The quiet room problem: Why some teams look fine, but aren't

Think about your last team meeting. Was there good debate? Did different views get airtime? Did someone say something uncomfortable, and the room just… moved on? If your answer is, "it was fine, nothing major," that might be worth examining more closely. The teams that appear to be working well (meetings ticked off, KPIs on track, no open arguments) often need a closer look.

What hidden conflict actually looks like

The first thing to understand about hidden conflict in teams is that it rarely looks like conflict at all. There are no raised voices, no formal complaints, no obvious flashpoints. No wonder it can be so hard for managers to catch!  

Deirdre Foley, Team & Executive Coach and Senior Facilitator at HPC, has spent thirteen years working with executive and functional teams across tech, finance, construction and agribusiness in Ireland, the UK and the US. Her engagements with leaders and teams are distinctive: As a facilitator, she can read a room and identify underlying dynamics of tension and conflict quickly.  

 "You can pick up on it the moment you walk into a room. When you ask a group about psychological safety and get complete silence? It’s like that rolling tumbleweed where everyone is looking sideways at each other, wondering who'll be brave enough to go first. That tells you everything you need to know."  

Jack Collins, Business Psychologist and Director at Westminster Associates, works with leadership teams across sectors from startups to large corporations. He describes a different but equally telling signal: The moment a team tries to rename the problem itself.  

 "In one Team Effectiveness session, someone asked whether we could reframe the word 'conflict'. The moment it came up in discussion and there was a visible reaction: They wanted to swap it for something softer because they were worried about how it would land in the organisation. I found that very revealing. The discomfort with the word itself showed the discomfort with the thing it described, and it showed that the appetite for honest challenge wasn't quite there."  

The signs compound. Decisions agreed in the meeting that don't get implemented. Topics that keep resurfacing but don’t get resolved. A manager going back to their team and saying, with a shrug, "I don't really agree with it either, but it's what we're doing." These are the fingerprints of hidden conflict; easy to explain away individually, but together they point to something systemic.  

Why leaders miss the signals  

Howard Scott, Senior Consultant, Facilitator and Coach at Unify Partnership, has spent fifteen years working with boards and senior leadership teams across sectors as varied as nuclear engineering and professional services. He makes this distinction plainly:  

 "Most senior leaders, if they're honest, already know where the tensions sit. It’s not that leaders are blind, but they avoid it. I’ve seen even the most capable, experienced leaders become very skilled at stepping around behavioural issues, while at the same time doubling down on KPIs and metrics. The ‘urgent’ always crowds out the important. And there's a second, more surprising reason leaders miss what's happening, one that tends to land hardest when it's said out loud. Sometimes the leader is the problem."  

Deirdre describes this leadership challenge as one of the most consistent patterns in her work with executive teams. She usually starts with the leader before she ever touches the team dynamic, assessing their self-awareness and understanding the impact they have on those around them (often without realising it).  

 "Leaders often misread the atmosphere on their team and what's really happening beneath the surface, because they're so focused on results. Many are highly driven towards getting things done, but they're not paying close enough attention to how the team is actually working together to get there."  

This shows up in specific recognisable ways: A leader whose presence in the room is so authoritative that, once they speak, no one contradicts them; or a leader who uses information shared with them in confidence to reprimand team members, quietly destroying trust in the process. It's why Deirdre starts a team engagement by having initial conversations with the leader.  

 "We can spend all our energy focused on the team dynamic, but the real starting point for change often sits with the leader, which is why I often begin with a confidential 360-degree feedback process with the leader before we start any work on the team itself."  

Jack adds another dimension: The leader’s blind spot more often comes from normalisation than complacency. When hidden conflict has been part of a team's culture long enough, it stops being visible - it simply becomes how things are.  

 "What strikes me most is when conflict becomes so woven into the fabric of how an organisation operates that nobody notices it anymore. It's not that people are hiding it; it's just become completely invisible. I see it most clearly when working with established teams who've been operating the same way for years."  

His example: A £500m business performing strongly by every external measure. A new leader comes in and holds up the mirror, asking whether the team that got them to £500m is the team to get them to £1bn. The conflict was hidden because success had made it invisible.  

The behavioural misunderstanding at the root of it 

Strip away the organisational dynamics and the leadership blind spots, and you find something more fundamental underneath almost every case of hidden conflict in teams: Two people who have simply misread each other.

Holly Miller,  Senior Consultant, Facilitator and Coach at Unify Partnership, works across private, charity and educational sectors, and regularly partners with clients to uncover what's driving tension and dysfunction in their teams. She describes the perception problem with striking clarity:  

 “Conflict can happen simply because we don’t understand where the other person is coming from. When two people face the same situation, like making a decision, one may take a totally different approach that feels baffling to the other person. Because we’re looking at them through our own lens, we interpret that person as being difficult or decide that we’re never going to get along with them.”    

Holly describes a scenario that's immediately recognisable to anyone who's managed a diverse team, explaining how the gap between working styles compounds over time.  

 "Picture someone who builds relationships through radical openness, sharing freely about their work, their thinking, their life. Now place them alongside someone who keeps their professional and personal worlds carefully separate. The open person reads the private person's restraint as coldness. The private person reads the open person's disclosure as a breach of professional boundaries. Neither is being difficult; they’re simply being themselves. But without a shared framework for understanding why they respond the way they do, the gap widens."  

 Jack identifies four specific working styles that generate friction in almost every team he works with:

• The thorough, detail-oriented thinker: Misread as indecisive or unable to commit
• The person who moves quickly: Misread as inconsiderate or not caring about how others feel
• The direct, clear communicator: Misread as blunt, unkind or aggressive
• The consultative, relationship-building colleague: Misread as trying to please everyone rather than deciding anything

Jack notes that people who process reflectively (those who sit with things and think them through) can build an entire conflict narrative out of a single comment.

