. He did not need me hovering. I was giving him the independence that his experience deserved.

That was not what I was doing. I was uncomfortable with his resistance, uncertain about my authority, and unwilling to create the friction that a direct conversation would have required. So I managed around him, and the work suffered for longer than it should have.

When I finally had the conversation, it was harder than it would have been earlier. The issues were more entrenched. The dynamic was more established. What could have been a direct discussion in month one became a more formal and consequential conversation in month six.

The conversation you avoid does not disappear. It grows. And the version you eventually have is always harder than the one you avoided. That is why avoiding it is costly.

I have watched this pattern repeat hundreds of times in the managers I have led, developed, and observed over thirty years. The circumstances change. The core dynamic does not.

How Common Is This

Research from Harris Poll, reported in Harvard Business Review, found that 69 percent of managers report feeling uncomfortable communicating with employees, and 37 percent say they actively dislike giving direct feedback when they think the employee might respond negatively.1

That is not a fringe finding. It is the norm. The majority of people in management roles are uncomfortable with the conversations that management requires most.

A study from the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership found that more than 80 percent of workers are currently holding back from at least one challenging conversation at work. Most say they avoid it because they lack the confidence to speak up, with one in five admitting they do not believe they would handle it successfully.2

That finding applies to employees broadly. For new managers, who are navigating the added complexity of authority they are still learning how to exercise, the percentage is almost certainly higher.

The avoidance is not laziness. It is not indifference. In most cases, it is an entirely human response to genuine discomfort. Managers avoid difficult conversations because they are worried about damaging a relationship, uncertain about their authority, unsure how the other person will react, or simply not equipped with a framework for having the conversation well.

The problem is not the discomfort. The problem is what happens when the discomfort wins. That is the central risk: avoidance creates larger problems than the conversation itself.

What Actually Gets Avoided

There is no single type of difficult conversation that managers avoid. But in finance and accounting teams, the most consequential pattern is this: a manager sees someone who is not carrying their weight and says nothing.

Not nothing forever. Just nothing today. And then nothing tomorrow. And then it has been three months, and the situation has calcified, and everyone on the team knows what the manager has refused to see or address.

This is the most dangerous version of avoidance. Not because the underperforming person suffers most, though they do suffer for being allowed to continue without honest feedback. But because of what it does to everyone else: it shifts the burden, weakens standards, and signals that performance does not really matter.

The Team Pays the Price

When a manager avoids addressing underperformance, the work does not stop. It shifts. The people who are performing well pick it up. They absorb the gap. They cover the shortfall. And they watch the manager do nothing about the person who is creating that shortfall.

This is not a quiet situation. Teams are acutely perceptive about fairness. Every team member knows who is carrying their load and who is not. When the manager appears not to notice, or notices but does nothing, the message is clear: what you produce does not actually matter here. The standard is not being enforced.

Research on workplace conflict found that 51 percent of employees have wanted to quit their jobs because of unresolved conflict, and 41 percent actually followed through.3 In most cases, the people who leave are not the ones causing the problem. They are the ones who have been quietly absorbing it.

This is the pattern I have seen repeatedly in finance and accounting teams. Your best performers, the ones with the most options, are the first to disengage and the first to leave. Not because the work is too hard. Because the environment has become unfair, and the person responsible for addressing that unfairness has chosen not to.

The Avoiding Manager Pays Too

There is a cost to the manager as well, and it is not only a professional one. Managing around a problem rather than through it is exhausting. It requires constant mental energy to work out the implications, buffer the impact, and justify the inaction to yourself.

Over time, the avoidance begins to define the manager's credibility. The team stops bringing real problems because they have learned the manager will not address them. The organizational culture around that team shifts toward tolerance of poor performance. The point is simple: avoiding one hard conversation creates more friction, not less.

Why Avoidance Feels Like the Right Thing

It is worth being honest about why managers avoid these conversations. The reasons are not frivolous.

