A conflict resolution facilitator explains what avoiding conflict is actually costing workplace teams
Most teams pride themselves on getting along. Meetings wrap up with nods instead of pushback, feedback gets softened until it barely registers, and the hard conversation about the underperforming project or the difficult hire gets pushed to "next week."
Priya Parker, a Brooklyn, New York-based conflict resolution facilitator and the author of "The Art of Fighting," has spent 25 years inside organizations that mistake this peace for harmony. In her view, it's usually the opposite.
Parker calls it toxic politeness, and she said the real question is what's driving it.
"I think if there's a presence of fear, that's what you need to ask. Fear from repercussions, fear from not feeling safe individually, fear from punishment, fear from negative consequences. There's often fear as an ingredient behind toxic politeness, fear of a negative outcome from actually speaking the truth," she said.
That description is consistent with decades of research on psychological safety, which describes what happens when teams believe it's safe to speak up, disagree or admit a mistake without facing punishment.
The fear behind the politeness
Fear like that tends to push out one thing first: voice. Parker pointed to economist Albert Hirschman's landmark 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which describes three ways people respond when something they're part of starts to decline. They can leave, they can stay and go quiet, or they can speak up, what Hirschman called voice. Parker illustrated it with a simple product example, a razor that isn't as good as it used to be.
"One option is exit. I'm no longer a Gillette gal, I'm going to choose Bic instead. The second is loyalty. I don't care what happens, I am a Gillette person through and through. You can cut my leg off and I will always be here," Parker said. "But there's a third move, which he calls voice. The organizations that last over time and stay relevant are the ones that cultivate voice and don't punish it."
Toxic politeness often looks like people settling into that loyalty option, staying without ever really speaking up. It's a pattern Parker sees often in her client work. Parker said her clients consistently describe the opposite problem, too much politeness, not too little.
"My clients will be the first ones to tell me that they suffer from unhealthy peace, from too much politeness, and that they're unpracticed at even small disagreements, let alone large ones," she said. "So many workplaces oscillate between saying nothing at all and then escalating and burning the house down. It's quiet, it's quiet, it's quiet, and then there's an explosion."
Why workplaces avoid healthy conflict
Parker said organizations tend to treat conflict skills as an individual leadership competency rather than something a whole team needs to practice together. Most invest in coaching managers on running a meeting or delivering a presentation, and leave the harder skill, disagreeing well, unaddressed.
"Conflict is dangerous. It can be messy. And when we only have a punitive lens on conflict, we assume it's something to banish. So we don't create the collective rituals, skills and structures for teams to build healthy conflict," Parker said. "Right now, the only conflict rituals most workplaces have are basically saying nothing, suing each other, or union negotiations."
That imbalance shows up in a widening disconnect between managers and employees on workplace engagement, with managers often believing they're communicating clearly while employees experience something else.
Parker said the cost of avoiding conflict shows up most clearly in decision making.
"Lack of conflict often means bad decisions are getting made, or decisions take much longer, or decisions don't get made at all. We figure out what we think and come to better ideas by arguing, by disagreeing, by bringing up different opinions," she said.
That blind spot isn't unique to conflict. Separate research has found that cultural issues are often underestimated inside workplaces, often because organizations underinvest in developing leaders who empower others.
Building a culture of healthy heat
Parker said the solution starts well above any individual training module. She laid out a three-part framework for leaders who want to change how their organization handles disagreement.
"The first is to change the conversation around conflict, to frame it to leadership as a crucial daily skill within highly functional teams. The second is to train not just experts, but to train everybody in conflict-competent skills. The third is to act intentionally and build cultures of healthy heat," Parker said.
Healthy heat, as Parker uses the term, means disagreeing with real care and respect. That's the alternative to the silence-then-explosion pattern described above, and it starts with a basic shift in how conflict itself gets seen. Most organizations still treat conflict as a sign something has gone wrong, a breakdown to manage rather than a normal part of how teams figure out what they think. That assumption is what turns useful disagreement into something to avoid.
"Conflict is not sin," she said. "Held well, it's actually how we change, how we grow, how we figure out who we are."
For leaders who want to learn more about cultivating healthy heat in their organizations, Parker covers it in Group Life, her Substack newsletter, which recently featured a webinar specifically on the topic.
