Two colleagues are in conflict and the rest of the team is working around it
A disagreement between particular colleagues has hardened, and the team is adjusting around it rather than working normally.
Two or three colleagues are not working well together. Meetings are stiff when they are both present, information travels less freely than it should, and other people have started routing around the problem. The rest of the team still works well, and a new colleague joining this term would notice that two people do not get on rather than conclude that this is how the team behaves.
Presenting symptoms
- The two colleagues route requests through you rather than speaking to each other.
- Meetings are noticeably more careful when both are present.
- Other members of the team have begun taking sides, or avoiding both.
Possible causes
- A specific decision or incident may never have been resolved and has been left to settle on its own.
- The two may hold different and unstated views about who is responsible for what.
- What is being described as a personality clash may be a professional disagreement that nobody has stated plainly.
- Pressure from somewhere else, at work or outside it, may be surfacing in this relationship.
A specific incident or decision that was never resolved.
Your most useful next step: Ask each of them separately what happened and what they wanted to happen. Hear both accounts without reaching a conclusion before both have been heard, then chair one meeting whose only purpose is to close that incident.
Lead behaviours
Overlapping responsibilities that have never been settled.
Your most useful next step: Decide who holds which decision in the two or three places they overlap, write it down, and tell them both in the same conversation so that neither hears it second hand.
Lead behaviours
A real professional disagreement about the work, being carried personally.
Your most useful next step: Put the substantive question on an agenda as a question to be answered, name it as a legitimate disagreement, and settle it on the merits so that it stops being carried by the relationship.
Lead behaviours
Something outside this relationship appears to be surfacing in it.
Your most useful next step: Speak to each of them about how things are more generally before treating this as a conflict. Do not force a resolution conversation until you know whether the relationship is the real subject, but make clear that professional conduct is still expected in the meantime.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
The aim is a settled question rather than a quieter team. This behaviour is what allows the disagreement to be named and resolved, instead of being managed indefinitely by keeping the two people apart.
Almost every conflict of this kind has two accounts, and the leader has usually heard one of them more fully than the other. Asking both before forming a view is what makes the eventual decision defensible to whoever it goes against.
A surprising amount of what presents as personal friction is an unallocated decision. Where two people each believe a call is theirs, they will keep colliding however well the relationship is handled.
Both colleagues will be reading you for whose side you are on. A leader who becomes visibly irritated by the situation hands each of them evidence, and the conversation stops being about the disagreement.
This is the situation leaders most often hope will resolve itself. It rarely does, and the delay teaches everyone else on the team that it is tolerated.
Secondary behaviours
Use this where the disagreement concerns the work rather than the relationship. A question of fact that nobody has settled will keep reappearing as a question of personality.
Use this where something outside the relationship may be surfacing inside it. Pressure elsewhere, at work or at home, frequently arrives first as a difficulty with a colleague.
Use this where both positions are defensible. Resolution usually requires each of them to move slightly, which is easier to ask for once the leader has conceded something first.
A useful first action
Speak to each of them separately and ask what they wanted to happen, rather than what went wrong. The two answers usually reveal whether this is about an incident, a boundary or the work itself.
Suggested approach
- Speak to each colleague separately, and hear both accounts before forming a view.
- Decide what kind of disagreement this is: an unresolved incident, an unallocated responsibility, or a professional question being carried personally.
- Settle whatever is yours to settle, including any decision rights that were never allocated, and tell both people at the same time.
- Chair one conversation with a defined purpose and agreed actions, rather than leaving them to sort it out between themselves.
- Check back within a fortnight. Conflict that appears to have settled has often simply gone quiet.