They Are Protecting the Relationship

In finance and accounting teams, the peer-to-manager transition means many new managers are having these conversations with people who were recently their colleagues. The concern about damaging a relationship that has real personal history behind it is legitimate.

What managers in this position often fail to see is that avoidance also damages the relationship, just more slowly and less visibly. The team member who is never given honest feedback never gets the chance to correct course. The relationship that the manager was trying to protect becomes one built on false premises: the pretense that things are fine when they are not.

They Are Not Sure of Their Authority

New managers often question whether they have the right to address certain things. Especially when the person in question has more experience, more tenure, or more institutional knowledge than they do.

I experienced this directly with the senior colleague I described at the opening. My hesitation was not only about his resistance. It was about my own uncertainty. Who was I to challenge someone who had been doing this longer than I had been in the workforce?

The answer, which took me longer to find than it should have, is that authority in a management role is not derived from knowing more than the people you lead. It comes from the responsibility you have accepted for the team's performance and the organization's outcomes. That responsibility includes having the conversations that need to be had, regardless of how long the other person has been in the role.

They Are Waiting for the Right Moment

This is perhaps the most common rationalization. The timing is not right. It is busy season. The person just had a difficult week. After the quarter closes. After the audit. After things settle down.

Finance and accounting teams are rarely not in some version of a busy period. If you are waiting for the perfect moment, you are waiting for one that will not arrive.

The right moment for a difficult conversation is almost always earlier than the moment most managers choose. Not because urgency makes the conversation easier, but because delay makes it harder.

What Silence Actually Communicates

This is the piece most new managers do not fully grasp: silence is not neutral. It is a message.

When a manager sees a problem and says nothing, the team does not conclude that the manager has not noticed. They conclude one of two things: either the manager does not care, or the manager is not confident enough to address it.

Neither conclusion is good for a manager's credibility. And credibility, once lost in this particular way, is difficult to rebuild. The team has already adjusted their behaviour based on what they believe the manager will and will not do. Those beliefs are hard to shift.

The person whose performance is being avoided also receives a message. In the absence of feedback, people tend to assume their performance is acceptable. They have no reason to think otherwise. The manager's silence is, from their perspective, implicit approval.

When the conversation eventually happens, often because the situation has reached a point where it can no longer be ignored, the person on the receiving end is frequently blindsided. They were not given the opportunity to course-correct when correction was still straightforward. They are now facing a more serious conversation about a pattern of behaviour that the manager allowed to develop without comment.

Silence is not kindness. It is avoidance dressed up as consideration. Speak sooner, and both people pay less than they would for delay.

What Actually Makes These Conversations Difficult

It is worth naming the real barriers because doing so is the first step toward working through them. Name them clearly, then address them directly.

The Absence of a Framework

Most new managers have never been taught how to have a difficult conversation. They have perhaps attended training on communication skills or participated in workshops on feedback. But they have rarely been given a simple, practical framework they can apply in the moment when a real situation arises.

In the absence of a framework, managers default to their instincts. And their instincts, developed as individual contributors in peer relationships, are not well suited to the requirements of the management role.

The Conflation of Kindness and Softness

Many managers avoid difficult conversations because they believe having them would be unkind. They are trying to protect the person from discomfort.

This belief has the relationship between kindness and honesty exactly backward. Protecting someone from honest feedback is not kind. It deprives them of the information they need to improve, understand how their work is perceived, and make informed decisions about their own professional development.

Real kindness in a management context is delivering feedback clearly, calmly, and early enough that the person can act on it. Not withholding it because the conversation would be uncomfortable for the manager.

The Fear of an Emotional Response

Managers often avoid difficult conversations because they are afraid of how the other person will react. Defensiveness, upset, conflict, and the possibility that the conversation will make things worse rather than better.

This fear is understandable. It is also, in most cases, overestimated. Most people, when approached with genuine respect and clear, specific information, respond more constructively than the manager feared. The conversations that go badly are more often the ones that have been delayed too long and arrive weighted with months of unspoken frustration on both sides.

