You wait. Your Push axis and your Pull axis are both low, which means that when a disagreement arrives you neither name it nor lean into the other person's side. You let it sit. Sometimes it resolves itself, which is the evidence you use to keep doing it. Usually it goes underground.
Postponers are often calm, well liked, and described as "easy to work with", and they are the leaders whose teams have the longest running unaddressed problems, because nobody in the team has the authority to raise what the leader will not. The underperformer stays. The two people who do not speak keep not speaking. The decision that was contested six months ago is still being relitigated in corridors.
The honest version of the Postponer's position is that conflict is expensive and most of it is not worth the cost. That is true of some conflict. The instrument cannot tell which, so look at item two: if you have let a disagreement sit for more than a week hoping it would resolve, ask what it cost you while it sat.
Check your lowest bar. If it is Naming, the block is the first sentence. If it is Curiosity, you may be avoiding the conversation because you suspect you are wrong and do not want to find out. That is a common and very human reason and it is also the easiest one to fix, because being wrong early is cheap.
My rule is short. If it still bothers you the next morning, raise it within a day. After two days the clean version is gone, and you are having a conversation about why you waited. The question I ask to decide whether something is worth the conflict is this: will it still be here in three months if nobody says anything?
If the answer is no, let it go and mean it. If the answer is yes, it is not a disagreement you are avoiding. It is a cost you are choosing to pay every week instead of once. One is an occasion. Two is a pair. Three is a pattern, and a pattern gets named.
One change for this week. Name the oldest unaddressed disagreement on your team, to yourself, in writing. Then book fifteen minutes with the person it involves and open with "I have been avoiding this, and I would rather have it now". You do not have to resolve it in that meeting. You have to end the postponing.
Your Directness score will be the lowest of the five styles. It goes up quickly, because every dimension moves with the same first step.
Next step: if you are avoiding conflict because you are running out of energy for it, check that first with the leader burnout test.
Next step
The other results
- Straight TalkerYou name it, you hold it, you keep the person.
- EnforcerYou name it and win it. The relationship pays.
- SmootherYou keep the person and lose the point.
- DealmakerYou split it. Nobody is unhappy enough to fix it.
About this result
This is one of 5 results from the Conflict Style Assessment, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.