The conversation you’re avoiding is holding your university team back

Difficult conversations in Higher Education

If you are a leader or manager in Higher Education, you don’t need a report to tell you that the pace of change is relentless. Across the UK, university teams are navigating constant volatility, from financial deficits to complex restructures.

In this environment, ‘change fatigue’ is a real barrier to progress. When everything feels urgent, the very thing that could help is often avoided: honest, difficult conversations. We tell ourselves we’re protecting our teams from more stress by staying silent, but the opposite is true.

Avoiding these discussions – whether about a missed deadline or a departmental shift – is exactly what holds your team back. By reframing these moments as opportunities rather than threats, you can unblock the energy and collaboration your institution needs right now.

The cost of silence in HE

There is a lot of change, transformation and rapid improvement in Higher Education in the UK right now.

Even the mention of change can spark anxiety about job security, about roles, about workload. Before you even start talking, people are primed for conflict. That’s a scary prospect.

This baseline anxiety is not helped by the state of workforce wellbeing: the 2025 Teacher Wellbeing Index reported that 76% of all education staff are stressed, with half stating that their organisational culture negatively impacts their mental health.

In our work supporting change in HE we often see a similar pattern. ‘Consultations’ that feel performative because they’ve been rushed to gloss over anything uncomfortable. The result is frustration and resistance: people feel unheard, powerless, adrift, angry. Exactly the outcome you feared.

The truth is though, if you’ve been avoiding the smaller day-to-day difficult conversations – the missed deadline, the tension in a team meeting, the underperforming colleague – you reduce the capacity to have these ‘bigger’ ones.

The invisible debt of unresolved conflict

Have you ever worked with a ‘difficult’ colleague? Have you waited in vain for your boss to ‘deal with it’? Or avoided doing it yourself, because you are just thinking about the worst that could happen?

Whether it’s a faculty-wide reorganisation or a single team member’s negativity, the danger of staying silent is the same. The people affected by a difficult colleague build up a debt of resentment, waste energy working around them, and absorb their negativity. Things look functional from the outside so you can justify not acting. But what’s your staff turnover like?

This isn’t just a cultural issue; it’s also a productivity one. Research from Acas shows that workplace conflict costs UK employers between £500 million and £2.3 billion and estimates that when conflict leads to an avoidable resignation the cost to the organisation is about £31,000.

Reframing conflict as a superpower

It’s tempting to imagine that by ‘not going there’, by not having that difficult conversation, you’re keeping things safe – but actually that’s only because you haven’t worked out ways to do it well.

In a university context – where transformation and pressure is everywhere – you simply can’t afford to stay stuck. Avoiding difficult conversations leaves projects stalled, teams frustrated, and blockers to change piling up.

The longer conversations are avoided, the more friction, miscommunication, and wasted energy accumulates.

What if, instead of seeing these conversations as something to avoid, you saw them as opportunities to make things better? It might sound crazy, but if you can see your way to that mindset shift, you can unblock a lot of energy, progress and collaboration.

How teams get stuck

The words ‘conflict’ or ‘storming’ (from Tuckman’s team development model) are really loaded. It’s hard to see how they could ever be positive. But rather than seeing conflict as a threat, if you see it as the bringing together of differences it becomes less negative.

Developing a practice of bringing differences into the light is a superpower we can all learn to harness. It starts with the recognition that no two people see the world in the same way. I’m responsible for good student outcomes, you’re responsible for cost reduction. You want to simplify your processes, I don’t want to pick up the work your team is no longer resourced to do.

Everyone’s point of view is reasonable from where they are sitting.

‘Conflict’ in some form is inevitable when you’re trying to do anything complex. Teams have different ways of working or different KPIs. People feel unsafe, their identities threatened. Learning to sort out disagreements is something that you have to be ready to do and need to learn to do well.

And it’s not so hard, most of us have been doing it since we could crawl.

The trap of the mental rehearsal

I recently spoke to a leader who was quietly frustrated about a team member who prioritises the wrong thing, or is too detailed: when a three-point bullet summary is wanted, they deliver a five-page document that the leader doesn’t have time to read. They needed to raise it with them, but kept not quite doing it.

When faced with something like this people often rehearse the conversation over and over in their head, trying out different ways it could go. You might get trapped there, imagining all the ways it could go wrong, putting it off or waiting until the moment is right.

And while you’re doing that, the real conversation isn’t happening – your colleague doesn’t get the chance to be different and your frustration continues to fester.

You are not being as kind or honest or courageous as you might be – to yourself or to them.

Avoiding the issue strengthens the invisible barriers that keep you all stuck. A manager might be quietly seething because someone isn’t delivering, or a team member might feel unheard. That stuff burns slow, and deep.

