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Q is for Quality Conversations That Move Things Forward
Welcome! This article is part of an A–Z series where I’m sharing reflections on the patterns I keep seeing in teams, leadership and workplace culture.
Not theory. Not tips. Just observations from real working life.
There is something I have noticed again and again in my work with teams and leaders...
It is rarely the big conversations that make the biggest difference.
More often, it is the conversation that happens five minutes earlier than it otherwise would have.
The conversation where someone says, “Can we just talk about what happened?”
The conversation where a manager stops making assumptions and gets curious.
The conversation where a team member feels able to say, “I’m struggling with this.”
Or the slightly uncomfortable conversation where two people finally say out loud what everyone else has already noticed.
For me, that is what a quality conversation is.
It isn't necessarily comfortable. It isn't about everyone agreeing. And it certainly isn't about having the perfect words.
It is about creating enough honesty, curiosity and trust for something to shift.
We are having conversations all the time. But are they moving anything forward?
The workplace is full of communication: Meetings. Emails. Teams messages. One-to-ones. Performance reviews. Away days. Informal chats over coffee.
And yet, sometimes, the conversation that actually needs to happen is the one that keeps getting avoided.
We talk around an issue rather than about it.
We soften things so much that the message gets lost.
We make assumptions about someone's intention instead of asking.
We wait for the "right time".
Or we hope that if we leave it alone, it will somehow sort itself out.
The trouble is, in my experience, most things don't disappear because we don't talk about them. They tend to become stories.
"They don't value my contribution."
"She clearly doesn't trust me."
"He never listens."
"Nobody is going to do anything about this."
Once those stories take hold, the conversation becomes much harder.
The latest UK workplace data gives us a useful reminder of just how important this is. Acas found that 44% of working-age people in Great Britain experienced conflict at work in the previous 12 months – the highest level recorded in its survey. The most common sources included capability and performance, personal disagreements and relationship issues.
What really caught my attention was how people tried to resolve that conflict.
45% had a discussion with their manager and 30% had an informal discussion with the other person involved.
In other words, conversations matter and often, they are the first place where things can start to change.
Quality doesn't mean easy
I think sometimes we confuse a "good conversation" with a pleasant one, but some of the most valuable conversations I've witnessed have been awkward.
They have involved challenge.
Disagreement.
Emotion.
Silence.
Occasionally, someone saying something that the other person really didn't want to hear.
The difference is that the conversation is happening with someone rather than at them.
There is a willingness to understand as well as to be understood. There is room for both people to be right about their experience, even if they see the situation very differently.
And there is a genuine intention to leave the conversation with greater clarity than when you started. That, to me, is the bit about "moving things forward". It doesn't necessarily mean solving everything in one conversation.
Sometimes moving forward simply means:
"Now we both understand what the issue actually is."
Or: "We've said the thing we've both been avoiding."
Or: "I hadn't seen it from that perspective before."
That's progress.
The cost of not having them
There is a bigger organisational picture here too.
Acas estimates that workplace conflict costs Great Britain £28.5 billion a year. Its 2025 research also found that 57% of people who experienced conflict reported stress, anxiety or depression, while 49% experienced a drop in motivation or commitment.
And yet 19% of people experiencing conflict said they took no action to address it.
That statistic feels important to me.
Because sometimes the absence of a conversation isn't neutrality. It is a decision. We are deciding to leave something unresolved. And unresolved things have a habit of taking up space.
They affect trust. They affect energy. They affect how people interpret one another. They can quietly change the atmosphere of a team.
Research from the CIPD has found that people who experienced workplace conflict were much less likely to be satisfied with their jobs – 54% compared with 77% among those who hadn't experienced conflict – and were twice as likely to say they were likely to leave their organisation within the next year.
So when I talk about quality conversations, I'm not talking about some nice-to-have element of workplace culture. I'm talking about one of the ways culture is actually created.
What I notice in healthy teams
The healthiest teams I've worked with aren't necessarily the teams that have no disagreement. They are the teams where disagreement can be talked about.
People can challenge one another without it becoming personal.
Managers don't have to pretend they have all the answers.
People can say "I don't know".
Feedback isn't saved for an annual review.
And difficult conversations aren't automatically escalated into formal processes before someone has tried to understand what is really going on.
There is a sense that we can talk about things here. That is powerful. It creates psychological space. And it also makes the ordinary conversations better, not just the difficult ones. Because when people trust that they can speak honestly when something matters, they are more likely to contribute ideas, ask questions, raise concerns and tell you what you might not otherwise hear.
For me, that's the real measure
When I think about quality conversations, I don't measure them by how polished they sound.
I measure them by what happens afterwards.
Is there more clarity?
More understanding?
A different perspective?
A decision?
A commitment?
A repaired relationship?
A willingness to try something differently?
Sometimes the outcome is simply that two people can now sit in the same meeting without carrying the weight of an unspoken issue. That matters too. For me, good leadership isn't about having all the answers. It is about creating the conditions where the right conversations can happen and sometimes the most important leadership question isn't:
"What should I do about this?" It is:"What conversation needs to happen here?"
Because when the conversation changes, quite often, something else changes with it.
And that is where things start to move forward.
If this resonated, it’s probably because you’re seeing it too.
Philippa x
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