HOW TO LEAD: THE STUFF NOBODY TAUGHT YOU | PART 1 OF 10
By Sonia McDonald, CEO of LeadershipHQ
You know exactly which conversation I’m talking about.
It’s the one that pops into your head at 3am. The one you rehearsed in the shower on Tuesday and then didn’t have on Wednesday. The one you’ve mentally scheduled for “after the quarter,” “after the restructure”, “after they get through this rough patch at home.”
It’s been on your list for six weeks. Maybe six months. And every single day you don’t have it, it gets heavier, more complicated, and more expensive.
Here’s the part nobody says out loud: you’re not avoiding it because you don’t know what to say. You’re avoiding it because you don’t want to feel what you’ll feel while you say it.
Let’s fix that.
The price tag on “not today”
Avoidance feels free. It isn’t. It’s just billed later, with interest.
The research on this is brutal, and it’s been brutal for years. Employees spend around 2.8 hours a week dealing with unresolved conflict. Up to 85% of us experience some form of it at work. And in Australia, unresolved workplace conflict is estimated to cost the economy between $6 billion and $12 billion every year through lost productivity, absenteeism, turnover and the sheer volume of leadership time burned on disputes that could have been a ten-minute chat in week one.
Zoom in from the economy to your team and it gets more personal:
• 44% of managers delay difficult conversations for weeks or months. Around a third have postponed one for a month or more.
• Managers who delay see materially lower team performance — and 77% of employees living with ongoing unresolved conflict become disengaged.
• 45% of employees have taken sick leave to avoid conflict. Read that again. People are calling in sick to dodge a conversation that a leader should have handled.
• 60% of leaders have never had a single scrap of training on how to run one of these conversations.
That last statistic is the one I want you to sit with. Because the story we tell about leaders who avoid hard conversations is that they’re weak, or conflict-averse, or too nice. That’s mostly rubbish. Most of them were promoted because they were brilliant at the technical work, handed a team, and never taught the single skill the job actually runs on.
You weren’t taught this. That’s not a character flaw. But now that you know, staying untrained is a choice.
Why you’re really avoiding it
Before we get to the how, let’s be honest about the why. In my coaching work, the reasons leaders avoid a conversation almost always land in one of four buckets.
1. You think you’re protecting the relationship.
You’re not. You’re protecting your comfort and charging them for it. Avoidance doesn’t preserve a relationship; it hollows it out. Every day you say nothing, you’re making a private judgement about someone who has no idea they’re being judged. That’s not kindness. That’s a slow, silent betrayal dressed up as consideration.
2. You’ve done the same thing yourself.
This one’s uncomfortable, and it’s everywhere. Research has found that 74% of leaders agree it’s harder to raise an issue when they’ve done something similar in the past. If you’ve been chronically late to meetings, you will not pull someone up on their lateness. The hypocrisy tax is real — and it’s why self-awareness isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s an operational requirement.
3. You’re scared of getting it legally or emotionally wrong.
With the rise of psychosocial risk obligations here in Australia, plenty of leaders are frozen. They’re worried about saying the wrong thing, triggering a complaint, or creating exposure. So they say nothing — which is, ironically, the riskiest option available. Under WHS law, unmanaged conflict is a foreseeable hazard. Silence is not a defence.
4. You don’t have the words.
This is the only one that’s genuinely a skills gap, and it’s the easiest to solve. Most leaders don’t lack courage. They lack a script. So let’s build you one.
TRUE STORY
A CEO I coached — I’ll call her Kate — had an executive on her team who was quietly torching the culture. Not dramatically. No shouting, no incidents. He was just dismissive in meetings, slow to share information, and had a habit of making people feel small in ways that never quite made it into a formal complaint.
Kate had known for fourteen months.
When I asked her why she hadn’t said anything, she gave me every reason in the book. He was a top biller. The timing was never right. She didn’t want to lose him. And then, eventually, the real one: “Because I don’t think I can get through it without crying, and I can’t be the CEO who cries.”
In that fourteen months, she had lost four people from his division. Four. Two of them told her in their exit interviews exactly why they were leaving. She had the evidence sitting in a folder and still couldn’t make herself walk into his office.
So we prepared. We wrote the opening line — the actual words — and she said them out loud to me eleven times until her voice stopped shaking. We agreed on the three specific examples she’d use. We planned what she’d do if he got defensive and what she’d say if she felt herself getting emotional.
She had the conversation on a Thursday morning. It took nineteen minutes. He was shocked, then quiet, then he asked her why nobody had told him sooner.
That’s the line I want you to remember. Why nobody had told him sooner. He wasn’t a villain. He was a man who’d been allowed to fail for over a year because the person responsible for telling him was scared of nineteen uncomfortable minutes.
He’s still there. He’s better. And Kate told me the thing that changed wasn’t him — it was her. She said, “I stopped being afraid of my own team.”
