When two employees are in conflict and both want you to take a side

Callum manages a team of eight at a mid-sized firm. On Tuesday, Fiona asks for five minutes and closes the door. Dev keeps rewriting her work without telling her, she says, and it has been going on for months. On Thursday, Dev asks for five minutes and closes the door. Fiona sends things half-finished, he says, and then complains when he fixes them. Both conversations end the same way. "You need to say something to him." "You need to say something to her."

A manager mediating between two employees usually starts here, with two separate conversations a few days apart, each with one upset person in it, each pulling the opposite way from the other. The meeting with both of them in the room comes later, if it comes at all. This is one of the conversations managers bring to the Management Lab, and most of the damage is done on Tuesday, well before anybody has arranged that meeting.

Tuesday

Fiona is upset, and she has a point. Callum's first line is the one most decent people reach for. "Leave it with me. I'll have a word with him."

Fiona leaves relieved. Callum has taken on a job, though, and it is a bigger one than it sounded. He has agreed to carry her version of events to Dev, so when he next speaks to Dev he arrives already briefed by one side. He has promised an outcome he doesn't control. Fiona now expects two things, that something will be said to Dev and that something will change, and if neither happens she won't put it down to the situation being complicated. She will decide that Callum said one thing and did another. On Tuesday it felt like a kind line to a colleague who was having a bad week.

Thursday

Dev is upset, and he has a point as well. Callum reaches for the same kindness. "I hear you. That does sound frustrating."

He has now agreed with both of them. Each line was true in the room it was said in, and he can't keep both. Whichever way he moves, one of them is going to find out that the manager who was on their side on Tuesday, or Thursday, was on the other side two days later.

A week or two after that the third line usually turns up. "I don't want to get involved. You two need to sort it out between yourselves." It is true and it doesn't help, because it comes after two promises, neither of them kept, and to both Fiona and Dev it sounds like a manager backing out of something he started.

The line that can be said twice

The replacement, on Tuesday, is less comfortable than "leave it with me". "I'm glad you told me. I'm not going to carry this to Dev for you. I'm going to hear his side, and then the three of us will sit down and you can say this to him with me in the room."

Fiona has still been heard. She knows what happens next and roughly when. She has also been told that Callum will not be her messenger, which is disappointing on Tuesday and a good deal better by the following month.

On Thursday Dev gets the same line, word for word, with Fiona's name in it. If the two of them compared notes on Friday they would find they had spoken to the same manager. "Leave it with me" doesn't survive being said twice, because the second time it is said the first promise has already gone.

What Fiona hears

In the Lab the pair swaps. The manager who has just played Callum sits down as Fiona and hears the lines come back.

"Leave it with me", heard from Fiona's chair, is a relief for about a day. After that you find yourself watching for the thing that was promised, and when it doesn't arrive you have stopped thinking about Dev and started thinking about Callum.

"I hear you", heard as Dev, when you know Fiona was in that room two days before, sounds like a manager who has already been got at, and you start listening for whose words he is using.

The replacement line is the least pleasant of the three to hear in the moment, because you wanted him to sort it for you. He hasn't gone anywhere, though, you know what happens next, and whatever he says to Dev he will say in front of you.

Where the lines get practised

There is no method for settling the conflict in this piece, and there is none in the Lab either. What the Lab works on is the two lines, because by the time a manager is in a room with both people the lines have already decided how much standing he has left. Two managers play the scene, I stop it at the first line that goes wrong, we look at what it did to the conversation, and the same pair runs it again. Then they swap. Nobody plays themselves and no real names are used. A live case with HR or legal sides to it stays with HR, and I don't advise on it.

If you manage managers and one of them has two people who each want a word, the Lab is three hours at your office for up to sixteen of them, and the first of those Tuesday conversations gets said out loud there before it is said for real.