Home / The Playbook / Month 6 / Handle Your First Real Conflict
Month 6 · Move 02

Handle your first real conflict directly.

Two reports in a dispute, or a disagreement with your own manager. Don't let it resolve itself, it usually won't, and letting it sit signals that you'll let things sit.

The instinct to hope a conflict cools down on its own is understandable and almost always wrong. It usually just goes quiet on the surface while it keeps accumulating underneath, and it resurfaces later, bigger.

Talk to each of them separately first
Getting both sides before you're in a room together keeps you from being ambushed by a dynamic you don't understand yet.
Don't referee, name the pattern
Your job isn't to decide who's right about the specific incident. It's to name the recurring pattern causing friction and get agreement on how to handle it going forward.
Bring them together only once you have a shape for the conversation
A joint conversation with no structure usually turns into two people re-litigating the same disagreement in front of you.
Follow up in two weeks, not never
Conflict resolution that isn't checked on tends to quietly reopen. Put a real date on the calendar to see if it held.
Example

Two engineers keep clashing over code review comments, one reads them as blunt and dismissive, the other thinks they're just being thorough. Talk to each of them alone first. You'll likely find the real issue isn't the comments themselves, it's that neither has told the other how they'd prefer to receive that kind of feedback. Name that pattern, get their agreement on a specific fix, and check back in two weeks.

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The Hard Middle: Month 6
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