I have a confession that undercuts this entire post. I can’t handle broken bones.
Not the pain of them. The idea of them. The crunch, the wrongness of a limb bent where it shouldn’t bend, someone calmly describing a fracture over dinner. It turns my stomach. I will change the channel. I have come close to needing to sit down.
So it is strange, even to me, that the metaphor I keep returning to as a leader is exactly that. Breaking a bone on purpose.
Stay with me.
There is a word for a bone that heals in the wrong position. Doctors call it a malunion. From the outside it can look fine. The skin closed, the swelling went down, the person is up and walking around. But underneath, the alignment is wrong. And the body, being adaptable, starts to compensate. Muscles and tendons quietly reorganize around the mistake. The longer it stays that way, the more everything else adjusts to the bad position.
To fix it, a surgeon has to do something that sounds barbaric. They re-break the bone. On purpose. Then they set it correctly and hold it there until it heals right.
I have watched the same thing happen on teams, including my own.
The bone that looked healed
We have all had a version of this. You let a tension between two people sit a little longer than you should have. Nothing dramatic on the surface. From the outside, everyone seems to be getting along and the work is getting done. The bone looks healed.
But underneath, the alignment is off. And quietly, everything starts adapting to it. People route around each other. Small assumptions harden into stories. The team reorganizes itself, in a hundred invisible ways, around a fracture nobody is willing to name.
Then you finally bring everyone into the same room, and the honest conversation you have all been avoiding takes about an hour. The real issue surfaces almost immediately, the moment you stop pretending the bone is fine.
That is the humbling part. The conversation you dreaded for weeks turns out to be the easy part. What takes longer, much longer, is undoing everything the delay built. The workarounds. The hardened assumptions. The trust that eroded a little more each week while everyone waited for it to resolve on its own.
Most of that damage is quieter than it sounds. In the absence of a real conversation, people fill the silence with a story, and the story is almost never generous. Instead of assuming the other person has their best interest at heart, they assume the opposite. That the other person thinks less of them. That they are not measuring up. That something is being held against them. None of it has been said out loud, which is exactly why it grows. The longer you avoid the conversation, the more you start believing the version of it you invented in your own head.
It never resolves on its own. That is the lie avoidance tells you.
The kindness that isn’t
When we avoid a hard conversation, we tell ourselves we are being kind. We are keeping the peace. We are not making it worse. But most of the time we are simply letting the bone heal crooked.
I am not alone in this. Something like 80 percent of people admit there is at least one conversation at work they are actively avoiding right now. We would rather live with a low-grade ache than face one sharp, clarifying pain.
And I understand it. I really do. I am the person who cannot think about a fracture without feeling queasy, so trust me when I say I am not pretending the discomfort isn’t real.
But the discomfort of setting the bone now is a single, contained pain. The discomfort of leaving it is diffuse and permanent. It spreads out over months until you stop noticing it is there, which is somehow worse than feeling it.
So I keep telling this story, the one that turns my own stomach, because it is the truest picture I have found of something I would rather not look at directly.
The break already happened. Pretending otherwise does not make the bone straight. It only makes the eventual setting hurt more.