All that energy on worrying and imagining unhappy outcomes instead of solving problems and getting work done.

What’s the worst that can happen? Actually, honestly, it’s THIS: what’s already happening because you are not talking about it.

The good news? The majority of the time, having the conversation goes way better than you expect.

And even if it doesn’t solve everything, it makes future conversations easier. If not solved, progress at least.

A personal lesson: when the problem was me

Here’s an example from my own life. My first job was in radio. I did well and at a young age I was promoted to head up a local station. A few months in, during the regular weekly team meeting, I asked about any problems. There was an awkward silence. After a pause, someone finally said:

“Well the thing is Steve, there is a problem. And it’s you… You’re a nightmare. One minute you’re cracking jokes and being a laugh. The next you’re all uptight. Grumpy. Aggressive. We’re sick of it. We don’t know whether we’re coming or going. It’s horrible working with you, Steve.”

I’ll be honest, my first instinct was panic, then defensiveness, then desperately grasping at straws for a way out of it. I found one.

I was completely taken aback but I managed to respond with something we could all do: I asked the team for their proposals for what could be better and what they could do to help that. Later at the suggestion of my boss, I asked them to add what they loved about working there.

And I did it too.

A few days later we read out our answers. Without interrupting, without justifying. The more we spoke, the more we all realised: this wasn’t an attack, it was a mutual shout for help. We were working out what was holding us all back.

It was a turning point.

We started to talk openly, to acknowledge frustrations, to work on the issues together. We all felt heard, and I felt a clarity I hadn’t had before. What began as a moment of conflict became a moment of connection.

From that point on, meetings were different. It didn’t solve every problem overnight, but it created a culture where difficult conversations became opportunities to improve, rather than threats to avoid.

That lesson has stuck with me ever since.

How this plays out in teams

That same principle plays out with the clients we work with:

At one faculty, the leadership team went through a formal consultation on a reorganisation. On paper, the process was followed perfectly: “But we did the consultation, Steve,” they told me. They did, but it was performative. They only succeeded in convincing colleagues they hadn’t heard a word. Frustration built. Meetings became tense, people shouted. Had the leaders been willing to really listen and create space for candid feedback, for genuine concerns to be raised, the process could have been smoother, resistance evaporating instead of solidifying.

At another institution, one senior leader I worked with dreaded giving honest feedback. They imagined arguments, upset colleagues, even blow-ups. When they finally had the conversation, it was calm, constructive, and revealing. It didn’t magically fix everything, but it cleared the air, allowed both sides to feel heard, and made future conversations easier.

Even the hardest conversations – like discussing someone losing their job, or giving difficult feedback to someone whose behaviour has been challenging – can lead to unexpectedly positive outcomes.

The act of talking, listening, and acknowledging each other’s perspective can form an allyship, even in difficult circumstances.

Moving from friction to collaboration

If this resonates, here are a few questions to consider:

Which conversations are you replaying in your head instead of having?
Where is your team stuck because of unspoken issues?
Which discussion could move your team from friction to collaboration?

7 guidelines for a good conversation mindset

However, before you jump straight in and have that difficult conversation – it’s worth pausing to check on your assumptions.

If you think you know what’s going on for the other person, take a breath. Instead start with curiosity, generosity and respect, it’ll demonstrate that you value them enough to find out more. That is a good foundation for progress.

Here are seven guidelines for a good conversation mindset:

Listen first: ensure people feel heard, especially when they are angry. Irritation is usually a sign of an unmet need.
Assume you don’t know: Your ‘facts’ about why someone is underperforming are usually just guesses. Ask them instead.
Clarify your intention at the start. Begin by saying: “My goal is for us to work together better, not to place blame.”
Admit your own anxiety, and commit to trying and sticking with it even if it gets hard. Acknowledge your own contribution: your behaviour shapes the conversation and their experience too.
Set simple ground rules: pause if needed, agree to keep trying, clarify next steps.
Be aware of any power imbalance. How can you make this space safe for everyone?
Stop imagining the worst, start imagining the best. Assumptions are guesses, not facts.

Difficult conversations are iterative: the first one rarely solves everything, but it creates a pathway for progress to be made together.

What you can do: a call to action

If a difficult conversation is keeping you up at night, here’s one practical step you can take:
Try to reframe it as an opportunity. What would be better if you managed to get unstuck?

Even if you can’t fix it all, having the conversation will move things forward and will often help more people than you expect – you, your team, and your wider organisation.

Often the worst-case scenario is far less likely than you imagine. And the act of having the conversation is often the best thing that can happen.

At ThenSomehow we help universities and other HE organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.