 "Each of these people has a genuine purposeful approach to getting their work done. But when someone operates in a style that's foreign to you, it's easy to experience it as a personal slight rather than simply a different way of being. And the story can continue long after the meeting ends. By the time someone's replayed the perceived slight a few times, a whole new narrative has been built around it. The conflict might not even have existed in the room - it was created afterwards."    

This is the territory where hidden conflict quietly takes root. Think: A comment that landed strangely or a meeting where someone felt unheard. It doesn’t feel like a ‘conflict event’ when it happens, but each one deposits a small residue of tension that, left unaddressed, slowly accumulates.  

The cost of leaving it unaddressed

There's a temptation, when a team is broadly performing, to treat hidden conflict as a background issue: Unfortunate, but not urgent. The problem with that judgment is that it underestimates the risk.

Howard draws on the Barrett Values Centre model of cultural entropy (a concept borrowed from thermodynamics) to explain what unresolved conflict costs an organisation in terms of energy.

In thermodynamics, entropy describes the energy a machine wastes simply keeping itself operational rather than doing useful work. The same principle applies to teams.  

 "The cultural entropy model gives teams a way to see the energy they're burning on unresolved issues, energy that isn't going anywhere useful. When you have sustained tension and friction, the additional effort people have to invest just to function, things like getting through meetings, communicating, making decisions - the toll is enormous. Most organisations aren't measuring it, but they're absolutely paying for it."   

Holly adds the dimension that matters most to commercially-minded leaders: The stress test. Teams carrying hidden conflict may manage to deliver while conditions are favourable, but they are profoundly fragile when disruption hits.  

 "It's when something dramatic happens, like a major funding cut, a big client loss or a sudden structure change, that the cracks become fractures. Teams who've been carrying unresolved tension can't hold it together. That's when leaders scramble to intervene reactively, rather than having invested in getting things right before the crisis arrived."     

 What works: Building a shared language

 Across the combined 50 years of experience of these four experts, a clear pattern emerges about what moves the dial.  

To create change, organisations must go beyond wellbeing policies and one-off team-building days and embrace something more fundamental: Embed a shared language to understand each other’s behaviour and learn how to talk about differences in a way that feels non-judgmental and doesn’t make anyone wrong.

This is where Insights Discovery does its most important work. It becomes that much-needed layer of shared understanding that changes how people on teams talk to each other.

Deirdre describes working with a risk division at a bank where two different approaches to decision-making generated months of unspoken tension.
One part of the team was driving for fast decisions; another wouldn't be moved until every risk had been mapped. Both were certain their approach was right.  

 "The breakthrough came when both sides could see that they were each 100% right. They were both trying to do the best thing for the bank. What was clashing wasn't their intent; it was their natural energy. Once you call that out and make it about energy rather than competency, something shifts. And a lot of that conflict was simply unnecessary: It existed because they didn't have a language for what was happening between them."       

Deirdre is careful to note that Insights isn't the whole answer; colour energy dynamics are one layer. Beneath them sit emotional factors: Job insecurity, ego, competition, personal history. But Insights creates the psychological safety and shared language to begin exploring these deeper layers.  

 "Insights isn't going to solve everything. But what it does is create the conditions for a conversation that simply couldn't have happened before. It sets you up for a day where people are genuinely willing to explore."         

 
Holly points to something equally important: It's not just the content of the workshop that creates change; it's what the process itself asks of people.

 "The Insights workshop often works because people learn about colour energies and because of what the process asks them to do. Sharing your profile is an act of vulnerability. And vulnerability, when it's met with curiosity rather than judgment, builds trust. That's where it starts to tip the balance, and where teams begin to work effectively rather than just adequately."       

Jack describes what this looks like in the room, the moment something shifts for an employee who's been stuck in a fixed view of a colleague:

 "There's almost always an 'aha' moment in every session. Someone who's spent months perceiving a colleague as deliberately obstructive suddenly sees their behaviour through a completely different lens, and you can see the shift happen in real time."     

See how one team resolved hidden conflict

Resolve conflict with self-awareness and psychological safety  

Most teams aren't performing as well as they could. Even when they have the right people in place, those people may lack the language, awareness and safety to be honest with each other.

The real risk is the accumulated cost of hidden conflict: Wasted energy, decisions that drift, good people who quietly decide it's not worth it.

Organisations that address this early – before the crisis and attrition spike – must build a foundation of self-awareness and shared understanding. Sustaining the investment in how people relate to teach other creates stronger teams, clearer communication and more effective working relationships over time.  

Further reading  

The essential guide to Insights Discovery colour energies and how to use them at work

Expert contributors  

With thanks to four accredited Insights Discovery practitioners and market-leading specialists in behavioural coaching, team facilitation and leadership development, with over fifty years of collective experience working with organisations across sectors and geographies.

Deirdre Foley, Team & Executive Coach, Senior Facilitator, HPC
Jack Collins, Business Psychologist & Director, Westminster Associates
Howard Scott,  Senior Consultant, Facilitator and Coach - Unify Partnership
Holly Miller,  Senior Consultant, Facilitator and Coach - Unify Partnership

References

Acas (2021). Estimating the costs of workplace conflict. Available at: acas.org.uk

Acas / NatCen Social Research (2025). Conflict at work: nature, extent and resolution. Available at: acas.org.uk

Acas (2024). Health, work and conflict: the human cost of workplace disputes. Available at: acas.org.uk

Barrett Values Centre. Cultural Entropy. Available at: valuescentre.com

CIPD (2024). Good Work Index 2024. Available at: cipd.org