Why Healthy Confrontation Should Be Seen as an Act of Kindness

And how to get more comfortable with conflict if you're a non-confrontational person

Far too many people in the Tech industry claim to operate from a place of kindness when, in reality, they are acting out of niceness. The results of each approach tell the real story.

The difference between being kind and nice is a topic that still puzzles many of us. For a refresher, head over to my last article:

Are you really kind, or are you just being nice?

In theory, kindness sounds great. You care and do good things for others.

In practice, however, choosing kindness is not as easy as it sounds.

A commitment to kindness means your primary concern is acting in the best interest of others. True kindness in action is challenging because it requires confronting situations and people that are negatively impacting your team or organization.

For example:

• Confronting a team member about consistently missing deadlines or not pulling their weight, impacting the whole team

• Challenging a senior engineer's or manager's technical decision when you believe there's a better approach, despite potential pushback

• Advocating for necessary but unpopular changes in team processes or tools to improve overall efficiency and quality

While niceness means pleasing others, in some situations, kindness means upsetting others, and there is no way around it. Choosing to be nice is easier than choosing to be kind.

If you claim to prioritize kindness but avoid conflict at all costs,
are you really as kind as you think?

In today’s article we’re covering:

• Defining Disagreement vs Conflict vs Confrontation

• How I grew comfortable with confrontation

• 🔐 Dangers of avoiding conflict and confrontation (only for paying subscribers)

• 🔐 When healthy confrontation is the solution

  (only for paying subscribers)

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You are reading a half-free article of The Caring Techie Newsletter. I post weekly articles on career growth, leadership and communication for high performing ICs and leaders.

If you want to access the entire article, support my work and be part of the community, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. See the benefits here.

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Disagreement vs Conflict vs Confrontation

To understand why healthy confrontation should be seen as an act of kindness, we must start by clarifying some definitions.

What is a “disagreement”?

A disagreement is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as a “lack of consensus or approval.” It also means “difference; incongruity; discrepancy.”

Cambridge defines it as “an argument or situation in which people do not have the same opinion.”

In your engineering career, you've probably disagreed on things like the best approach to a problem or which tech stack to use for a new project. As a manager, you’ve probably seen disagreements all the time about priorities or deadlines.

What is “conflict”?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines conflict as “an active disagreement between people with opposing opinions or principles.” Collins adds it’s a “serious disagreement and argument about something important.”

Some things to note here:

• Conflicts are states, not actions

• Disagreements can exist without conflicts, but conflicts cannot exist without disagreements

• It’s only a conflict if the disagreement is active and serious enough

For example, two engineers might disagree about which framework to use, but it turns into a conflict if one person starts pushing hard for their choice without hearing out the other side. Managers can experience conflict when they disagree with upper management on resource allocation for a project.

If you hold serious disagreeing opinions but keep them to yourself to avoid conflict, you fall into the “conflict-avoidant” category. We’ll talk more about the risks of that below.

What is “confrontation”?

Oxford defines confrontation as a “hostile or argumentative meeting or situation between opposing parties.” Dictionary.com defines it as “to present for acknowledgment, contradiction, etc.; set face to face, or to bring together for examination or comparison.”

Confrontation is the act of addressing something directly and proactively. To confront also means to challenge or express disagreement.

For example, an engineer might confront a colleague during a code review, pointing out issues directly to improve the code. Or they might confront their product manager about unrealistic timeliness.

A manager might confront a team member about missed deadlines or showing up late for meetings.

By comparing conflict with confrontation, we see:

• Confrontation is the act of facing a problem, while conflict is the ongoing state of disagreement.

• When you face a disagreement head-on, confrontation can sometimes lead to conflict.

How I got comfortable with confrontation

Throughout my career, my threshold on the comfortable-with-conflict scale grew higher with time and experience.

At Google, I wasn’t confrontational at all. The culture was not very confrontational and, as a first-time Tech Lead, I found myself guilty of sugarcoating my grievances, or relying on my manager to give difficult feedback.

At Uber, however, the culture was very different. In 2017, they still had an explicit core value stating “not be afraid to toe step”, hence most people didn’t shy away from confrontation.

Despite the culture being more open to directly challenging things, I’ve worked with some very non-confrontational leaders who prioritized being “nice” and keeping peace at the expense of their team’s wellbeing. These leaders weren’t actually making things better for their teams and it showed (high attrition and high burnout rates).

As I matured as a leader, I started to understand that, irrespective of the culture of the company I’m at, I cannot truly be a kind leader if I don’t tackle real issues head-on and engage in conflict when needed. My job as a leader isn’t to be nice, it’s to be kind (and fair).

The way I got comfortable with conflict was by seeing the impact it had on my team.

There were many instances where I brought up issues on behalf of my team or called out inefficiencies and gaps, and together we were able to figure out solutions. My team benefitted from me fighting for them, and that was worth my discomfort any day.

What ultimately helped the most was:

• reframing confrontation from conflict-seeking to solution-seeking

• understanding the impact of confrontation and the damage of being non-confrontational

• accepting confrontation as part of my job as a kind leader

• understanding not all issues are made equally and having a good framework to assess whether an issue is worth confronting or not (we’re covering this in a future article)

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You are reading a half-free article of The Caring Techie Newsletter. I post weekly-isharticles on career growth, leadership and communication for high performing ICs and leaders.

If you want to access the entire article, support my work and be part of the community, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. See the benefits here.

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Dangers of avoiding confrontation due to fear of conflict

Many of us see conflict as a bad thing that hurts people’s feelings, damages relationships, and is rarely conducive to a solution. So we try to dodge it by not confronting issues or people directly.

We automatically assume confronting issues leads to conflict and why create a conflict that doesn’t exist??

The reality looks a bit different …

Our worst-case scenario fears aren’t guaranteed to happen.

What we really want is to figure out a path to resolution.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for conflict for the sake of conflict. I’m also not advocating for confrontation for the sake of confrontation. Not all issues are worth confronting (see future article on how to assess).

What I’m advocating for is considering all the possible options before ruling out conflict as the worst possible outcome.

Let’s start by looking at: What happens to the original issue if we don’t handle it?

By avoiding conflict, we let the issue linger, and we can end up in one of these three situations: