Conflict as Infrastructure

A few years ago, I worked on a team that brought in two different consultants. Both of them said the same thing: this was one of the most conflict-averse teams they had ever worked with.

With one exception. Me.

I hate conflict. I always have. But my way of dealing with it was to address it head on. And when a culture refuses to deal with conflict and one person keeps saying, “Hey, we need to talk about this,” it creates a lot of struggle.

Leadership eventually offered one-on-one coaching to all eight of us. I was the only one who stayed with it. So for a year, I grew. I worked on my own patterns, because to be clear, I had contributed to our problems too.

And at the end of that year, here’s what I saw: I was ready to deal with conflict. The team wasn’t. I had to leave because I realized I can’t work on a team that isn’t willing to address the issues sitting right in front of us.

That’s when I stopped seeing conflict as the problem.

The Belief That’s Costing You

Most organizations believe good teams don’t have much conflict. The goal is smoothness. And when conflict does surface, it’s treated as a crisis: contain it, mediate it, hand it to HR, get back to normal.

Here’s what I’ve learned instead: conflict is not a failure to prevent. It’s infrastructure. It’s a capacity you build, maintain, and trust, just like your financial systems or your technology.

Because the teams with the least visible conflict often have the most underground conflict.

One of my clients told me at the start, “I don’t know if we even really need you, but coaching is a positive thing, so let’s do this.” They described an organization where people loved each other, were for each other, and had worked through hard situations. And all of that was true.

What they weren’t talking about was all the conflict they were denying. Not covering up. Denying. It had become so normal they couldn’t see it anymore.

It took months to uncover. And by the end of twelve months together, we had pinpointed the root issues and built a plan projected to save them up to three million dollars. Most of that number was retention. They were heading into a restructure, and every person stayed, even as roles shifted. The rest was the cost of communication breakdowns that all traced back to the same source: conversations everyone had been avoiding.

The quiet wasn’t healthy. The quiet was costly.

The Math Is Not on Your Side

The research here is sobering, and it matches everything I see in the room.

Toxic workplace cultures cost US employers an estimated $223 billion in turnover over five years, according to SHRM’s 2019 analysis. Christine Porath’s research on workplace energy found that de-energizing relationships drag performance down four to seven times more than energizing relationships lift it. Read that again. One unaddressed toxic dynamic is not offset by several good ones. The math is asymmetric.

And in Porath and Pearson’s research on incivility, among people treated poorly at work, 78 percent said their commitment to the organization declined, 66 percent said their performance declined, and nearly half intentionally decreased their effort.

I lived that asymmetry. I like to think I brought some positive energy to my old team while I was growing. But the conflict avoiders were impacting our team’s ability to move forward far more than I could ever lift it.

This is exactly why CEOs tolerate toxic high performers for too long. CEOs watch numbers, and a toxic performer shows up in the lagging indicators, not the leading ones. If someone is driving sales or production, the dashboard is deceiving you while the exponential cost accumulates in everyone around them.

Zoom out far enough and you see the aggregate price. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report estimates disengagement costs the world economy $8.9 trillion, roughly 9 percent of global GDP. That’s the bill for all the capacity that never got built.

Why Training Doesn’t Fix It

So organizations respond the way organizations do: a conflict resolution training, a communication workshop, a set of scripts.

And the scripts fail the moment someone gets activated. Because when stress rises, the nervous system overrides insight. Knowing how to have a hard conversation is different than having the capacity to have one.

Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety was the single biggest differentiator of their high-performing teams, the foundation everything else rests on. Amy Edmondson’s foundational research showed why: safety drives the learning behavior that drives performance. And Dr. Stephen Porges’s work on neuroception explains the mechanism underneath it all. The nervous system learns safety through repeated evidence. One safe conversation is not enough. One offsite is not enough.

That’s why conflict capacity has to be infrastructure, not an intervention.

How to Start Building It

You don’t have to wait for a crisis or a consultant to begin. Here are the four pillars of a conflict-capable culture, and where you can start on each one this quarter.

1. Help every leader learn their own wiring. Conflict capability starts with self-knowledge, not scripts. Ask each person on your leadership team to answer two questions: What reliably triggers me, and what is my triggered response? Do I attack, appease, disappear, or rush to fix? Then go one layer deeper: where did I learn that response? Those past experiences are the clue to rewriting the pattern. If you want a guided starting point, I offer a free nervous system audit that walks you through exactly this. It’s the fastest way I know to make your own wiring visible, and it’s where most of my clients begin.

2. Create a way for truth to travel safely. Underground conflict stays underground because people don’t believe the truth is safe to say. Start by asking your team, one-on-one, “What are we not talking about?” and then do the hardest thing: receive the answer without defending. Here’s the honest limit, though. People rarely tell their boss the whole truth, because you sign their reviews. This is where a neutral third party changes the math. When I meet confidentially with every person on a team, nothing gets attributed. I share patterns, never sources. And when I ask clients what helped most, this is what they name: having an objective person they could tell the truth to without fear it would be used against them.

3. Make the group the training ground. This is the part individual development misses. If one person works on themselves while the group stays the same, the team dynamics don’t change. I know, because I was that person. So don’t outsource your hard conversations to offsites and side channels. Bring one real, live disagreement into the room on purpose, at a moment when everyone is resourced, and practice staying in it. And know the ceiling here too: a group can’t be its own emotional anchor. In my work, I hold that role. I know what will trigger each person and what their defense will be, and I can guide them into a new response in real time. Their brain gets updated by the experience itself. They realize that they don’t have to default into fight or flight because they are safe.

4. Make being human a standing practice. This one you can start tomorrow. Every time your team gathers, open with “How are you coming in?” Because the brain works from the bottom up. Physical needs must be met first, then relational needs: people need to know they matter, they’re wanted, they belong. Only when those needs are met can the smart brain do the work they were hired to do. Making space for someone’s frustration doesn’t mean fixing it. It means saying to them: you’re welcome here, even frustrated. As a human, you matter.

Two of these, the self-knowledge and the check-in practice, you can begin on your own this week. The other two are where most teams hit a ceiling, because truth needs a safe carrier and groups need an anchor. That’s the work I do with leadership teams.

Build It Before the Fire

Here’s the counterintuitive part: the best time to build conflict capacity is on the team that isn’t in crisis. You don’t pour a foundation during the earthquake.

If your team is quiet right now, I’d gently ask you to get curious about what kind of quiet it is. Is it genuine health or conflict that’s gone underground?

A simple first step: take the free nervous system audit at lp.braverestoration.org/executivecapacity-audit. It will show you your own wiring, the patterns you bring into every hard conversation, and awareness is where all of this work begins.

And if what you find raises bigger questions, that’s worth a conversation. Reach out at julia@braverestoration.org.

References

• Society for Human Resource Management (2019). Toxic Workplace Cultures Are Costing Employers Billions. shrm.org
• Porath, C., Gerbasi, A., & Parker, A. (2016). The Hidden Toll of Workplace Incivility. McKinsey Quarterly, December 2016. mckinsey.com
• Gerbasi, A., Porath, C., Parker, A., Spreitzer, G., & Cross, R. (2015). Destructive De-energizing Relationships: How Thriving Buffers Their Effect on Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(5), 1423–1433.
• Porath, C., & Pearson, C. (2013). The Price of Incivility. Harvard Business Review, 91(1). hbr.org
• Pearson, C., & Porath, C. (2009). The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It. Portfolio/Penguin.
• Google re:Work (2015). Understanding Team Effectiveness (Project Aristotle). rework.withgoogle.com
• Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
• Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. gallup.com