Why Your Managers Avoid Difficult Conversations,  And What It’s Costing You

Earlier this week, I was on a call with a marketing team I manage. I went into the meeting with a clear intention: I needed to address the gap between what we had planned and what had actually been delivered.
The plan was specific: a certain number of videos and posts within a week.

The output fell significantly short of the target. And it wasn’t at the standard I expected.
As these conversations often go, the team started by highlighting what had gone well.
They explained the areas where they had delivered, the few hiccups they had encountered, and why they hadn’t been able to keep up with the numbers.

“There were some small technical errors that can happen.”

And then something interesting happened: as the conversation progressed, I started accommodating their perspective. Instead of staying with the performance gap I had intended to address, I softened the conversation.

The meeting ended with:

“Let’s try our best to ensure we post more this month.”

And just like that, the difficult conversation had been avoided.

The uncomfortable truth about difficult conversations,

This happens in organisations more often than we like to admit.

A manager sees the missed target.
The quality issue.
The repeated behaviour.
The lack of ownership.
The team conflict.

But instead of addressing it directly, they soften the message.

Not because they don’t care.

Often, because they care too much about how the conversation will land.

And in Tanzania, there is a cultural layer to this.

We operate in a largely high-context culture, where communication is often shaped by relationships, hierarchy, respect, and what is left unsaid. We learn to read the room. To preserve harmony. To avoid embarrassing someone publicly or making a relationship unnecessarily difficult.

We are taught to be nice. To be kind. To be understanding.

And sometimes, honesty is anything but comfortable.

A manager starts thinking:
Maybe I don’t have all the facts.
Maybe I should be more understanding.
Maybe this isn’t the right time.
Maybe they’ll take it personally.
Maybe I’ll damage the relationship.

So the conversation gets postponed.
Or diluted.
Or transformed into something that sounds positive but says very little.
“Good effort… just keep improving.”
“You're doing well, but there are a few things to work on.”
“We should probably talk about this at some point.”

The intention is often good: protect the relationship, preserve dignity, avoid unnecessary tension.
But the unintended consequence is that the employee leaves the conversation without knowing what actually needs to change.

And this is where the real cost begins.

The cost of avoiding feedback is rarely immediate

A missed expectation today may seem insignificant.
But if it isn’t addressed, it becomes tomorrow’s pattern.
Then next month’s frustration.
Then a difficult appraisal.
Then a performance improvement conversation.
And eventually, perhaps, an exit.

The problem is that by the time the organisation formally addresses the issue, the employee may be hearing the feedback for the first time.

This is particularly important in a context like ours.
The 2023 World Bank Enterprise Survey found that 74.7% of surveyed formal businesses in Tanzania reported having no formal training programme for permanent, full-time employees.

At the same time, evidence from Tanzania’s informal sector points strongly to the importance of communication: in the World Bank’s 2023–24 survey of informal businesses in Dar es Salaam, 64.4% identified interpersonal and communication skills as the most important skill for succeeding in business.

The message is important:
Organisations need people to perform, but performance doesn’t improve through targets alone.

People need clarity.
They need to know what good looks like.
They need to know when they’re falling short.
And they need a manager who can tell them early enough for the feedback to be useful.

This is not just an HR issue
We often place performance management, employee engagement and feedback under the HR umbrella.
But the actual experience happens between a manager and an employee.

The ILO’s work on the changing workplace in Tanzania has highlighted the interconnected importance of workplace relations, skills development, knowledge sharing, productivity and human resource management. And global evidence reinforces just how much influence managers have.

Gallup research estimates that managers account for 70% of the variance in team-level employee engagement. More recent Gallup research found global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, with declining manager engagement accounting for much of the recent drop.

So the question isn’t simply:
“Are our employees engaged?”

A better question is:
“What are our managers doing every day that shapes the experience and performance of their teams?”

Because your culture is not experienced through the values written on the wall.
It is experienced through the conversations your managers have or don’t have every day.

I saw this play out in the very situation I described.

The truth was left unsaid in that meeting.
Afterwards, tensions started piling up.
Requests were met with slower responses.
Frustration grew on both sides.

Eventually, the manager was considering letting the employee go and, and by the time the conversation finally happened, the employee had already reached the conclusion that they might want to leave the role themselves.
Of course, there were other factors at play, including the employee being extremely stretched.
But it made me reflect on something:

How much time, tension and uncertainty could have been avoided if the feedback had been timely, specific, behavioural and actionable?
That is the difference between feedback that feels good and feedback that actually helps someone perform better.

Feedback is not about being brutally honest
This is another misconception worth challenging.
Giving feedback doesn’t mean saying everything you think.
It doesn’t mean being harsh.
It doesn’t mean embarrassing someone in the name of accountability.

And it certainly doesn’t mean waiting until an appraisal to unload everything that has frustrated you over the past six months.

Good feedback requires judgement.
It requires knowing how to describe the behaviour without attacking the person.
It requires being specific enough that the other person knows what needs to change.
It requires being able to listen without immediately abandoning the performance issue.
And it requires the courage to stay in the conversation when it becomes uncomfortable.

The goal isn’t to make the conversation comfortable.
The goal is to make the conversation useful.
Because the conversation you avoid today becomes the problem you manage tomorrow.
This is why feedback cannot be an annual HR process.
It has to become a management practice.

A regular rhythm of:
Expectation → Observation → Feedback → Action → Follow-up.

When that rhythm exists, performance conversations become less dramatic.
The employee isn’t blindsided.
The manager isn’t carrying months of frustration.
And appraisals become a reflection of conversations that have already happened rather than a surprise verdict.

This is exactly why we created Thrive on Feedback.
At WhyLead, we’ve designed Thrive on Feedback, a two-day, in-person workshop for managers who want to become more confident and effective in the conversations that matter.

The workshop is designed around the real tensions managers face:
How do I tell someone they’re falling short without damaging the relationship?
How do I give feedback that is specific enough to change behaviour?
What do I do when the other person becomes defensive?
How do I coach rather than simply criticise?
How do I create a feedback rhythm so performance doesn’t only get discussed at appraisal time?

Because we don’t need more managers who know that feedback is important.
We need managers who can actually do it.

Thrive on Feedback takes place 3rd–4th September in Dar es Salaam.
Two days. Practical tools. Real conversations. Real practice.
Seats are limited.

If your managers are responsible for performance, they cannot afford to keep avoiding the conversations that shape it.

Sometimes, the conversation you’re avoiding is the one your team needs most.