3 conversations you are avoiding and how to start them

You know the moment. Someone says something in a meeting, or fails to say it, and the room goes quiet. People study their notebooks. Someone reaches for their phone. The conversation moves on, a little faster than it should. Nothing happened. That is exactly the problem. Most leaders treat such silences as awkward gaps to be bridged. And they are gaps: something should be there, and isn’t. What should be there is the thing that everyone is avoiding. What we avoid does not leave the room. It settles into how people behave, what they will risk, how much of themselves they bring to work. Over time it drains the energy of everyone present, including the person at the front who chose to let it pass. In thirty years of working with leaders, and plenty of years getting it wrong myself, I have found that awkward silences tend to be a way of avoiding three conversations. 1. The elephant This is the conversation everyone knows is needed and nobody will start. The well-liked colleague who is underperforming and costing the company far more than money. The strategy that stopped making sense a year ago and is still being blindly pursued. The elephant is rarely a secret. Everyone can see its grey and wrinkly mass. The cost is the energy spent walking around it, week after week, pretending the room is empty—and what it blocks that might otherwise be possible. Naming the elephant is simpler than it feels. You do not need a grand confrontation. You need one person willing to say, without blame, what everyone already knows. “I think there’s something we keep not discussing here.” That sentence gives the rest of the room permission to breathe. 2. The hangover A hangover is a past event that still shapes how people behave. A botched reorganisation. A leader who departed under a cloud. That Covid-era downsizing where valued colleagues left and were never replaced in kind. The event is over, but its impact lives on in the caution, the cynicism, the quiet assumption that this is how thing