When I sit with leadership teams early in the year, I often observe two conversations happening at once.
There’s the visible one—goals, priorities, plans. And then there’s the quieter one, happening beneath the surface. The issues no one quite names. The tensions people assume will resolve themselves once things get busy.
Most leaders don’t avoid these things intentionally. They’re optimistic. They want to give people the benefit of the doubt. They’re focused on moving forward. So certain challenges get mentally filed under “We’ll deal with that later.”
Later has a way of becoming costly…
When teams struggle to execute, it’s rarely because they didn’t think hard enough about the strategy. More often than not, it’s because a people issue is being avoided— an unclear role, a strained relationship, a decision no one wants to own, a pattern everyone sees but no one addresses.
I see this often in my work with executive teams. The longer an issue is left unnamed, the more energy it quietly consumes. Meetings become heavier. Decisions slow down. People adjust their behavior in small ways to avoid discomfort. And the team normalizes it.
What often surprises leaders is not that the issue exists, but how much effort it takes to keep pretending it doesn’t.
Hope is not a strategy. Especially when it comes to people dynamics. The things we hope will resolve themselves usually don’t. They either resurface later with more force, or they quietly shape the culture in ways no one intended.
If you’re leading a team right now, ask yourself: what am I hoping will just work itself out this year? Not what’s broken. Not what’s loud. But what’s easy to ignore.
Then consider: what would change if I confronted it—calmly, directly, and without blame—before it becomes harder to address?
Leadership isn’t about having all the answers at the start of the year. It’s about acknowledging what’s already there and choosing not to look away.
The moments we avoid don’t disappear. They wait. And how we respond to them often matters more than the plans we’ve carefully laid out.