How to actually do it
Here’s the framework I use with every leader I coach. It’s not complicated. It just has to be done, not admired.
Step one: Get clear on the one thing.
You cannot raise six issues at once. If you try, the person will defend the weakest one, and you’ll both lose. Write down, in a single sentence, the one behaviour or outcome that needs to change. If you can’t write it in a sentence, you’re not ready — you’re still venting.
Then gather two or three specific, observable examples. Not “You have an attitude problem.” Try “In the last three project meetings, you spoke over Priya each time she raised the timeline risk.”
Behaviour, not character. Character invites a fight. Behaviour invites a fix.
Step two: Write your opening line and say it out loud.
The first fifteen seconds determine the next thirty minutes. Most leaders wing the opener and immediately soften it into meaninglessness — which is how you end up with someone leaving your office thinking they got a compliment.
Say it out loud. In the car. In the shower. To your coach. Until it comes out steady.
Openers that work:
• “I’ve got something on my mind that I should have raised sooner. I want to talk about it properly.”
• “I need to give you some direct feedback because I think you deserve to hear it rather than guess at it.”
• “There’s a pattern I’ve noticed, and I want to understand it before I draw the wrong conclusion.”
Openers that wreck it:
• “Have you got a sec?” — no context, maximum dread.
• “Everyone’s been saying…” — you’ve just made them paranoid about the entire team.
• Twenty minutes of praise before the point. They will not hear the praise. They will only learn that your praise means bad news is coming.
Step three: Say it, then stop talking.
This is where most leaders blow it. They deliver the message and then, panicked by the silence, immediately start diluting it. “But look, it’s not a huge deal.” “Honestly, we all do it.” “Anyway, you’re doing great otherwise.”
Stop. Let the silence sit. It will feel like a decade. It will be four seconds. That silence is where the message lands, and if you fill it, you’ve just talked them out of hearing you.
Step four: Ask and mean it
“What’s your read on this?” You might be wrong. There might be context you don’t have — a health issue, a workload problem, a conflicting instruction from someone senior. A hard conversation isn’t a verdict delivery. It’s the start of a shared problem.
Listen properly. Not the fake listening where you’re just waiting for a gap to redeploy your argument.
Step five: Land the specific next step.
A conversation without an agreed action is just an awkward chat you’ll have to repeat. Before they leave, you both need to know what changes and what support they get and when you’re checking in. Put the check-in in the calendar while they’re still in the room.
When it goes sideways
Sometimes it does. Here’s your emergency kit.
• They cry. Don’t retract. Don’t apologise for raising it. Pause, offer water or a break, and hold the message. “Take your time. This is hard, and it’s still important.”
• They get angry. Lower your voice rather than raising it. “I can see this has landed hard. Let’s take twenty minutes and come back to it.” A pause is not a loss.
• They deflect onto someone else. “We can absolutely talk about that, and I’ll follow it up. Right now I want to stay on your part of it.”
• You get emotional. Say so. “I’m finding this hard because I care how it lands.” Naming it defuses it, and it’s not weakness. It’s the most human thing in the room.
• You realise mid-conversation that you were wrong. Say that too, on the spot. It will cost you nothing and earn you an enormous amount.
Your action points this week
• Name the conversation. Write down the person and the one sentence. Today.
• Work out the real reason you’ve been avoiding it. Protection? Hypocrisy? Fear? No words? Be honest — it changes how you prepare.
• Draft three specific, observable examples. If you can’t find three, you may have a story rather than a problem.
• Write your opening line and say it out loud five times.
• Book it. A real meeting, in the diary, in the next seven days. Not “sometime soon”. Diarised courage is the only kind that shows up.
• Afterwards, write down what you learned. That’s how the next one gets easier.
And here’s my challenge to you: the conversation you’re most afraid of is almost always the one your team most needs you to have. Not because they want to be corrected — because they want to know that you’ll tell them the truth. That’s what people mean when they say they trust a leader. They mean, ‘I know where I stand with you.’
Nineteen minutes, Kate. That’s what fourteen months of dread turned out to be worth.
Go and have it.
READY TO LEAD WITH MORE COURAGE?
This is exactly the work we do inside The Leadership Association—LeadershipHQ’s membership community for leaders who want to stop winging it and start leading with real courage, confidence and clarity.
Members get monthly live masterclasses, practical tools and scripts you can use the same day, a private community of leaders working through the same challenges, and direct access to me and my team when you need to prepare for the hard stuff.
Because leadership isn’t something you should have to figure out alone at 3am.
Join The Leadership Association today at https://theleadershipassociation.com/ — and let’s build your courage muscle together.
Sonia McDonald | CEO, LeadershipHQ | Leadership Coach, Keynote Speaker and Author
Next in the series — Part 2: How to hold someone accountable without becoming a micromanager.