Embrace the Suck

Nobody tells you this when you become a manager: the conversations that make you successful are the ones that make you want to crawl out of your own skin.

It's not the high-fives and the "great job on that launch" Slack messages that prove your success. It's not the strategy sessions where everyone nods along to your brilliant insights that give the best impacts in your team.

The conversations that TRULY matter? The ones that make a difference? They suck.

My December so far

It's mid-December. Let me tell you about my month.

I had a hard conversation with a client about discontinuing a service we were providing to them. Not because they did anything wrong. Not because they're a bad client. Just because it wasn't working for us as partners anymore, and I had to look them in the eye and say that to them.

I sat down with a team member and told them their performance isn't where it needs to be. Specific, direct feedback about specific, real gaps. The kind of conversation where you watch someone's face fall and you have to keep going anyway even though every part of you is screaming "CTRL-Z!!".

I let someone go. Someone who was performing really well. Someone who did nothing wrong. We just didn't have enough work to keep them. Try explaining that one without feeling like a complete arsehole. (And, yes, I know this conversation sucked worse for them).

And I had a difficult conversation with my wife that I'm not going to tell you about, because some suck is private.

Four conversations. Two weeks. All of them necessary. None of them fun.

This is the job. This is life. This is what it looks like when you're actually leading instead of just occupying a leadership-shaped hole on an org-chart.

The Suck is the job

I used to think good leadership meant having good conversations. Productive meetings. Aligned teams. Smooth sailing.

Lol. Nope.

Good leadership means having the conversations nobody wants to have. It means sitting across from someone and saying "this isn't working" when every cell in your body wants to say to them "it's fine, you're doing great, please don't cry."

It means telling your best engineer that their code is excellent but their attitude is poisoning the team. Telling someone you hired, someone you believed in, that they're not going to make it here. Having the same feedback conversation for the third time because they still haven't heard you.

These conversations are not fun. They are not good. They actively suck.

And they're the whole goddamn job. The suck isn't a bug in leadership. It's a feature.

Not numb. Not cold. Just... ready.

Here's where people fuck this up: they think "embrace the suck" means becoming some dead-eyed robot who delivers hard news without flinching. They think it means not caring.

That's not embracing the suck. That's just being an arsehole.

Embracing the suck means you feel ALL of it (the dread beforehand, the discomfort during, the second-guessing after) and you do it anyway. You don't armour up. You don't shut down. You walk into that room with your whole messy human self and you have the conversation that needs to be had.

If you stop feeling the suck, you've stopped caring about the person across the table. And if you don't care about them, you can't help them. You're just executing HR protocols like a AI Agent with an EmploymentHero MCP.

The goal isn't to stop feeling it. The goal is to stop letting that feeling stop you.

Feel the discomfort. Acknowledge it. Then do the thing anyway.

Why we avoid the Suck

These conversations suck because they're high-stakes and ambiguous and there's no script that guarantees a good outcome. Often there's not even clarity on if the outcome was "good" or not.

And if you came up through engineering like most of us, your brain is particularly badly calibrated for this. We're trained for deterministic systems. Input goes in, output comes out. You write the code, you run the tests, you get predictable results. Cause and effect. Logic. Control.

Human conversations are not deterministic systems. They're distributed, stateful, eventually consistent at best, and running on hardware you can't inspect.

There's no staging environment for "I need to talk to you about your performance."

You might say the perfect thing and they still get defensive. Prepare for hours and they still cry. You deliver the feedback with compassion and clarity and they still quit the next week.

There's no winning. There's only doing.

And our brains HATE that. We're wired to avoid uncertain outcomes, especially social ones. A conversation that might go badly? Our lizard brain treats that like a tiger in the bushes. Run. Hide. Send a Slack message instead.

So we delay. We soften. We hint. We give feedback so wrapped in compliments that the actual message gets lost (hello "Shit Sandwich" - this is me calling you out for being less sandwich and more just shit). We wait for the "right time" that never comes. We tell ourselves we're being kind when really we're being cowardly.

Every avoided conversation is like technical debt - a "cultural" debt. It compounds. That small performance issue you didn't address in month one? By month six it's a full-blown crisis. That tension between two team members you hoped would resolve itself? It's now a factional war. You're not avoiding discomfort. You're deferring it, with interest.

And then we're shocked (SHOCKED!!) when the performance issues don't magically resolve themselves.

The Suck is a gift (I know, I know)

Stay with me here. I haven't fallen into a McKinsey Sarlacc Pit, I promise.

Those awful conversations? They're where trust gets built. Not the fake trust of never disagreeing, but the real trust of knowing someone will tell you the truth even when it's hard.

Think about how you build confidence in a system. You test it under load. You see how it handles failure. You don't trust a service that's never been stressed. You trust the one that's been through incidents and recovered. Same with people. Same with relationships.

Every time you have a conversation that sucks, you're proving something. You're proving that you care enough to be uncomfortable, that you respect someone enough to be honest with them, that your relationship can survive difficulty.

That engineer you gave hard feedback to? If you do it right, they don't just improve their behaviour - they learn they can trust you. They learn that when you say "great job," you actually mean it, because you've shown you're willing to say the opposite.

The suck is the price of admission for real relationships. Pay it.

How to get good at Sucking

You don't get good at hard conversations by reading about them. You get good by having them, badly, repeatedly, and learning as you go. It's not a knowledge problem, it's a reps problem.

But here are a few things that help:

Prepare, but don't script it like an essay. Know your main point. Know what outcome you want. Plan some of the key phrases you want to use. Don't script every word or you'll sound like you're just reading HR talking points.

Do it soon. The longer you wait, the worse it gets. The conversation you're dreading? Have it this week. Have it tomorrow. Have it today. The anticipation is always worse than the thing.

Name the suck. It's okay to say "this is a hard conversation for me to have." Vulnerability isn't weakness. It's proof you're human.

Stay curious. Hard conversations go sideways when you go in certain you're right. Go in curious instead. What are you missing? What's their experience? You might learn something that changes everything.

Sit in the silence. After you say the hard thing, shut up. Let them react. Don't rush to fill the space with caveats and softening. The silence is where the processing happens.

Why you should embrace the suck

Look, if your leadership conversations are all pleasant, you're probably not leading.

You're managing. You're coordinating. You're being a very nice person who happens to have "manager" in their title. But you're not doing the work that actually changes people's trajectories. You're running in dev mode, where nothing really matters and all the data gets reseeded anyway.

Real leadership happens in production. With real people, real stakes, real consequences. And production is where things get uncomfortable.

The leaders who changed my career? They had uncomfortable conversations with me. They told me things I didn't want to hear. They cared enough about my growth to risk my temporary discomfort.

That's the job. That's the whole job.

How to embrace it

I'm not saying you have to like it, or that it gets easy, or that you won't still feel that knot in your stomach before every difficult 1:1.

I'm saying: stop running from it. Stop treating the suck as a sign that something's wrong. The suck is a sign that something's right. It means you're doing real leadership, not just calendar management in a leadership costume.

The best leaders I know? They've embraced the suck. Not with some toxic positivity bullshit, not by pretending it doesn't hurt. They've embraced it the way you embrace anything hard and necessary - with full awareness of what it costs, and full commitment to paying that price.

The conversation you're dreading? On the other side of it is a team that trusts you, a person who can actually grow, and a version of yourself that knows it can handle hard things.

That's worth some suck.

Now go have that conversation you've been avoiding. You know the one.