How to resolve a workplace conflict: cold disputes and the four rungs

The dispute you can see is the loud one, and it is also the rare one. Most workplace conflict is cold: two people stop talking about the issue and route around each other.

They cooperate exactly as much as required, and nothing is ever raised, so nothing is ever resolved. The cost is paid in every handover, every review, and every decision made slowly because one of them will not be in the room with the other.

Loud conflict is easier. Both parties are engaged, and engagement can be redirected. Cold conflict has to be found first, and then somebody has to make it hot enough to work on, which is the step most people skip because it feels like making things worse.

What to take away

Which chair you are in

Before anything else, decide which of two things you are doing. If the outcome affects your work, your team, or your standing, you are a party. If it does not, you may be a referee. Trying to referee something you have a stake in produces questions that steer, and both sides notice within minutes.

This is why organizations that take the problem seriously fund a separate role. It is why an ombuds office insists on being independent, informal and off the record: neutrality is a structural property, not a state of mind. Say which chair you are in, at the start, out loud.

"I have a view and I will decide after hearing you both" is a legitimate position and easy to work with. "I am neutral" is only legitimate if it is true, and if it is not true it poisons everything after it.

The rest of this page covers both chairs, because the mechanics are the same and only the permissions differ.

Warming up a cold conflict

You will not be told about a cold conflict. You will infer it from the shape of the work. Two people are never on the same thread. A handover always goes through a third person. A decision has been pending for a month because the two people who need to agree have not spoken.

The move is to name the pattern, not the feelings. "You two have not been in a meeting together since March and the handover is going through me. What happened?" That is a question about work, it is answerable, and it does not require anyone to admit to a grievance they may not have words for yet.

Expect the first answer to be that nothing happened. Ask what they would need to be different in order to work together directly. That question has an answer even when the first one did not.

The ladder

Not every dispute can be settled by agreement, and treating agreement as the only acceptable outcome is why so many disputes stay open. There are four rungs, and each is a genuine resolution.

Most failed resolutions are attempts to reach the top rung when the third or fourth was available. Two people who genuinely value different things will not agree, and forcing a summary that says they did produces a document nobody believes. Naming who decides, and getting both to accept it in advance, ends more disputes than agreement ever will.

Running the conversation

Speak to each person alone first. Do not gather evidence. Find what each would need to consider the matter closed and whether the thing argued about is the wrong thing.

In the joint conversation, the most senior person says the least and speaks last. The rules are few: one topic at a time, facts before interpretations, and nobody characterizes the other's motives.

Ask each person to state the other's position until the other agrees it is accurate. This takes longer than it sounds and it does most of the work, because half of what people are fighting is a version of the other person's view that the other person does not hold.

Then go to the ladder. Ask which rung is realistic. Do not be the one who chooses.

When you are the party

Raise it early, with the person, before anyone else. Describe a specific behavior, its effect on the work, and what you are asking for.

Not "you are dismissive in meetings" but "twice this week you answered a question I asked by addressing someone else, and I need to know whether the answer was for me". The first accuses character and will be defended. The second describes an event and can be discussed.

Then listen for the thing you did. There almost always is one, and finding it is not weakness; it is the only currency you have for asking them to look at theirs.

If the other person has already escalated, do not try to win. Someone who took a position in front of their manager cannot retreat without cost.

If you make that retreat expensive, you have made an opponent for the price of one argument. Offer a route: a narrower version of their position they can hold, a new fact that lets them move, or a reframing that makes the change look like an update, not a climbdown.

After the resolution

One limit is worth stating plainly. Some disputes are not private disagreements at all, because the conduct in them is covered by employment law. The guidance on harassment at work describes the territory. A resolution that quietly settles that kind of matter between two people is not a resolution, and it is not yours to make.

For everything else: write down the outcome, including which rung it stopped on and who gave something up. Then check, separately, in a few weeks, whether the behavior changed. Ask what is different, not whether it is better.

Most resolutions decay because they were made under conditions that then shifted. The check is cheap and the repair, done early, is a conversation. Done late, it is the original dispute with a history attached.

The dispute is often a negotiation that nobody labeled, and the preparation is the same; see negotiation. If the two parties are both trying to move a decision that neither of them owns, the underlying problem is described in control and influence.

When you are refereeing a dispute between people who report to you, your position changes what they will say; see leadership influence. The disclosure test for whether the pressure you are applying is legitimate is in positive influence, and how to brief upward on a dispute without turning it into an escalation is in executive communication.

Common questions

They refuse to talk to each other at all.

Then you are on the third rung whether you like it or not. Decide, or find who decides, tell both parties what was decided and why, and separate the work so that it does not depend on their cooperation. Some working relationships do not recover, and a structure that requires them to is a structure that will fail.

Is it my job to fix a conflict between two peers?

If it is costing the work, and you can see it, and nobody with authority over both is acting, then raising it is your job. Fixing it may not be. Describe the cost to whoever owns both of them, plainly, once.

What if the conflict is really about one person's behavior?

Then it is not a dispute and should not be handled as one. Mediation between someone who is being treated badly and the person treating them badly puts a false symmetry on it. That case needs someone with authority to name the behavior and say what follows if it continues.

How do I know it is resolved?

Each person can state the outcome, and the reason for it, in their own words, without you present, and the work has visibly changed in a way that matches. Until all three are true, it is paused, not resolved.