# Transcript: Featured Session: Why Work Feels So Unfair and How Hard Conversations Help **Date:** March 14, 2026 · 10:30 PM **Session:** [Featured Session: Why Work Feels So Unfair and How Hard Conversations Help](/sessions/2026-03-14/pp1149255-featured-session-why-work-feels-so-unfair-and-how-hard-conversations-help) ## Summary Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review author and conflict expert, explores why workplace unfairness often stems from avoided conversations. Using personal stories and research, she argues that managers' reluctance to have difficult conversations creates a vacuum that employees fill with perceptions of bias. She offers a framework for reversing this pattern through intentional, transparent communication. ## Topics `difficult conversations` · `workplace fairness` · `psychological safety` · `feedback culture` · `emotional regulation` · `transparency` · `middle management` · `artificial harmony` ## Key Takeaways 1. Reverse the risk assessment: instead of only weighing the costs of speaking up, also consider the costs of staying silent and the benefits of having the conversation. 2. Replace the feedback sandwich with an intention sandwich — lead with your intention, give clear SBI (Situation, Behavior, Impact) feedback, then affirm the person's good intentions to allow them to save face and believe they can change. 3. Turn up the transparency dial: process fairness research shows people accept even negative outcomes more readily when they believe the decision-making process was transparent and consistent. 4. Improve emotional regulation through self-distancing, temporal distancing (how will you feel in a year?), and reframing emotions — these prevent feelings from hijacking the conversation. 5. Practice difficult conversations by saying the words out loud first, and make yourself feedbackable by asking for advice rather than feedback. ## Full Transcript I was sitting in this restaurant in Perth, Australia, having lunch by myself. I love eating by myself because I get to do my favorite thing, which is eavesdrop on everyone else's conversation. I'm listening to these two guys have this conversation. One of them starts telling his colleague, "Oh yeah, no I didn't get that job. They gave it to a woman." And my immediate thought was, that manager did actually not tell him the real reason he didn't get that job. What it made me realize is that there are so many perceptions at work of unfairness that could be possibly remedied by a difficult conversation. And since I am an expert in difficult conversations, I thought, this is a new mission: how do we eliminate the perceptions of bias by having hard conversations. I want to first start by asking you to think about a hard conversation that you really need to have at work, but you hesitated to do so. What held you back from having that conversation? Fear. Insecurity. Anxiety. They won't get it. They won't change. Those are all understandable. We are hardwired to make things go smoothly with our colleagues. We are hardwired for harmony, for connection, and so raising a difficult conversation feels like it's going to disrupt that. It feels like it might damage the relationship, it might slow things down, it might not work. There was one study that showed that eighty-five percent of people had concerns or issues at work that they were afraid to raise. That's a huge number. And that presents a real problem. Because when we do not have those hard conversations, when we avoid them, we allow for perceptions of unfairness. Think about what topic you were afraid to raise. Was it a piece of feedback? Was it a concern about equity? Was it a policy that you thought wasn't working? My friend in Perth was left to wonder. He was left to fill in the holes, to fill in the vacuum with his own story. And that story included bias. How many people have had something happen at work where they thought, I think this is bias — gender discrimination, racial discrimination, age discrimination? It is truly an uncomfortable position to be in because you don't want to believe this unfairness exists in your workplace. But without the information, without understanding the hidden assumptions, the rules that are often disguised or secret at work, it's understandable that we fill that in. Work is at times — a lot of times — unfair. Stagnant wages, discrimination, gender bias, the threat of AI, bad management, toxic work environments and avoidance of conflict. Work is going to remain broken. But we have an opportunity to change what we can control. There is something you can control, which is your voice. Whether you choose to speak up, whether you make something clearer, whether you have that hard conversation. The challenge is: do we actually do it? I was in an Uber recently and the driver was driving very unsafely. I'm an expert on speaking up, and I sat there quiet the entire time. Because I was making a risk assessment. Could speaking up make me more unsafe? This is the risk assessment all of us are making at all times. We often assume things are true without interrogating whether they're actually real. There's lots of social science research that shows we anticipate an interaction with another person to be much more awkward than it ends up being, or that we assume it's going to harm the relationship when sometimes the exact opposite happens. Elaine Lin Haring, who wrote "Unlearning Silence," articulated something that happens in our minds: we immediately think of all the reasons that speaking up will be costly, and then we look at all the benefits of staying silent. The problem is we fail to assess the risks of not speaking up and the benefits of speaking up. I want you to reverse this risk assessment. Think about the cost of speaking up, but also think about the costs of staying silent and the benefits of speaking up. When you choose to stay silent, especially if you are a leader or someone who has informal authority, your choice has ripple effects. You start to create a culture that values silence and stifles voice. This is what Patrick Lencioni, who wrote The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, calls artificial harmony. Everyone's nodding in the meeting, then meeting in the hallway saying, "Yeah, but what did you really think?" Those smiles and nods feel good but can be corrosive to an organization. One of the best antidotes to artificial harmony is psychological safety, a term popularized by Dr. Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School. Middle managers are in a tough spot right now. They have to do all of the traditional work plus the additional emotional care of their teams. A recent article in Harvard Business Review showed that middle managers actually feel the least amount of psychological safety. When your middle managers don't have psychological safety, how can they build it for others? This is a reinforcing cycle — the more we take risks and have hard conversations, the more we create psychological safety, and the more psychological safety we have, the safer we feel to have hard conversations. Everyone in this room, regardless of your role — individual contributor, executive, founder — all of us have a role to play in having these tough conversations. We cannot only leave them to middle managers. We have to support our middle managers by helping to co-create a culture where hard conversations can happen. Tip number one: change your definition of what makes a difficult conversation successful or a failure. I'll tell you a story about Susan. She had worked at the organization for twenty-plus years and used every meeting to basically dismiss the ideas of more junior team members. Two people nominated me to talk to her about it. I spent twenty-four hours prepping, even role-played with a friend. And it went terribly. Susan was dismissing me while I was telling her she was too dismissive. I tried again the next day and it went even worse. Three months later, Susan's work friend Naomi told me, "Susan really likes you. She said you gave her great feedback that was really helpful." I was shocked. The message had landed even though I had every indication it didn't. We often think success means walking out holding hands. But the conversation is going to feel messy. You're going to feel like you failed, like your relationship is never going to recover. But that doesn't mean the message wasn't heard. Discomfort is actually a sign that we need to reflect, not a sign that we need to retreat. Discomfort is growth. It's how we learn. It's how we improve. Tip number two: ditch the feedback sandwich. The feedback sandwich — say something nice, slip in the criticism, then say something nice again — has a simultaneity problem: confident people only hear the bread, and insecure or self-reflective people only hear the criticism. Instead, use what I call an intention sandwich. Be clear about the feedback using SBI: Situation, Behavior, Impact. But put intention before and after. Start by explaining your intention in giving the feedback — "I'm giving you this feedback because I care about how you succeed." Give the SBI feedback. Then end with: "I know it's not your intention, but this is the impact." This allows them to save face and believe they can change. As Frances Frei said: don't distort reality even out of kindness. We often don't tell people the full truth, changing it to make it more palatable. But that lack of clarity is even more confusing. Be honest about what you're observing, even if it feels unkind in the moment. Tip number three: turn up the transparency dial. A lot of the unfairness we perceive at work comes from a lack of transparency. Transparency prevents misinformation, reduces ambiguity, and fosters psychological safety. There's a concept in management science called process fairness — the perception that the methods used to make decisions are consistent and transparent. Research shows that when people believe the process was fair, they're more willing to accept the outcome, even in layoffs. We want to be more transparent about the decisions we make, the reasons behind them, and the consequences. You have to assume you are far less transparent than you think you are. In the famous tapping study, tappers were asked to tap out "Happy Birthday" while listeners guessed. Tappers estimated listeners would guess correctly fifty percent of the time. The actual rate was two and a half percent. Because the tappers hear the song in their head while the listeners just hear taps. When you're having a hard conversation, assume you have all the background and they're basically guessing. Ask yourself: how can I make this as clear as possible? Not how do I deliver the news and get out, but how do I make sure the other person doesn't have to guess what I mean? Tip number four: improve your emotional regulation. We are terrible at difficult conversations when we are emotionally dysregulated. Emotional regulation is not suppression — it's not puppies and rainbows. It's being aware of what you are feeling and making sure those emotions don't hijack the conversation. Three techniques: First, self-distancing — instead of "I'm so overwhelmed," try "Amy, you've felt overwhelmed before and you were okay." Second, temporal distancing — how will you feel about this in an hour? Next week? In a year? Third, reframe — what other emotions are you feeling besides fear? Maybe compassion for the other person? My daughter and I were driving in Rhode Island when two motorcyclists without helmets came whizzing by. I started telling her how dangerous it was. She agreed. Then she said, "But mommy, maybe they're on their way to buy helmets?" She changed my entire emotional makeup by suggesting an alternative view. It doesn't have to be true, but it can help you break your attachment to the negative emotion about a hard conversation. Tip number five: practice. Practice having hard conversations. They get easier the more you do them. Choose a topic and start saying it out loud — in the shower, to a friend, to anyone. Also ask for feedback on the way you give feedback, from someone who will tell you the truth. Sometimes just saying it out loud makes it feel more manageable. What if you're the person not getting the feedback? You may have played a role in creating a loop where people don't give you honest feedback. You react defensively, they decide it wasn't safe or worth it, and you get less honest feedback. Make yourself feedbackable. When you receive feedback, say: "Thank you for that. I'm going to reflect on this." You can always come back later if you disagree. Ask: "Is there something you wish you could say to me but you're afraid of how I'll react?" My colleague Rosario once told me, "You know Amy, sometimes there is a silent 'you asshole' at the end of your sentence." I was shocked. But he was right. That feedback changed the way I behaved professionally and personally. I was distancing myself from people, acting like a know-it-all because I felt insecure, making people feel smaller to make myself feel better. I didn't know that's how I sounded. So if you're going to ask for feedback, make sure you're ready to hear it. Don't ask for feedback — ask for advice. People love to give advice. It's future-focused and growth-focused, and they're more willing to share honestly when it's not labeled "feedback." You cannot control how the other person behaves, their comfort level, or their conflict aversion. Even if you do all of these things, work isn't necessarily going to be perfectly fair. But we've got to do our part. One of the biggest myths about difficult conversations is that it will damage our relationships. Research shows almost the opposite — we tend to have hard conversations with people we trust and care about, and having those conversations tends to make us feel closer. My mission is for you to see the humanity in yourself when you show up at work, and to see the humanity in others. I do think some of you have thought, can we just have AI have the hard conversations? AI can be a great tool to practice difficult conversations and find language. But what concerns me is that we are outsourcing the very thing that creates connections with people. It is in the messiness — the way we speak and mess up and recover, the clarifications, the awkwardness — that we build connections with others. If we try to create a frictionless experience in the workplace, we're going to miss out on that connection. So let's lean into the messiness. --- *Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6* [← Back to session](/sessions/2026-03-14/pp1149255-featured-session-why-work-feels-so-unfair-and-how-hard-conversations-help)