The Wobbly Toilet Problem: Avoidance, Supervision, and Early Intervention

At some point over the seven years my husband and I lived in our last house, the second-floor toilet began to wobble. I can’t pinpoint exactly when the wobble started, but I can tell you that a wobbly toilet can be a symptom of several different issues, some minor and some major. I can also tell you that my husband and I noticed it, commented on it regularly, and did nothing about it. We were both tired and busy (we have demanding jobs and young kids) and fixing it felt like more than we could take on.

At some point after the wobble started, I remember being in the downstairs bathroom and hearing a dripping sound. Once again, feeling busy and tired, I ignored it.

Well, about six months ago, my husband heard a loud crash from the kitchen. He called to our son, who swore he wasn’t to blame. When I got home that night, my husband told me to take a look in the first-floor bathroom. I opened the door and found the ceiling had caved in, and sewage was raining down from above.

Our choice to not address the wobbly toilet because we were too busy, too overwhelmed, or because it would be too inconvenient became a much bigger, much messier problem. Now we had a toilet to replace, a ceiling to repair, and—pardon my language—a pile of shit to clean up.

The parable of the wobbly toilet has become my go-to story when counseling people around supervision issues. Both supervisors and supervisees often come to me with thorny situations that could be solved with some old-fashioned direct communication, or they come to me when a problem has already been calcified.

Often, they are hesitant to address issues right in the beginning, thinking they could resolve things with vague messaging or manage it themselves. Even worse, like me with my wobbly toilet, they hope it will just go away on its own. And sometimes, people do self-correct: exposed to excellent modeling, they absorb good practices without anyone intervening directly. But that is the exception, not the rule.

In my workplace, a large legal aid organization serving low-income Philadelphians, we are all busy and exhausted and have a hundred other things on our to-do list. We could always devote time to another client, another advocacy issue, or one more revision of that filing. It makes perfect sense that a potentially awkward conversation or time-consuming training feels like the kind of thing that can wait, especially if the work is still getting done. Research on cognitive bandwidth and scarcity helps explain why:¹ when people are operating under chronic stress or time pressure, their capacity for proactive problem-solving diminishes, and relief-seeking behaviors, like postponing uncomfortable conversations, become more likely.

This doesn’t mean supervisors don’t care; it means their mental resources are already depleted. Supervisors want to help, but they are worn out. Unfortunately, the very conditions that make avoidance understandable are also the conditions that make early intervention most necessary.

The problem is, like my wobbly toilet, that ignoring it because there was a baby crying, or dishes to be done, or I was just wiped out from the day, allowed that tiny slow drip to eat into the floorboards and beyond.

Why It’s Easier to Ignore the Drip

You have just glanced at your supervisee’s time report, and you see that there is extraordinarily little time entered. You have noticed for the last couple of months that timekeeping has been increasingly delayed. You tell yourself that you will address it during your next supervision meeting, but just then your phone rings: a city council staffer is on the phone with a constituent.

The constituent has been without heat for a week. Temperatures are dropping, and the constituent’s landlord is ignoring repeated requests to repair the heat. Suddenly, you are gearing up to file an injunction on the constituent’s behalf.

By the time your supervision meeting rolls at 3 pm, you are exhausted. You just do not have it in you to give constructive criticism at that moment. What if your supervisee gets defensive? What if they shut down completely? What if (worst-case scenario) they start to cry?

This conversation can wait. Shoddy timekeeping isn’t going to hurt a client imminently, right?

Our jobs are hard, and for many of us, the world is even harder. I am sure I am not alone in not wanting to spend ten minutes reexplaining the basics of the work to someone who should already know them. I have already spent the better part of my morning trying to get a one-year-old to put their shoes on. I am spent on basics for the rest of the day.

When I first stepped into this role overseeing supervision and professional development, I had a very senior manager lecture me about opportunity costs and tell me that spending time on supervision issues or staff engagement meant helping fewer clients. I believe strongly that this is a false dichotomy. Certainly, everything comes with opportunity costs, but excellent supervision and robust staff engagement are how we serve more clients.

I’m Tired of Fighting

Now you are a manager. A frontline staffer has come to you complaining about their supervisor’s people skills. The staffer feels micromanaged. They have been doing this work for a long time and are known as a top-tier performer, but their supervisor does not seem to respect their knowledge or skills.

