Leadership involves conflict! While it’s never a pleasant thing to experience, the fact is that as a leader you will experience conflict. Just think about it for a second, leaders move people from where they are to another place. You are taking someone from a place of comfort to an unknown. Where they are is comfortable, but where you are asking them to go makes them uneasy.

Wanting to be comfortable isn’t their fault. It’s just human nature. But just because being comfortable is human nature it doesn’t mean that it’s ok. There’s no situation where the status quo is acceptable when it comes to organizational health. You’re either evolving or devolving. Organizationally status quo = stagnation.

Your job as a leader is to lead! That means you will have to conflict with someone who refuses to move forward. They like it the way it is, or was. To them change means they lose control or influence. Change is a risk to them and their cool kid status. Left unchallenged they will poison the organizational water.

If you leave them in place, the fault is your’s, not their’s. Lead them forward or move them out, but avoiding the conflict isn’t an option.