Two of your best executives cannot work together, and everyone has stopped pretending otherwise. The instinct is to wait, because senior people are supposed to sort this out themselves. The evidence says waiting is the worst available option. In research published in Harvard Business Review in 2015, covering nearly 8,000 managers across more than 250 companies, Donald Sull and colleagues found that conflicts between functions are handled badly roughly two times out of three: resolved after significant delay 38 percent of the time, resolved quickly but poorly 14 percent, or simply left to fester 12 percent.
Left to fester is the largest single category of genuine failure, and it is also the option that feels most reasonable in the moment. Nobody schedules a meeting to let a conflict fester. They schedule other things instead, and by the time the cost is visible on a number, the dispute has been running for a year.
The situation is usually specific. Two capable leaders, both performing, both with supporters. Their teams have stopped collaborating. Meetings involving both of them are notably careful. Neither has done anything you could put in a file, and you are being asked, informally and constantly, to take a side.
Work out which of the three conflicts you have
The intervention that fixes one of these does nothing for the other two, which is why generic conflict resolution advice so often fails at this level.
Structural conflict is built into the design. Two executives with overlapping decision rights, a shared resource with no arbitration rule, or incentive plans that reward opposite behavior. The people are interchangeable. Replace both and the argument continues.
Substantive conflict is a real disagreement about a real question: how fast to move, what the product should be, whether to keep the region. This is the useful kind, and the problem is not that it exists but that it has never been resolved by anyone with the authority to resolve it.
Personal conflict is about conduct and regard. One party believes the other is untrustworthy, dismissive or self serving. It usually started as one of the other two types and was left long enough to acquire a history. It is the slowest to fix and the only kind that sometimes ends in someone leaving.
The structural test comes first
Before any conversation with either person, do this on your own. Write out the decision rights, the shared resources and the incentive plans for both roles. Then ask: would two different people, in these two roles, with these targets, be having this argument?
If the answer is yes, you have a design problem dressed as a personality problem, and mediation will produce a temporary truce followed by an identical dispute in the spring. Fix the design first, tell both of them that is what you are doing, and see what remains afterwards. Sometimes nothing remains, which is the cheapest outcome available to you.
Step 1. Two separate conversations, the same three questions
Meet each of them alone, within the same week, and ask the same three questions in the same order. What outcome do you need that you are not getting? What do you think the other person needs? What would have to be true for you to stop working around this?
Take notes and read the answers back. The first question produces a position, the second produces the diagnosis, and the second is the one worth studying. When both parties can describe the other's needs accurately, the conflict is substantive and solvable in one session. When neither can, you are dealing with something that has become personal and the work is longer.
Say explicitly in both conversations that you will not receive grievance about the other person in one on ones from this point on. That sentence changes behavior immediately, because those private channels are how the dispute has been sustained.
Step 2. Set the joint conversation up so nobody is ambushed
Both people need to know, before they walk in, what will be discussed, who else is present, and what you intend to decide by the end. Surprise produces defence, and defence produces the meeting everyone dreads.
Send a short note to both, identically worded, naming the two or three specific issues in neutral language: the ownership of the pricing decision, the sequencing of the platform work, the handover between the two teams. Issues, not character. Ninety minutes, a room with no audience, and no other agenda items before or after it.
Step 3. Run the session around interests, not positions
Open by stating the cost to the organization in concrete terms: the decision that has been stalled for eleven weeks, the two resignations in the layer below, the customer who received contradictory answers. Facts, not disappointment. This is not a conversation about how you feel as their leader.
Then take each issue in turn and make each person state the other's case before stating their own. It is a simple mechanism and it works, because a conflict that has been running for months is largely sustained by each party arguing against a version of the other that does not exist. Hold the room in the issues. When it drifts into history, name the drift and return to the issue.
Step 4. Write the working agreement and set a review date
End with something written that two people sign up to in front of each other. It has four parts: which decisions each of them owns outright, which they make jointly and what happens when they cannot agree, what each will do differently and by when, and how they will raise the next disagreement before it becomes this one again.
Then set a review in thirty days with all three of you. The review is what makes the agreement real, because an agreement with no scheduled test is a good mood with a date stamp. Hold it even if things look fine, particularly if things look fine.
What the chief executive's job is, and what it is not
Your job is to decide the structural questions, because only you can. Who owns the pricing decision. Whether the two functions share a target. What the arbitration rule is when they deadlock. Executives left to negotiate decision rights between themselves are being asked to do your job without your authority, and they will settle it by attrition.
