Avoidance, Disguised as Kindness

One of the harder parts of being a manager isn’t figuring out who’s doing well. It’s deciding what to do when someone clearly isn’t.

In most cases, it’s not even ambiguous. The feedback has been given. Expectations have been clarified more than once. You’ve already seen enough to know where this is heading.

And still, the decision doesn’t get made.

It gets delayed.

You tell yourself it needs more time, that it wouldn’t be fair to call it too early, and that maybe things will improve with a bit more support and patience.

So the conversations continue, the edges get softened, and you wait to see if something changes, giving it another cycle, and then another.

At no point does it feel like you’re avoiding anything, and slowly what started as an attempt to be fair begins to drift into something else.

Where This Shows Up

I’ve been part of situations where this pattern unfolds in plain sight.

We had someone on the team who came in with a bit of history. There were concerns from previous projects, but nothing that couldn’t be reset. We aligned this person to a new team with a clean slate and clear expectations from day one.

The setup was deliberate, with expectations made explicit and a clear agreement with the team lead to closely monitor progress and share regular feedback so things wouldn’t drift.

For some time, it felt like things might settle into place.

But they didn’t.

The same gaps showed up again, the same feedback had to be repeated, and the output continued to fall short of what was expected.

The lead handling this was thoughtful and well-intentioned, but also increasingly hesitant. They didn’t ignore the problem, and if anything, they leaned in harder, adding more conversations, more context, and more chances to improve, but each step forward on feedback was matched with a step back on action.

At the same time, the rest of the team started adjusting around it, where work didn’t just get redistributed but accumulated elsewhere, and others were already doing more than their share by covering gaps, reworking deliverables, and quietly absorbing the impact.

No one escalated it directly, but the discomfort was visible in how the team operated.

And still, a clear decision didn’t follow, and this continued longer than it should have.

In hindsight, I let this run longer than I should have.

Eventually, I stepped in and moved the person into a PIP, with the same lead responsible for driving it and with the expectation clearly set that this needed to lead to a decision.

What followed was more of the same. The improvement didn’t come, but the conversations continued, timelines stretched, and the PIP was extended more than once, where each extension felt justified in isolation but together pointed to the same hesitation.

At no point was there a lack of intent to be fair.

But the decision still didn’t get made.

What Was Actually Happening

Looking back, the problem wasn’t a lack of feedback, effort, or intent, and if anything, there was more of it than usual through repeated conversations, added context, and enough time being given for things to improve, yet what remained missing through all of it was a clear decision.

At each step, what we did, whether it was offering support, sharing feedback, or giving more time, felt reasonable, which is exactly why the decision kept getting pushed further out.

But when you step back and look at it as a whole, the pattern becomes difficult to ignore, because what appears as continued support on the surface slowly turns into a way of deferring the call that needs to be made.

Kindness, stretched too far, becomes avoidance, not by accident but as a conscious trade-off, because making that decision is uncomfortable and carries a weight that most managers hesitate to take on, and over time, process quietly becomes a substitute for decision.

Fairness, Self-Image, and the Team

One of the reasons this pattern is hard to catch is because it aligns so well with how we want to see ourselves as managers.

You want to be the one who gave someone a fair shot, who didn’t rush to judgement, and who created space for improvement instead of shutting it down too early, and that identity quietly shapes how long you’re willing to wait and how much you’re willing to stretch a situation.

The problem is that fairness, when viewed only through the lens of one individual, starts to break down.

While patience is being extended in one direction, the rest of the team is already adjusting around that decision, where work doesn’t just get delayed but redistributed, expectations begin to shift, and over time others start carrying more than their share without it being formally acknowledged.

No one calls it out directly, but it shows up in smaller ways through missed ownership, quiet frustration, and the gradual erosion of what the team considers acceptable, and even when it’s not said, it’s rarely unnoticed.

At some point, what feels like fairness to one person becomes unfairness to everyone else involved.

What This Means for the Individual

There is also an impact on the individual, although it’s less obvious.

When a situation is stretched too long, the signals become mixed, with repeated feedback about gaps but no clear outcome, making it harder to understand whether improvement is still expected to change things or whether the decision has already been made but not communicated.

In such cases, the delay takes away clarity they might actually need, leaving them in a prolonged middle ground where expectations remain but consequences don’t follow.

The Decision We Delay

In most of these situations, the turning point isn’t new information or a sudden change in performance, but the moment the manager decides to stop extending the timeline and accept what has already been visible for a while.

That moment usually comes later than it should, not because the signals weren’t clear, but because making that decision carries weight, and delaying it feels easier than taking responsibility for an outcome that directly affects someone’s role and trajectory.

Over time, this turns into a pattern where conversations continue, intent remains good, and actions keep happening, but the one thing that actually resolves the situation is consistently pushed out by the person responsible for making the call.

What feels like patience starts looking like hesitation, what feels like support starts looking like avoidance, and what feels like fairness to one person starts becoming unfairness to everyone else involved.

In most cases, this isn’t something a manager fails to see.

It’s something they choose to wait on.