The Conversation Nobody Wants to Have

There’s a particular kind of morning in HR where you arrive, open your emails, and feel the day shift before it’s even started.

A manager has flagged something. A complaint, maybe. Or a pattern, lateness, attitude, something they can’t quite name but have been tolerating for months. And now it’s landed with you.

This is the part of HR that doesn’t make it into the job descriptions.

The formal process is usually the easy bit. You know the policy. You know the steps. What nobody trains you for is the conversation before the conversation, the one where a manager sits across from you, visibly uncomfortable, and says something like “I just don’t want it to escalate.”

And that sentence? That’s where ER actually starts.

I’ve sat in rooms where someone was crying because they’d never been told their performance was a problem. Where a manager admitted they’d been avoiding a conversation for six months because they were scared of the reaction. Where two colleagues had fallen out over something so specific and so small that you almost couldn’t believe it had made it this far.

In every single one of those situations, the issue wasn’t the policy. It was the delay. The tolerance of tension until it became undeniable.

Informal resolution gets underestimated. Not every situation needs a formal process, in fact, most don’t. A properly handled informal conversation, with the right preparation and the right tone, resolves more than most people expect. It also preserves the working relationship, which the formal route rarely does.

The questions I’d always ask before recommending a route:

How long has this been going on?
Has the employee been told directly that there’s an issue?
What outcome does the manager actually want?

That last one matters more than people think. Sometimes the answer is “I just want it to stop.” Sometimes it’s “I’ve already decided, I just need the process documented.” Both are valid. But they lead to different places.

Nobody talks enough about the emotional labour of ER work. You’re not a decision-maker in the way a line manager is, you’re a navigator. You hold the framework, you manage the risk, but you also manage the people inside the situation. That means holding space for someone who is scared, or defensive, or both.

It’s one of the harder parts of the job. And also, quietly, one of the most meaningful.