The antidote to the fear of an emotional response is not avoidance. It is preparation. Knowing clearly what you want to say, being specific about what you have observed, and being genuinely open to hearing the other person's perspective.

What This Costs Organizations

The organizational cost of manager avoidance is not abstract. It shows up in specific, measurable ways.

Turnover is the most visible. When high-performing team members leave because the environment has become unfair or the management has become ineffective, the organization pays a real replacement cost. In finance and accounting, where specialized expertise takes time and investment to develop, that cost is particularly high.

Disengagement is less visible but equally costly. The team member who has stopped believing that performance matters but has not yet left is present in body and absent in contribution. Their productivity drops. Their quality declines. Their attitude affects the people around them.

Research consistently points to the manager-employee relationship as the primary driver of engagement outcomes. Only 30 percent of leaders report feeling confident in their ability to manage conflict effectively.3 That confidence gap at the leadership level is not just a personal failing. It is an organizational risk because when leaders avoid conflict, minor tensions escalate into major cultural problems.

Finance and accounting teams operate in high-accountability environments where precision, reliability, and trust in the process are essential. A team that has lost confidence in its manager's willingness to address problems does not perform at its best under the highest pressure.

Where to Start

If you are a first-time manager reading this and you recognize the situation I have described, here is what I would offer you.

The conversation you have been avoiding is almost certainly not as dangerous as the conversation you will eventually be forced to have if you keep avoiding it. The difficulty scales with the delay.

Start with what you have directly observed. Not what you have concluded, not what you feel, and not what others have told you. What you have actually seen. Describe it specifically. State what you need going forward. Give the person the chance to respond.

That is the whole structure. It does not require a perfect script. It requires clarity about what you observed, honesty about what you need, and enough respect for the other person to have the conversation directly rather than managing around them indefinitely.

The most effective managers are not the ones who never find conversations difficult. They are the ones who have developed the discipline to have them anyway, early enough that the conversation can still be a course correction rather than a consequence.

If you are an HR leader or organizational decision-maker reading this, the question worth asking is: how are we preparing our new managers for these conversations? Not whether we have a performance management policy. Whether the people we are asking to manage others have actually been taught how to address a problem directly, calmly, and early.

In most organizations, the honest answer is no. And the cost of that gap is visible in every team quietly managed around a problem its manager is unwilling to face.

About the Author

Shelley Lewis-Mercier is a CPA, MBA (HR Specialization), and ICF-Certified Coach with over 30 years of experience leading finance and HR teams. As a former CFO and senior HR executive, she has navigated the full range of difficult conversations that management requires and spent years helping organizations understand what it costs when those conversations do not happen. She is the founder of Foundation First, a manager readiness program for first-time managers in finance and accounting.

Learn more at manager-readiness.com.

Endnotes

1. Harris Poll for Interact. Survey of 2,000 U.S. adults. Reported in: "Survey: 69% of Managers Are Uncomfortable Communicating with Employees." Harvard Business Review, 2016. The finding that 69 percent of managers are often uncomfortable communicating with employees and 37 percent dislike giving direct feedback if the employee might respond negatively has been widely cited and replicated in subsequent research.

https://hbr.org/2016/11/survey-69-of-managers-are-uncomfortable communicating-with-employees

2. McKendree, J. "Leaning Into the Discomfort: Managing Difficult Conversations at Work." Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership, University of Notre Dame. The finding that more than 80 percent of workers are holding back from at least one challenging conversation at work, and that most avoid it due to lack of confidence, is drawn from CCL research cited in this piece. https://ethicalleadership.nd.edu/thought-leadership/leaning-into-the-discomfort-managing-difficult conversations-at-work

3. Speakwise. "Workplace Conflict Statistics 2026." Speakwiseapp.com, April 2026. Draws on multiple peer-reviewed and industry sources on the organizational cost of unresolved workplace conflict. The findings that 51 percent of employees have wanted to quit due to conflict and 41 percent followed through, and that only 30 percent of leaders feel confident managing conflict effectively, are drawn from this compilation.

https://speakwiseapp.com/blog/workplace-conflict-statistics