The staffer further notes that they don’t think the supervisor behaves this way with just them, but with almost all the paralegals and certain attorneys. You have heard rumblings about this supervisor being less than pleasant interpersonally, but they are an excellent attorney, and up until this point, most of the complaints had been minor or involved interactions external to the organization.

The feedback gap that results falls hardest on the people who can least afford it. Black staff and staff of color, women, people with disabilities, and others navigating marginalized identities in the workplace are less likely to receive early, consistent, developmental feedback and more likely to find out there is a problem only when it has already become a crisis.

This scenario is reflective of the common instinct to promote high-skill workers, who are not that good at people management. It can feel impossible to tell someone who has always gotten positive reinforcement about their work that they are not good at something, especially in a mission-driven nonprofit where the work is personal, not just professional. We are here because we care about people and the world at large, which makes feedback that touches identity feel particularly high stakes. This presents the risk of hurting someone’s feelings and perhaps challenging their most basic self-conception.

Importantly, sometimes what gets labeled an “interpersonal issue” is actually a reaction to someone’s identity—staff playing into stereotypes (for example, the “angry Black woman” trope) or bristling at a colleague with less privileged identities exercising authority.

The equity problem can and does run in both directions. Research on intergroup anxiety shows that supervisors actively avoid engaging across lines of difference, and that avoidance is itself a form of bias even when it does not feel like one.² The same discomfort that causes a supervisor to misread an identity dynamic can cause them to underinvest entirely: to avoid the relationship, skip the hard conversation, and let things slide in ways they would not with someone who feels more familiar.

Meanwhile, the supervisee is navigating their own weighty issue. Stereotype threat research demonstrates that people from marginalized groups carry the additional burden of managing how they are perceived, which can affect performance and makes the absence of clear, supportive feedback even more costly.³ The feedback gap that results falls hardest on the people who can least afford it. Black staff and staff of color, women, people with disabilities, and others navigating marginalized identities in the workplace are less likely to receive early, consistent, developmental feedback and more likely to find out there is a problem only when it has already become a crisis. The wrench to tighten the bolts and stop the wobble never comes. What comes instead is the ceiling collapse: a sudden escalation, a performance action that feels like it came out of nowhere, consequences that are disproportionate to what early intervention would have required. Two people can have the same performance issue in the same organization. One gets coaching, patience, and resources. The other gets managed out. The difference is rarely just performance.

Returning to our struggling people manager: the instinct to avoid this conversation doesn’t only come from discomfort with the feedback itself. Again, we are in a situation where clients’ needs are not immediately at risk. Plus, what if this supervisor gets so upset that they are no longer engaged at work and ultimately leave the organization? All this interpersonal “stuff” feels sticky and subjective. Wouldn’t it be easier not to have another fight? The entire world feels like a fight right now.

From Dripping to Collapse: How Avoidance Escalates

The two scenarios above give great examples of what dripping or wobbling can look like and why we, as leaders, supervisors, or managers, might be tempted to just “not take it on right now.”

Here’s the rub: while a drip is just one drop of water, or a wobble might just need a couple of bolts tightened, when we ignore them, the water collects, and the bolts continue to loosen.

Take our struggling timekeeper. A lapse or two might seem minor, but if everyone stopped keeping time, and every supervisor decided they were too busy or too tired to take it on, the organization stops getting paid, and zero clients get helped if the place shutters.

Another consideration for the staffer who falters on timekeeping: when one norm or requirement goes unenforced, it can lead to other bad habits, or it can be a sign of them already beginning to fester. It is astounding the number of cases I have heard of in my 15 years of practice, where a lapse in timekeeping led a supervisor to do a deep dive into an advocate’s casework, only to discover that there was actual harm to individual clients, or the staffer was just not doing any work at all.

Avoidance does not distribute its consequences equally, and organizations that pretend otherwise are not being honest with themselves. When avoidance is normalized at every level of an organization, the people most likely to be left without feedback, without investment, and without a fighting chance are the same people organizations claim to center in their mission statements. The ceiling does not cave in on everyone. It caves in on the person who never got the early conversation, who never had the relationship with their supervisor that would have made that conversation possible, who was written off before the writing was ever on the wall.

