Two of them stopped working together, and now everything routes around it.

Everyone will tell you this is a personality clash. That the two of them are oil and water, that one of them has to go, that you should have seen it a year ago.

It is almost never that. What actually sits underneath a split like this is a small number of things that were assessed and never said out loud, and a smaller number of requests that were needed and never made. 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, and 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, and 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.

A composite, braided from several engagements. Details are changed.

The company was doing a little over forty million. 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 he was spending most of his week doing it.

We started where it usually starts, with what each of them had concluded about the other and never said. The operations lead believed growth had promised numbers she knew were fiction, and had watched the company plan around them twice. She had never said that, because saying it would have meant calling a peer a liar in front of the founder. The growth lead 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, and then to build the request-and-promise habit that had never existed between them. The founder got his week back first. The forecast stopped being fiction the quarter after that, because someone was finally willing to say out loud when it was.