For the CEO or business owner
Two of them stopped working together, and now everything routes around it.
The meetings still happen. The decisions do not. And there is no one inside the company you can say this to.
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What everyone will tell you
Three explanations, and all of them keep you stuck.
It is a personality clash
Oil and water, nothing to be done. This is comfortable because it makes the problem a fact about who they are rather than something in front of you.
One of them has to go
Sometimes true, and almost never true yet. Acting on it now means losing someone you cannot replace over something nobody has tested.
You should have seen it a year ago
Useless as advice and corrosive as a verdict. It aims the whole thing at you and moves nothing.
What is actually underneath
A small number of things assessed and never said.
Someone decided years ago that the other one was not serious. Nobody ever put that on a table where it could be answered.
So it hardened. Everyone around it started routing their work to avoid the hard edge, and the routing is what you are now living inside.
Your team does not have a personality problem. It has a stack of ungrounded assessments and unmade requests.
Those are repairable in weeks, not years. That is a different problem than the one you have been losing sleep over, and it has a different solution.
The cost of another year of this
You are already paying it. Nobody has totalled it.
Most of your week goes to sitting between two people. Decisions get made in the room and undone in the corridor. Everyone below them has learned which subjects are expensive and works around them, which means the information you need arrives late or not at all.
Meanwhile the two of them are each building a case, and cases get more expensive to abandon the longer they run.
None of that shows up on a report, and all of it is coming out of the company every week you wait.
You can test whether it is really personality in one conversation.
100 messages free. No card.
Who this is for
And, more usefully, who it is not.
For the one who will look at their own part
You have been routing work around this too, and you set some of it up. If that sentence is bearable, this works.
For the one who wants it repaired or ended
Either outcome, cleanly, on evidence. Not another year of managing it.
Not for someone who wants a verdict
If what you want is confirmation that one of them is the problem, you will get an assessment offered back and you will not enjoy it.
Not for someone who wants it handled
This is not mediation and nobody is coming in to fix them. What changes is how the three of you coordinate, and that part is yours.
What becomes available
Not warmth. Coordination.
You may never get warmth between them, and you do not need it.
What you need is a team that can put a hard assessment on the table, get it answered, make a clear request, and get a yes or a no you can build on. That is a skill, it is learnable by adults who do not like each other, and it moves faster than anyone expects once the first real conversation happens.
And if the working relationship genuinely cannot be repaired, you will know inside a few weeks rather than another two years, with the evidence in hand to act cleanly.
How the work goes
Four moves, in order. Not a script, a way of seeing.
Mood
The mood you carry into the room with them, which has been deciding what you can hear for longer than you think.
Narrative
The story you are inside about each of them, including the parts you have been handling as fact.
Agency
The move that is actually yours, rather than the one that waits for either of them to change first.
Action
Requests made cleanly, promises with conditions, breakdowns named and repaired instead of routed around.
One company, disguised
Forty million, and two people who had stopped speaking.
A composite, braided from several engagements. Details are changed.
The founder had two people he could not run the business without: the one who ran operations, and the one who ran growth. They had stopped speaking directly about eighteen months earlier. Everything went through him. He had started calling it managing the personalities, and it was most of his week.
We started where it usually starts, with what each had concluded about the other and never said. Operations believed growth had promised numbers she knew were fiction, and had watched the company plan around them twice. She had never said it, because saying it would have meant calling a peer a liar in front of the founder.
Growth believed operations had quietly killed two launches by moving slowly on purpose. He had never said that either.
Neither belief was entirely right. Both had enough truth in them that they had been running the company for a year and a half.
It took six weeks. Not to make them friends, they are not friends. To get those two assessments spoken, grounded and answered. The founder got his week back first. The forecast stopped being fiction the quarter after, because someone was finally willing to say out loud when it was.
Six weeks, or another two years. The difference is whether anything gets said.
Roughly three real conversations, free, before anything is asked of you.
Fair questions
The ones you are actually holding.
Should I just let one of them go?
Maybe, and not yet. You would be acting on an assessment nobody has grounded. Test it first, which takes weeks rather than quarters, and then you will be deciding on evidence.
Do they have to use it too?
No. You are the one here and the work is yours. What changes first is how you coordinate with each of them, and that shifts the room whether or not they ever open it.
Is this mediation?
No. Nobody arrives to sit between them. This works on what you are carrying into the room, and on the requests you have not made.
I do not have time for this.
You are currently spending most of a week on it. Four minutes before the conversation that matters is not the expensive part of your calendar.
What happens to what I say?
It is yours. A small council of senior practitioners reviews de-identified conversations to improve the coaching, and you can switch that off in Settings. Delete anything, any time.
Is this therapy?
No, and it does not diagnose anyone, including the two of them. It works on moods and language in a working context.
The terms
One hundred messages, then a decision.
A hundred messages free. No card, no trial clock. Roughly three real conversations, which is enough to know.
After that it is one hundred dollars a month, or a thousand for the year.
Cancel in two clicks, and your conversations stay yours.
The meetings will keep happening. The decisions will not.
100 messages free. No card.
A team that coordinates again, or clarity about who has to go.
Bring it the real oneWould rather we came to you? Ask us to get in touch, with a line about your situation. A person reads every note, and writes back.