The Cost of Conversations Not Had
When a municipal airport authority's Talent Development team set out to shift the culture around conflict, they needed a partner who could give leaders practical tools — not theory — and the confidence to use them. Lead at Any Level® designed a custom two-part program that reframed conflict as a leadership skill, not a leadership risk, and delivered it to the leaders most responsible for setting the tone.
Client Snapshot
The client is a municipal airport authority with approximately 550 employees, the majority working in operations across a multi-layered organizational structure. The Talent Development function partners with leaders across departments to build internal capability through a mix of compliance training, leadership development programming, and skill-based courses sourced from a curated bench of on-call vendors. The team selects vendors deliberately and treats each first engagement as a "dress rehearsal" — a deliberate test of fit before scaling further.
The Challenge
The client's Talent Development leader had been hearing the same theme across departments and tenure levels: leaders were avoiding the hard conversations. Managers were not telling employees the truth about their performance. Supervisors were withholding feedback that would have helped their people grow. Peers at the same level weren't aligning before bringing competing direction to their teams. The pattern was creating downstream cost — disengagement, confusion, and trust gaps — that the team could see clearly but couldn't fix with a slide deck on performance reviews.
The Talent Development leader had a specific culture shift in mind: help leaders understand that avoiding difficult conversations does more damage to their teams than having them. Existing internal training touched the mechanics of performance reviews and the value of in-the-moment feedback, but no program in the curriculum addressed the underlying skill — or the underlying fear.
Our Approach
Lead at Any Level® was selected from the airport authority's on-call vendor bench to design a custom program against this specific challenge. Working closely with the Talent Development team, Amy C. Waninger built and delivered Communicating with Clarity and Confidence in Challenging Situations — a two-part program scoped specifically for the client's leaders.
Two half-day sessions delivered one week apart, deliberately paced so participants could retain Session 1 material and apply it before Session 2.
- Session 1 grounded the work in foundations: defining what makes a conversation "crucial," establishing psychological safety, and introducing a structured dialogue framework participants practiced in small groups.
- Session 2 moved to application: identifying difficult dynamics and personal triggers, working a three-step conflict de-escalation model, delivering feedback with clarity, and finishing with integrated role-play against participant-supplied scenarios.
The program was customized to the airport's organizational context — multiple management layers, an operations-heavy workforce, and the specific patterns the Talent Development leader had been observing. Pre-work asked each participant to reflect on a real situation they were avoiding and bring it to class as their working scenario.
Our Results
Post-course feedback came in strong across every dimension the Talent Development team tracks. Overall session ratings split between "Met Expectations" and "Exceeds Expectations," with no neutral or below-target responses. Instructor effectiveness ratings landed at "Very Effective" and "Mostly Effective," including one participant who wrote "best instructor I've ever had." Likelihood to recommend skewed "Very Likely" and "Likely."
What participants flagged in their open-text feedback mapped directly to the culture shift the client was driving:
- Several new ideas for addressing issues participants were actively facing on their teams
- The interactive format — participants worked their own situations, not generic case studies
- The reframe that conflict doesn't always have to be bad — which the client called out as exactly the mindset shift she'd been working to create
The post-course survey also produced something the client described as "surprising"—zero suggestions for improvement. In a culture the Talent Development leader described as one that contributes feedback readily, the absence of revision asks was itself a signal.
“I really enjoyed working with you, and I sincerely hope that we will find an opportunity to work together again. You made the process really nice, really easy, really engaging for the learners, which is really important to me. I can't thank you enough for all the hard work that you put into this. It showed.”
— Talent Development Leader,
Municipal Airport Authority
Municipal Airport Authority
What's Next
A leader in the airport authority's operations team has already reached out about a similar engagement, suggesting the work has begun to travel beyond the initial cohort. The Talent Development team remains on the on-call bench of program providers.
Ready to Equip Your Leaders for the Conversations They've Been Avoiding?
Whether your leaders are sidestepping performance conversations, talking past each other across departments, or simply lacking the tools to navigate conflict well, Lead at Any Level® can help. Our practical, custom-scoped programs give leaders frameworks they can use in the next conversation — not the next quarter.