Why Your CrossFit Team Needs Healthy Conflict
As a psychologist working with CrossFit coaches, there’s one dynamic I keep seeing in CF boxes: people are great at building community, but hesitant to confront tension. Many coaching teams across the UK lean toward harmony over honesty, and in doing so, may unintentionally avoid the very conflict that could make them stronger. Real growth, whether physical or psychological, doesn’t happen in ease. It happens under pressure, through tension, resistance, and challenge - just like a good workout.
There might be an uncomfortable truth: your team probably needs more conflict. Not the toxic, destructive kind. But the kind that’s honest, productive, and rooted in respect.
This may be especially true in London, a city marked by deep multiculturalism and also by uniquely British social codes: politeness, emotional restraint, and indirectness in communication (Wierzbicka, 2006). In this context, conflict doesn’t just feel uncomfortable, it can feel inappropriate, or even unsafe, especially across cultural or national lines.
Let’s face it: if everyone in your box always agrees, is it because you’re all aligned, or because someone’s biting their tongue?
The UK Way: Politeness Over Directness
British organisational culture, including in gyms and CrossFit boxes, tends to prize civility, diplomacy, and emotional moderation (Hofstede Insights, 2024). As a result, open disagreement is often pathologised, seen as rude, disrespectful, or aggressive. This can be particularly true in diverse teams where members come from cultures that emphasise politeness as a moral value (e.g. British, East Asian, or Afro-Caribbean cultures).
In contrast, American and Mediterranean coaching environments often encourage direct challenge. Assertiveness is culturally rewarded. Disagreement is seen as engagement, and confrontation can be a sign of commitment, not disrespect. Conflict is approached with passion and expressive communication, sometimes leaning toward open emotional debate and value-driven argumentation, even within teams.
In a London-based box, these different communication styles often collide. London is one of the most multicultural cities in the world. That’s a gift, but also a challenge for teams navigating interpersonal dynamics. Within one coaching staff, you might have members from Poland, Brasil, Pakistan, Italy, Ghana, Spain, Australia, and East London. Each brings their own implicit “rules” about what good teamwork looks like.
A British coach may avoid challenging a programming decision to “keep the peace”, while an Italian coach may openly debate it as a form of team bonding. An American team member might offer direct feedback, which can be misinterpreted as brash or insensitive in a British or Asian context.
This leads to conflict mismatch, when one person sees disagreement as honesty and another sees it as disloyalty. Without an intentional team culture that explicitly welcomes respectful challenge, many voices go silent, and misunderstandings pile up. This silence isn’t peace, it’s pressure. And pressure always leaks.
Conflict Avoidance: A Psychological Risk
In psychology, conflict avoidance is often a defense mechanism. It protects us from the discomfort of disapproval or rejection (Linehan, 1993). But what it also does is rob teams of clarity, innovation, and truth.
In many affiliates, I’ve seen how a surface-level “we’re all good” vibe can mask real frustrations, unmet expectations, and passive disengagement. Team members smile through gritted teeth, suppress feedback, and silently diverge in vision. It’s a psychological pattern Daniel Goleman (1995) calls emotional suppression, which actually increases stress and impairs cognitive functioning.
Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman (2013) even demonstrated that suppressing emotions activates the brain’s pain centers, meaning avoiding conflict literally hurts.
Instead of resilience, you get fragility. People walk on eggshells. Feedback becomes diluted. Communication breaks down. And the team slowly drifts, not because they lack motivation, but because they lack candour. Over time, this culture of accommodation breeds resentment and disengagement.
Why CrossFit Teams Are Especially Prone to Conflict Avoidance
In a CrossFit box, relationships are close, often informal, and emotionally intense. You work side by side, coach together, train together, and build a shared identity. This closeness makes disagreement feel riskier. But it also makes it more necessary.
CrossFit culture places strong value on community and belonging - both essential for psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999) - but when misunderstood, this can morph into false harmony. Teams confuse being “a family” with avoiding hard conversations. Belonging gets reduced to being liked, rather than being respected.
Understanding the Tensions: Autonomy, Clarity, and the Drift
In coaching teams, I often hear phrases like “We want everyone to feel empowered.” But empowerment without direction is like giving an athlete an open gym without a program.
Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) tells us that autonomy is a core human need, but it must be balanced with competence and relatedness. Autonomy doesn’t mean “do whatever you want.” It means being trusted to operate within a clearly defined framework, where feedback is frequent and goals are shared.
Without this structure, autonomy becomes drift. People work in silos, expectations remain unspoken, and responsibilities blur. Eventually, this leads to frustration, burnout, or quiet quitting, especially in high-functioning, passionate teams like CrossFit coaches. People don’t quit jobs; they quit emotional dissonance.
From Suppression to Strength: Why Healthy Conflict Builds Resilience
Disagreement is not a bug in the system. It’s a cultural immune response. When done well, conflict sharpens ideas, deepens trust, and enhances team intelligence (Jehn & Mannix, 2001).
Productive friction sharpens performance. Great ideas survive because they withstand scrutiny, not because they go unopposed. Build a culture where scrutiny is welcomed, not feared, and excellence will follow.
Giovanni Liotti’s (2001) theory of motivational systems helps here. In groups, people shift between attachment, competitive ranking, caregiving, and cooperation systems. When a team avoids conflict, it often means members are stuck in a maladaptive attachment mode: fear of rejection or shame overrides the drive to solve problems or grow.
To build high-functioning coaching teams, we need to move into collaborative motivational states, where disagreement is welcomed as a sign of engagement, not disloyalty.
High-Performance = High-Candour + High-Care
The best CrossFit teams are not those who avoid tension. They’re the ones who can hold disagreement without rupturing, challenge each other respectfully, and stay engaged when the emotional temperature rises.
Your box isn’t a machine, it’s an organism. And like all living systems, it thrives through dynamic tension, not static harmony. Healthy teams don’t avoid conflict, they train for it, just like they train their athletes: consistently, intentionally, and with the long game in mind.
As psychologist and researcher Brené Brown (2018) puts it: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”
In the end, thriving teams in your box aren’t defined by how “nice” they are. They’re defined by how honest they’re willing to be.
