What do you do when two people in your team cannot stand each other?
What do you do when two people in your team simply cannot stand each other?
Every few weeks my client has to deal with this exact situation. One member of his team comes to him privately to say his colleague is unprofessional and lazy. Then the other one comes separately to say he can never get a straight answer and that nothing is communicated openly.
His plan was to keep the whole thing strictly factual. What was supposed to be delivered, what actually arrived, who said what and when. He worried, quite reasonably, that stepping into how two colleagues feel about each other would make him look like he was taking a side. Sticking to the evidence has kept him out of that trap but it hasn't resolved the issue.
On top of that, the accusations in this conflict are nothing but factual. Both sides have escalated this to naming character flaws instead of actions or even specific behaviors.
There is research on this. Simons and Peterson studied 70 senior teams back in 2000 and found that trust changes how disagreement gets interpreted. Where trust is low, people misread a disagreement about the work as an attack on themselves. The facts do not stay facts, they land as accusations.
At some point, the trust between those two colleagues was irreparably broken. Everything else has essentially stemmed as a side effect of that.
What's the right approach here for the leader?
Separate conversations with each person first with the goal of understanding what values each of them feels is being violated.
Say one of them values politeness and a bit of daily human contact. A colleague who writes in clipped, purely transactional messages then creates accumulated friction that violates the other person's need for connection and belonging in the workplace.
So, in the conversations, it's important to explore:
What good collaboration means to each person
What are the values that they consider most important at work
What they would need in order to work with this person, separate from liking them
Over time, the ultimate goal is to rebuild the trust between the two colleagues, regardless of personality preferences and character alignment. But to get there, there is no avoiding the emotional labor that needs to take place, both from the side of the leader and the team members involved in the conflict.
⁉️ Have you ever had two people in conflict in your team over character disagreements? What approach did you take?
🌟Sparking Leadership # 59: a weekly series on human-centered sustainable #leadership. Reach out if you're stuck in your #career and need a change or follow for more sparkling content. In the meantime, lead with spark! ✨️
