We usually do not just find ourselves entrenched in a conflict over night, but go through subtle ‘stages’. It is only later in the process that we feel frustrated over futile attempts to clear the air. At this point, we lose both, our ability to walk in someone else’s shoes and the hope for relationships improving. If not addressed, such dynamic can get carried over to unrelated events, blocking collaboration elsewhere.

A Head of Department and one of their Team Leads had been keeping communication to a bear minimum outside official meetings. The Head got frustrated as deadlines and agreements were not met, the Team Lead felt left in the lurch with unthankful projects and excluded from important decisions on purpose. The result was a pivotal team in the department not delivering on client contracts. Any attempt from either colleague to approach the other ended in further confirmation that trying to repair the relationship was futile.

Our intervention entailed three parts: Individual conversations with judgement-free appreciation for each person’s perspective by the mediating consultant. Three meetings ensuring both parties were enabled to express why they felt disappointed by their colleague and what they needed from each other to re-establish a constructive working relationship, ending with the agreement on a communication strategy where both talk in regular intervals about how they experience their collaboration. A review a few months down the road to see how agreed changes had been implemented and their impact on the overall departmental performance.

Head and Team Lead alike reported on gaining unique insight into each other’s logic, using these for their own roles. Being caught in the victim role, both saw they had underestimated each other’s emotional burden. They admitted to unintentionally ‘forgetting’ to share information with one another, impeding on departmental performance. Both found commonalities in their effort to cope with the situation and separated the matters of potential disagreements from their stuck relationship pattern, thereby modelling constructive conflict for their teams.