The Avoiding Conflict Style: Waiting for the Right Moment

The avoiding style isn’t always about running from the problem: sometimes it’s waiting for the right moment to address it.

This quiz is part of an informational series on conflict management, based on a classic academic model from social psychology. It’s meant for informational purposes and doesn’t replace guidance from a professional.

Low assertiveness, low cooperation

In Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann’s model (1974), the avoiding style combines low assertiveness (not actively defending your own position) with low cooperation (not actively seeking the other person’s either): it simply postpones or sidesteps the disagreement. It’s often misread as weakness, but in many contexts it’s a reasonable strategic choice.

When it works

It’s genuinely useful in low-stakes conflicts, where the cost of arguing outweighs the benefit of resolving it; when the tension of the moment means any conversation would go badly, and it’s better to wait for it to settle; or when the topic simply tends to resolve itself over time without needing direct intervention.

How it shows up

• You postpone a difficult conversation until the tension of the moment settles.
• You let things you don’t consider very important slide, without dwelling on them further.
• You avoid starting a conflict if you think it won’t lead anywhere productive.
• You’d rather give yourself time before reacting to something that bothered you.

The risk of avoiding what matters

The problem shows up when this style becomes the automatic response even for topics that genuinely need to be discussed. Unlike minor disagreements, those topics don’t disappear just because they get postponed indefinitely: they tend to still be there, and putting them off too long can mean that, once they’re finally addressed, they arrive with more accumulated weight than necessary.

Your growth edge

The key is telling apart “this can wait” from “I’m avoiding this because it makes me uncomfortable.” The first is a legitimate strategic decision; the second, if it repeats with what matters, can leave real needs unattended indefinitely. Asking yourself honestly which of the two is actually happening in each case helps you use this style where it genuinely pays off.

What avoiding does to shared meaning

Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, in Crucial Conversations (2002), include “avoiding” and “withdrawing” among the forms of silence that appear when a conversation starts to feel risky: sidestepping the sensitive topic entirely, or leaving the conversation or the room outright. Applied to conflict, this style does exactly that, postponing or sidestepping the disagreement, and the authors are clear about its effect: it keeps the shared pool of information and perspectives dangerously shallow. That isn’t a problem when the topic really is minor, in which case avoiding it is simply efficient. But when it’s applied to something that does matter, the underlying issue doesn’t get resolved, only delayed, and it tends to come back later with the same unprocessed tension, or even more built up than at the start.

Do you recognize yourself in this style? Find out with the conflict management style quiz.