Riviera Group Consulting

ARTICLE 08  /  RIDE THE WAVE

The Conversation Your Organization Is Avoiding

Every organization has conversations that keep getting postponed. A board is unsure how to address an executive performance concern. Two leaders disagree about ownership. A team knows a process is not working, but nobody wants to challenge the person who designed it.

Avoiding the conversation may feel like protecting the relationship. Over time, it often transfers the cost to everyone else: unclear expectations, repeated work, quiet frustration, and decisions that never quite get made.

A high-courage conversation does not have to be confrontational. It begins with clarity about the issue and respect for the people involved. What have we observed? What impact is it having? What do we need to understand from the other person? What decision or commitment is needed next?
Preparation matters. Separate facts from assumptions. Decide whether the goal is to understand, to resolve, or to communicate a decision. Choose the right participants and setting. If the issue belongs to the board, use the appropriate governance process rather than informal side conversations.

During the discussion, be direct enough that the issue is unmistakable and curious enough to learn something you may not know. End with a clear next step and a time to follow up. A courageous conversation without follow-through can become another meeting people remember differently. The goal is not to eliminate discomfort. It is to prevent avoidable discomfort from becoming an organizational pattern.

As this first Ride the Wave series closes, consider the conversations, decisions, and systems that will help your organization meet its next wave with more clarity and courage.

REFLECTION  What conversation, handled thoughtfully now, would make the next ninety days easier for your team?
Cover of book "High-Courage Conversations"
About the Book
You cannot control every wave. You can decide how you meet it. That lesson started in the ocean at a young age, when Lauren Sweeney's father taught her to stand to the side of an incoming wave and let it move through her instead of trying to fight it or turning her back on it, and it never really left her. In High-Courage Conversations, Sweeney, SHRM-CP, B.S., draws on two decades of leadership, from being a Retail Pharmacy Manager to building a sales team of hundreds to sitting in the C-suite, to make one central argument: courage is not the absence of fear; it is what happens when clarity meets capacity.

Across thirteen chapters, Sweeney tackles the conversations most leaders quietly avoid. The feedback that feels too risky to give. The values conflict that looks like a personality clash. The burnout hiding behind a full calendar and a fuller sense of obligation. The identity crisis that shows up when a title changes, or disappears, faster than your sense of self can catch up. She writes about chasing a credential to feel like enough, and about learning to stay present in hard conversations with her husband instead of freezing and disappearing behind her own eyes. This is not a book of tidy frameworks handed down from a distance. It is a field guide written from inside the moment right before you say the hard thing, by someone who has stood in that moment as a store manager, a Vice President, a co-founder, a board chair, a wife, and a mother, and who has learned, sometimes the hard way, what actually helps.

Readers will find practical tools alongside the stories: a way to name what's really draining you before you try to fix it, a script for the conversation before the conversation, three questions to ask in any transition. But mostly they will find permission to feel the racing heart and go anyway, to ask for clarity before demanding courage of themselves, and to trust that meeting the wave well matters more than controlling it ever could.
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