Mission-driven organizations are not exempt from this pattern. In some ways they are more vulnerable to it, because the language of care and shared purpose can obscure the ways that bias operates quietly underneath. An organization can genuinely believe it values equity while its supervisors are systematically underinvesting in the staff who most need support and over-punishing the ones who never got it. That is not a values problem. It is a supervision problem. And it is solvable, but only if organizations are willing to look honestly at who is standing in the mess with plaster dust in their hair when the ceiling comes down.

Routine Maintenance: Direct Communication & Facing Issues Head-On

I hope it’s clear now how I could have avoided my collapsing ceiling: I could have directly addressed the myriad signs of a problem by tightening the bolts, checking the toilet’s wax ring, and maybe even replacing the entire thing. Each of these steps would have been easier than the caved-in ceiling repair and sewage cleanup.

In the supervision context, positive and growth feedback are the keys to good supervision and serve as a kind of supervision bolt tightening. Providing feedback regularly not only benefits supervisees but benefits supervisors as well. Supervisors get in the habit of providing feedback and paying purposeful attention to the work that their supervisees are doing. Supervisees get used to receiving feedback and learn where to spend their time and what is important to the organization, its work, and its clients.

There are dozens of feedback models that an effective supervisor can employ. For me, the most important components are keeping feedback specific, non-judgmental, clear, firm, and kind.

For the staffer struggling with timekeeping, this feedback could look something like: “Hey, your last two time reports have been incomplete. Timekeeping is necessary for our clients and our organization. It must be done, but let’s talk about ways we can work together to make sure your time is entered correctly and on time going forward. Do you have any ideas?” Delivered casually and early, this kind of feedback is less likely to feel like an attack and may even uncover a larger problem before it compounds.

Research on psychological safety helps explain why early, routine feedback is often experienced as supportive rather than threatening. When expectations and corrections are delivered consistently and predictably, people experience less anxiety than when feedback arrives suddenly or only during moments of crisis. Ambiguity, silence, and delayed intervention tend to increase stress, while clear and timely communication builds trust. From this perspective, avoiding feedback in the name of kindness may undermine the sense of safety supervisors hope to preserve.⁴

Regular positive feedback is just as important. It gives the supervisor credibility when they have growth feedback to offer, and it can reveal surprising things. Maybe our problem timekeeper has been agonizing over client letters they have already mastered, because no one ever told them so.

Larger-Scale Repairs: Diagnosing the Problem and Rebuilding Systems

Some supervision issues are the equivalent of tightening a few bolts. Others require more serious work. Interpersonal issues often fall into the second category. For my husband and me, just tightening some bolts wasn’t going to solve our problem, we needed to do a full-scale replacement.

Replacing a toilet is disruptive. It’s inconvenient. It requires admitting that something is fundamentally not working. But it is still infinitely preferable to pretending everything is fine until the ceiling caves in.

Interpersonal supervision is often harder because it touches identity, not just behavior. Adult learning theory and social psychology both show that people are more resistant to feedback when it threatens their sense of competence or belonging. This is especially true for high-performing professionals who have built their identity around being “good at their work.” Avoiding these conversations can feel compassionate, but research suggests that delayed or indirect feedback increases defensiveness and harm. Addressing interpersonal patterns early and before they harden into identity judgments can reduce threat and make change more possible.⁵

Addressing complicated interpersonal dynamics early can prevent damage to team morale, staff retention, and ultimately to clients, who may either lose access to talented advocates or end up weathering a difficult interaction with someone meant to be their advocate. While waiting to address a difficult micromanager’s behavior may maintain your comfort in the moment, waiting does not protect the supervisor or the supervisee. It can also be dangerous for the organization, as these types of supervision issues are the ones most likely to turn into much larger, much messier HR issues. They erode trust not only between the staffer who would have benefited from the feedback but from everyone they supervise or who sees their behavior and sees leadership failing to address obvious problems.

Supervision is not one of the soft skills. It is not one of the easy skills. It is a discipline, and organizations that refuse to treat it as one are making a choice.

Good leadership means knowing when to tighten bolts and when to replace the toilet before the damage spreads. Remember, replacement is about changing conditions—not discarding people. Our struggling people manager is an excellent lawyer who likely has an important place in the organization. They are suffering under a troubled system as much as their supervisees.

