A conflict between two team members is handled in three stages: separate conversations to understand each version without arbitrating, a three-way meeting with rules announced in advance, then a written agreement about observable behaviour. Your job is not to identify who is at fault — it is to restore a working method.
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Alex and Sarah have not spoken in a week. Meetings happen in parallel, information routes through you, and the rest of the team quietly picks sides. Each comes to you separately with a coherent, documented account that is incompatible with the other. The trigger they cite — an email, a remark, a project taken over — is almost always the visible episode of something that built up over months. Meanwhile the whole team spends part of its energy navigating around the silence.
You are structurally badly placed: you were not there, you inherit two narratives, and each side wants you to validate theirs. Ruling makes you a judge and manufactures a loser who stays on the team. Doing nothing lets the conflict become institutional, and everyone learns to route around it. So you have to hold an uncomfortable position — refusing to arbitrate the truth while demanding a change in behaviour — which initially displeases both parties.
Reconstructing the timeline is a trap: it always produces an earlier incident, and you end up in last year’s history that nobody can verify. The past is not your subject. How these two work together for the next six months is.
Bringing both together before you have seen them separately produces an audience, not a mediation. Each performs for you. The preliminary conversations are not a courtesy: they let you arrive knowing what is actually negotiable.
Becoming the relay relieves everyone in the short term and entrenches the conflict: the more you pass along, the less they need each other. After a few days, refuse that role out loud.
«They’re just very different» closes the subject without touching it. Behind most durable interpersonal conflicts sits a blurred boundary, a scarce resource or unevenly distributed credit — an organisational problem that belongs to you.
The end-of-meeting reconciliation does not survive the next disagreement if nothing was written down. Without precise commitments and a dated review, you will be back here in three weeks with less credibility than you started with.
Meet each with the same sentence: «Tell me what is happening, from where you sit, without me having to decide who is right.» Listen without correcting the account. Always close with: «What would have to change, concretely, for you to be able to work with them again?» You are collecting requests, not grievances.
Three rules, given to each person separately: speak in the first person, do not reopen anything before a set date, leave with commitments. Without that frame set in advance, a three-way meeting turns into a prosecution inside five minutes.
When an accusation lands, translate it in real time: «So what you’re asking is to be copied before the client is contacted. Is that right?» That reformulation is the core of the work: it converts a trial into an operational negotiation.
Not «make an effort», not «communicate better». Verifiable behaviour: who writes to whom, before what, within what timeframe. Three lines sent to both the same day, with a review set for three weeks out. The date matters as much as the content.