Episode 17 - Conflict at Work: Amy Gallo on How to Have the Hard Conversation You’ve Been Avoiding

May 19

Most organizations don't have too much conflict – they have too little. For Amy Gallo, author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People) and contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, the default mode in most workplaces is “artificial harmony”: teams that look aligned on the surface while real disagreements, unspoken feedback, and simmering resentments pile up underneath. Her prescription isn't to create more friction for its own sake; it's to help leaders understand that avoiding conflict isn't actually the safe path, it just feels precariously like one.

Why do leaders avoid conflict — and what does it actually cost?

Something like 76% of employees report using avoidance as their primary conflict management style. Managers estimate spending 20 to 40% of their time handling conflicts, yet nearly half report feeling unprepared to address them effectively. And workplace conflict costs U.S. employers an estimated $359 billion annually in lost productivity.

Turns out, avoidance has a price – and "keeping the peace" and "actually having peace" live in two very different zip codes.

Amy Gallo, a Harvard Business Review editor and the author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People), has spent a decade documenting what that price looks like in practice. Teams that look harmonious turn out to be running on what Patrick Lencioni famously called "artificial harmony" – the appearance of alignment with none of the substance. It’s basically the organizational equivalent of a Potemkin village – everything looks fine from the outside, but things might be crumbling on the inside.

“I can think of one, maybe two clients who've reached out to me because there's too much conflict. More often, I'm brought in because there's not enough.”

– Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review editor and author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People)

The irony is that the leaders most likely to avoid conflict are often the ones who got promoted precisely because they were “easy to work with.” They learned early that harmony was rewarded. By the time they're running a team or a company, that instinct is deeply grooved. But it's working against them.

Amy's framework for breaking the pattern starts with a simple recalibration: before you decide to stay silent, actually evaluate the cost of staying silent. Many of us instinctively weigh the risks of speaking up. We rarely apply the same scrutiny to the risks of not speaking up. What feedback isn't being given? What decision is being made without the information you're withholding? What relationship is slowly drifting because neither person will name what's wrong?

Should leaders focus on being liked or being respected?

The pursuit of likability is one of the most common roots of conflict avoidance at the executive level. Leaders who have been rewarded throughout their careers for being pleasant, collaborative, and easy to get along with often find, once they reach the top, that those same instincts are now costing them. They don't give the feedback that needs to be given. They keep the underperformer too long. They let the client relationship limp along rather than have the honest conversation that might reset it.

“The most talented executives are easy to get along with, but also are willing to say [the hard things]. It's the difference between being respected and being liked, and way too many leaders focus on being likable instead of being respected.”

– Amy Gallo

Direct, even uncomfortable honesty, delivered with care and self-awareness, tends to build stronger relationships than the kind of frictionless agreeableness that masquerades as warmth. When you bring up a hard topic, you're not risking the relationship; you're demonstrating that you trust it enough to stress-test it.

Amy also points to an emerging threat that's accelerating this dynamic: AI. Tools that respond exactly as we want, that validate rather than challenge, that can be reprogrammed the moment they produce an inconvenient output. Which means they're quietly conditioning us to be less tolerant of the normal human messiness that real collaboration requires. We've essentially built a coworker who will never push back, never have a bad day, and never tell us our idea needs work. What could possibly go wrong?!

“We're now all dealing with tools that are telling us exactly what we want to hear and we're being trained to be intolerant of people who don't tell us exactly what we want to hear.”

– Amy Gallo

How do you have a hard conversation without damaging the relationship?

The practical question underneath all of this is: how do you actually do it?

It’s all about behavior, not mindset. Research from Julia Minson at Harvard Kennedy School on conversational receptivity shows that you don't have to fully believe you're open to a different perspective in order to demonstrate it. Specific phrases like “tell me more,” “why do you feel that way,” and “help me understand” can shift both the other person's experience of the conversation and, over time, your own relationship to disagreement.

For leaders who want to shift the culture on their teams, Amy argues the work starts with honest self-examination. What is your own relationship with conflict, and how is it showing up in how you lead? Are you modeling the directness you claim to want? And perhaps most critically, are you taking responsibility not just for your relationship with your direct reports, but for the relationships they have with each other?

“Your team looks to you at every point to see how you behave, to determine how they should interact with one another.”

– Amy Gallo

The leader who says “I want more debate” while visibly shutting down at the first sign of pushback isn't creating psychological safety. They're creating a more elaborate version of the silence they were trying to fix.

One question she recommends leaders build into every significant decision: what if I'm wrong? Not as a rhetorical gesture, but as a genuine invitation. It's a small act of humility that signals something important: that this team is a place where being wrong is survivable, and where the conversation that follows is worth having.

What to do this week:

The next time you find yourself about to let something go – a piece of feedback you haven't given, a conversation you've been postponing, a dynamic on your team you've been hoping will resolve itself – stop and make a list.

Write down the actual cost of staying silent: what keeps not getting done, what the other person keeps not knowing, what the relationship slowly loses. Then write down the cost of speaking up. Compare them honestly. We’re willing to bet that the silence column is longer than you think. (It usually is. Silence is sneaky that way.)

Related Episodes

– Toxic Leadership Explained: What Makes a Bad Boss with Mita Mallick

– Judgment at Work: A Framework for Better Leadership Decisions with Sir Andrew Likierman

– Lead Like a Learner: “Squiggly Careers” and the Power of Vulnerability with Helen Tupper