This article should be included in every Professional Development program. This is excellent advice.
I live in an area of the midwest United States where nearly _everybody_ is kind, but severely conflict averse... To the point where it becomes difficult to gauge true intentions. Lack of clarity on everybody's priorities make work far more difficult than it needs to be because everyone here are people pleasers who don't know how to say "no" or "I don't like that".
I tell my managers "no". I tell them why: this process doesn't scale with the team, the security policy forbids it, this is the fifth project you've given top priority to this week, etc.
They say, don't worry, just do it. I'm at a point where saying no doesn't matter, so I have to consider if I should even bother.
In software companies priorities mean nothing, they're there to check a checkmark that "we also have prioritization". Anything they want to have will be "top priority" even if they have 50 "top priority" deliverables this release.
What actually prioritizes things is actual friction: from stuff actually taking time to make, to things falling apart and needing time to repair, to employees unionizing and refusing endless overtime.
And anything else (scalability, policy, etc) is also irrelevant, when it comes to "the customer/CEO/higher manager wants this". People are not actually hired to make the product better, or to follow policies. They work to do what the company higher ups want them to do - the rest is up to them to try to fit under those contraints.
> it was nearly impossible to get them to say where they wanted to go out to eat.
Some people just don't care, like me, and can find something to eat just about anywhere. I also dislike choosing where to eat, so my rule is that the pickiest eater gets to choose, and I'm never the pickiest in a group.
If you clearly state what you want you end up taking responsibility for that. Say you want to go to X which is a 40 minute drive away and when you get there it is full. Then you will here "Well, you wanted to go here!" and it will be your fault.
I think this is pretty terrible advice actually. Verbal confrontations like this are a huge dice roll and have a tendency to make not-perfect-but-tolerable relationships totally fall apart. Its one thing to bring these kinds of things up with your partner, but not with a colleague or acquaintance.
Imagine your colleague or someone in your friend-group who you think you get a long with great says "I always feel awkward around you" or "I sense some low-level tension between us" or "I feel like we're annoyed at each-other but trying to stay polite". That can make things very uncomfortable between the two of you. Most times the best course of action is to just continue to be polite because the awkwardness, annoyance, tension, etc. is only experienced by you. Bringing it up to the other person is going to make them feel really uncomfortable, or worse, and can make the relationship potentially unrecoverable.
I'm also in a Midwestern city and see similar things. I once saw a project manager at a Fortune 500 that literally fabricated statistics about an ongoing project I was on to please management.
I've found that not being afraid to say no or opine on things has been very effective in my career.
Sometimes it is not conflict aversion as much as, and maybe i am speaking for myself here, being unsure if the opinion/judgement you have and are about to express is valid or if this is a real bad misread. Maybe conflict aversion is a form of short-sighted kindness
I’ve often been the only person in the room willing to confront things directly. (I don’t like doing it but unresolved issues just get worse.)
What a person says about people who are not there is telling.
When it’s not outright malicious, it’s usually fear. It’s something they don’t want to happen that stops them from saying it. (Depending on the situation it may be entirely justified.)
Kindness does exist. There’s plenty of times you don’t want to upset somebody else for their sake.
There’s nothing wrong with conflict avoidance being the default. It only becomes a problem when it stops you from conflict where it’s necessary.
I think what you're describing is a form of conflict aversion, where the (tiny) conflict is what would clear up your read, or the group's attitude on something, for going forward. Short sighted kindness is a nice way to put it
I live in an area of the midwest United States where nearly _everybody_ is kind, but severely conflict averse... To the point where it becomes difficult to gauge true intentions. Lack of clarity on everybody's priorities make work far more difficult than it needs to be because everyone here are people pleasers who don't know how to say "no" or "I don't like that".