Individual supervisors do not operate in a vacuum, and organizations that treat avoidance as a supervisor problem while ignoring their own role in creating it are not being honest. Organizations set the conditions. They decide whether supervision is treated as infrastructure or afterthought. They decide whether managers receive real training and ongoing support, or whether they are handed a title and expected to figure it out. They promote the best lawyer, the best advocate, the best clinician, and then act genuinely surprised when that person struggles to manage people, as if the skills that make someone excellent at direct service work automatically transfer to the entirely different work of developing other humans. They do not.

Supervision is not one of the soft skills. It is not one of the easy skills. It is not sometthing that talented people just pick up along the way. It is a discipline, and organizations that refuse to treat it as one are making a choice. That choice creates the conditions for avoidance. It puts undertrained, under-supported supervisors in impossible positions and then holds them solely accountable when things fall apart. The wobbly toilet was always going to leak. The organization just made sure no one had the tools to fix it.

In practical terms, replacing the broken thing might mean training, coaching, shifting responsibilities, or adding structure and support. The goal is not to lose skilled staff or shame anyone. A good leader can do the challenging thing with empathy, firm and trauma-centered at once.

When the Ceiling Has Already Caved In

If you’re reading this while standing in the mess (and I mean standing in it when the ceiling has already caved in and the problem can no longer be ignored) you’re not a failure. You’re human. Cognitive overload and stress can cause people to delay action not because they don’t care, but because they are operating at or beyond capacity.⁶ It’s also possible you inherited some of the mess. Our very old home had a lot of problems when we bought it. Some of them were obvious and some were not.

For example, we could feel that toilet wobbling, but we could not see the five decaying layers of roof that led to a chronic leak. It may not matter how you came to be standing in the mess; it matters what you do once you are in it. When the collapse finally happens, the instinct is often to move immediately to accountability, analysis, or repair. But effective leadership in moments of crisis starts somewhere simpler: stopping the damage, stabilizing the environment, and creating enough clarity for people to breathe again.

At this stage, clear and direct communication matters more than ever. In moments of high stress, ambiguity and silence increase fear, defensiveness, and mistrust.⁷ Leaders do not need to have all the answers, but they do need to name reality calmly and honestly: what has happened, what must be addressed immediately, and what will come later. This is not the moment for blame. It is the moment for containment, transparency, and steadiness. Crisis leadership emphasizes the importance of sensemaking, helping people understand what is happening, what matters most right now, and what will come next, before attempting deeper analysis or long-term repair.⁸ Saying, “This is serious, and we are going to address it together,” does far more to restore trust than either minimizing the harm or reacting with panic.

Only after the immediate crisis has been stabilized can meaningful repair begin. Interpersonal ruptures, burnout, and broken systems rarely heal through technical fixes alone. People are far more capable of growth and change when they do not feel shamed or written off.⁹ Repairing trust—between supervisors and supervisees, within teams, and across the organization—is as critical as repairing policies or structures. While no leader wants to find themselves cleaning up a collapse, how they respond in that moment can determine whether the organization learns and strengthens, or whether the damage continues to spread unseen, deteriorating the floor below and the ceiling above.

Fix the Wobbly Toilet

I wrote all that to tell you something that could have fit on a Post-it note: fix the wobbly toilet before the ceiling caves in. While true, my real point is that avoidance is understandable. We have all been in that moment, whether dealing with a home repair issue, a pile of dishes in the sink, or a difficult conversation at work. We are all tired and overwhelmed.

Despite our exhaustion and our desire to make people feel good, early action is kinder and will save time and energy in the long run. Temporary, planned disruption is always better than accidental harm, large or small.

End Notes

1. Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.
2. Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. W. (1985). Intergroup anxiety. Journal of Social Issues.
3. Steele, C. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi (on identity threat and performance).
4. Edmondson, A. (2018). The Fearless Organization.
5. Knowles, M. (1984). The Adult Learner. Steele, C. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi (on identity threat and performance).
6. Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. (On how stress and overload narrow decision-making and delay proactive action.)
7. Edmondson, A. (2018). The Fearless Organization. (On how clarity and predictability reduce fear and defensiveness in high-stakes environments.)
8. Weick, K. E. (1988). Enacted Sensemaking in Crisis Situations. Journal of Management Studies.
9. Steele, C. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi. (On how perceived threat to identity impedes learning and change.)