Your job is not to adjudicate who is a better colleague, to relay messages between them, or to keep the peace by giving each of them a version of your support in private. That last habit is the most common and the most damaging, because each party then believes they have your backing and neither is wrong.
When to bring in a neutral third party
Bring one in when you are part of the conflict, which includes having visibly favored one of them, when previous attempts by you have already failed, when the dispute has a history longer than a year, or when the content is likely to touch conduct rather than work. In all four cases your presence changes what gets said, and what gets said is the point.
A neutral practitioner also lets each party hold a position privately without losing face publicly, which is often the actual barrier. Choose someone with no other engagement in the organization, and be clear with both executives about what the third party reports back to you and what stays between them.
If it still does not resolve
Give it a defined window, usually one quarter, with the thirty day review inside it. If the agreement holds, say so and move on. If it does not, the situation has answered your question and the remaining decision is about roles rather than relationships.
That decision is unpleasant and it is rarely a surprise to anyone by that point, including the person who leaves. Making it late is expensive in a way the organization can feel. Gallup's 2015 State of the American Manager research found that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units, and two executives at war are both being copied by everyone reporting to them.
The order things fall apart in
Unresolved conflict at this level degrades in a predictable sequence. Knowing it lets you judge how far along you are.
- The meeting goes first. The two stop attending anything the other chairs, send deputies, and their calendars quietly diverge.
- Then information. Each stops copying the other, decisions get made without the input that would have improved them, and both teams learn to route around the gap.
- Then the layer below picks a side, because their own progression depends on reading the situation correctly. This is the point at which the conflict stops being about two people.
- Then the joint commitments slip, and the failure becomes visible on a number. This is usually the first version of the problem the board ever sees, and it arrives labelled as a delivery issue.
- Then talent. The strongest people in both functions leave first, because they have options and they can read a room. You lose the ones you would have promoted.
- Last, your authority. Once it is clear this has been tolerated for a year, every other thing you tolerate is interpreted through it. Frequently the underlying behavior is a leadership derailer that has been read as a strength for years.
What your next week looks like once you have called it
The first difference is quiet. Your one on ones stop being a channel for grievance, because you have said you will not receive it there, and both of them believe you. That alone gives you back an hour a week and removes the mechanism that has been keeping the dispute alive.
The second is that there is a date in the diary. Not a resolution, a date. Both executives now know the conversation is happening, which changes how they behave in the intervening days more than any amount of encouragement would have. Several of these disputes soften before the joint session, simply because it exists.
The third is that you will have written down the one structural question you are going to answer yourself, and you will have stopped waiting for two people to answer it for you. That is usually the item that has been sitting unresolved the longest, and deciding it is the part of this that only you can do. If the pattern is wider than these two people, the wider read is in the signs of a dysfunctional leadership team.
When you are too close to the conflict to run it yourself, a neutral practitioner can hold the separate conversations and the joint session without changing what gets said. That is part of our leadership team effectiveness work, and it usually starts with the structural test rather than the two people.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Should a chief executive get involved in conflict between two direct reports?
Yes, and earlier than feels comfortable. Senior leaders rarely resolve these alone, because each has a team, a budget and a reputation that make unilateral concession costly. What the chief executive should not do is adjudicate personalities. Decide the structural questions, require a working agreement, and set a review date.
How long should I give two executives to work it out themselves?
One clearly stated attempt with a deadline, usually four to six weeks, after which you intervene. Open ended patience reads as tolerance to everyone watching, and the organization is watching. Say the deadline out loud to both of them so the intervention is not experienced as a sudden change of position.
Does executive conflict always mean someone has to leave?
No. Most of these disputes are structural or substantive, and both resolve without a departure once the decision rights and the disagreement itself are settled by someone with authority. Departures become likely when the conflict has been personal for more than a year, or when one party has already broken a written agreement.
What if one executive will not participate?
Treat non participation as the answer to a different question. Ask directly what would need to change for them to engage, and if there is no answer, the issue is no longer the conflict but the refusal, which is a performance conversation with a different shape. Document that shift, because it changes what happens next.
Should HR run the joint session or should we use an outside facilitator?
An internal partner can run it well when the dispute is substantive and neither party outranks them in practice. Use an outside facilitator when the conflict involves the chief executive, when either party has a relationship with HR that complicates neutrality, or when conduct is in question. Neutrality that only one party believes in is not neutrality.