05/18/2026
Toilet Paper Roll — Over or Under? People Have Strong Feelings. Why Learning to Share Them Creates More Successful Organizations.
Posted on May 12, 2026
Two toilet paper rolls
Today’s Morning Buzz is by Sheila Shockey, Founder and CEO of Shockey Consulting Services, a woman-owned planning and management consultancy based in Overland Park, Kansas.
What I’m reading: This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage
What I’m listening to: Rage Against the Machine and David Byrne
What I’m working on: Fully integrating AI into our consulting practice.
The night before my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary celebration, we sat around the dinner table — full bellies, good wine, the kind of evening where everyone feels a little sentimental and a little ornery.
I was feeling both.
“Hey,” I said, casually lobbing a gr***de into the room. “I noticed the toilet paper in the guest bathroom rolls out from underneath. But in the master bath, it rolls over the top. What’s the deal?”
I’ll be honest — I thought it was hilarious. I was fully prepared to laugh about it for thirty seconds and move on. This is what I do. A little family fun never hurt anyone.
That is not what happened.
My mom didn’t miss a beat. She rolls it under, she said. Always has. Always will. She had reasons. Deeply held, non-negotiable, apparently God-given reasons.
My dad — a man who has raised his voice approximately four times in his entire life — looked up and delivered this, with a quiet intensity that was somehow more alarming than a shout: “She has been doing it wrong for sixty years.”
The table went silent.
I looked at my mother. I looked at my father. I guzzled down my wine and tried not to laugh out loud.
Still hilarious. Also suddenly very real.
We never resolved it. Nobody budged. They went to bed, woke up the next morning, and celebrated sixty years of marriage at a beautiful party surrounded by everyone who loves them.
The toilet paper situation? Still unresolved. Still festering. Still, apparently, a thing.
Here’s what struck me on the drive home: they never talked about it. Not in sixty years. Someone would quietly re-roll the toilet paper when the other wasn’t looking. A small, silent act of defiance. Sixty years of passive-aggressive bathroom management.
It’s funny when it’s toilet paper. It’s a lot less funny when it’s your team.
Think about this: the average American spends more waking hours with their coworkers than with their families. We eat lunch together, survive difficult councils together, celebrate wins together. And yet we walk around every day carefully not saying the thing we need to say — about a process that doesn’t work, a colleague who keeps dropping the ball, a decision that felt unfair, a working style that drives us absolutely up the wall.
We keep it nice. We keep the peace. We keep it inside.
And here’s why: we were taught to.
From the time we started school, the message was clear — especially for girls. Be nice. Be quiet. Don’t make waves. This may or may not be why I spent so much time with Mr. Inman, my grade school Principal. We were rewarded for getting along and corrected when we pushed back. What we were never taught — not once, in all those years of education — how to express a conflicting view in a way that actually works. How to say the hard thing without it becoming a fight. How to disagree with someone and still respect each other when it’s over.
So we grew up. We got jobs in local government. We sat in conference rooms full of people who were also never taught. And we all kept being very, very nice to people’s faces — until someone loses it over the metaphorical toilet paper. In front of the worst possible audience. And everyone acted surprised.
“Your job is not to prevent conflict. Your job is to build a team that knows how to move through it.”
Model It. Teach It. Hold People Accountable for It.
Here’s the leadership truth nobody posts on a motivational poster: your job is not to prevent conflict. Your job is to build a team that knows how to move through it. That means three things: you model it, you teach it, and you hold people accountable for doing it.
I won’t pretend this comes naturally. Afterall, I was raised to be Midwestern nice. The impulse to smooth things over, to let it go, to smile and say “no worries” when there are absolutely worries — I feel that every single time. But I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, that nice without honest is just delay with a friendlier face.
A few things that work:
Name the norm out loud. If your team culture is “we don’t talk about problems directly,” you can’t just wish it away. You have to explicitly say: Here, we surface tension early. It’s not drama — it’s how good teams operate. Say it during onboarding. Say it in team meetings. Say it until it’s boring.
Give people a script. Most people don’t speak up because they don’t know how to do it without it feeling like an attack. Teach the difference between “you always drop the ball on deadlines” and “I need us to talk about what happened last Tuesday — I want to understand your side and share mine.” That’s a learnable skill. Invest in it.
Create low-stakes practice. Retrospectives, after-action reviews, “what worked / what didn’t” rituals — these normalize the act of naming friction before it festers. Make it a habit, not a crisis response.
Stop being the referee. When two colleagues bring a conflict to you, your first instinct might be to solve it. Resist. Ask: Have you two talked directly about this? If the answer is no, send them back. You are not the toilet paper police. Your job is to coach people to work it out themselves — and step in only when the power dynamic or the stakes make that impossible.
The irony of conflict avoidance is that it doesn’t actually avoid conflict. It just delays it, compresses it, and guarantees it will come back with interest.
The best teams I’ve worked with — in city halls, planning departments, and community meetings across the Midwest — aren’t the ones without disagreement. They’re the ones that learned to disagree well. Where someone can say “I think we’re doing this wrong” and the room responds with curiosity instead of defensiveness. Where the culture says: your perspective is worth saying out loud.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built deliberately, by leaders who decided to model what they wanted to see. Even the Midwestern nice ones.
My parents are still happily married — 64 years now. Still deeply in love. Still, I am told, no discussions about toilet paper, but they are fighting over the tv remote.
Some battles are forever. Just make sure yours aren’t the ones that actually matter.
