Two of your best people aren’t speaking to each other.
You can feel it the second you walk into the room. The clipped answers. The way one of them suddenly needs to “grab something from their desk” when the other starts talking. Projects are slowing down. Other folks are picking sides without even meaning to. And both of them keep showing up at your door, separately, building their case like lawyers hoping you’ll bang the gavel in their favor.
Here’s the temptation in that moment: you’re the boss. You could just decide. Call them both in, lay down the ruling, and tell them to act like professionals. Problem solved.
Except it isn’t. Not even close.
When you use your authority to settle a fight between two people, you might end the argument. But you don’t end the conflict. You just push it underground.
Think about what happens when a referee makes a bad call in a close game. The play stops. The whistle blows. Technically, the matter is “resolved” — the ref has the authority, and the game moves on. But the players don’t believe in it. They carry that resentment into the next quarter, the next game, sometimes the whole season. The call didn’t change anyone’s heart. It just used a bigger whistle.
That’s exactly what happens when a leader rules from the top of the org chart. One person walks away feeling vindicated. The other walks away feeling overruled. And both of them learned the same lesson: the way to win around here is to get the boss on your side. So next time there’s friction, they won’t work it out between themselves. They’ll race to your office to lobby you first.
You didn’t solve a conflict. You trained two people to bring you all of them.
Here’s what I’ve noticed over the years Coaching leaders through these moments. The breakthrough almost never comes from deciding who’s right. It comes from a different question entirely.
Not “Who’s right?”
But “What are we actually here to do?”
Most workplace conflicts between good people aren’t about good versus evil. They’re two people who both care, pulling hard in slightly different directions, who have lost sight of the thing they’re both rowing toward. The marketing lead and the sales lead aren’t enemies. They both want the company to grow — they just have different maps for getting there. The argument feels personal, but underneath it is usually two people who forgot they’re on the same boat.
Your job isn’t to be the judge. It’s to be the person who points back at the horizon.
I learned this a long way from any conference room. In the Army, you don’t end disputes between soldiers by reminding everyone who outranks whom. You remind them of the mission. The mission doesn’t care about whose feelings got bruised in the motor pool. The mission is bigger than both of them, and the moment they remember that, the argument shrinks down to its real size — which is usually pretty small.
The same thing works on your team. When two people are locked in, get them in a room and don’t open with the dispute. Open with the purpose.
“Before we talk about what’s going wrong between you two, I want to remind us both why this work matters. We’re building something here. There’s a customer on the other end of all this who’s counting on us getting it right. Now — with that in front of us — let’s talk.”
It sounds almost too simple. But watch what it does. You’ve just moved the conversation from a tug-of-war between two people into a shared problem the two of them have to solve together. You’re no longer the judge they’re trying to win over. You’re the teammate reminding them of the score that actually counts.
Here’s the thing about authority: it can make people comply, but it can’t make people commit. Those are two very different animals.
Compliance is what you get when someone does what you said because you’re the one who signs the reviews. It lasts exactly as long as you’re watching. Commitment is what you get when someone believes in why the work matters more than they care about winning the argument. That kind of buy-in doesn’t need you standing over it.
A cause does something a title can never do. It gives two people a reason to come back together that has nothing to do with you — and everything to do with something bigger than either of them. When a leader points to that shared purpose instead of pulling rank, they hand the conflict back to the people who actually own it, and they hand it back with a reason to solve it.
That’s the heart of servant leadership, and it’s the least soft thing in the world. You’re not avoiding the hard conversation. You’re refusing to short-circuit it with your title, because you know the short-circuit costs you more in the long run.
So the next time two people on your team are at each other’s throats, try resisting the urge to rule. Instead:
Start with the shared purpose, not the disagreement. Get the cause on the table before the complaint.
Ask each person what they think the team is trying to accomplish. Nine times out of ten, you’ll find they actually agree on the destination — they’re just fighting about the road.
Then ask the question that puts the ball back in their court: “Given that we both want the same thing, what would it take for the two of you to get there together?”
And then — this is the hard part — stay quiet. Let them build the bridge. You’re not there to construct it for them. You’re there to remind them why the bridge is worth building.
You’ll know it worked not when the argument ends, but when you stop being the one ending it.
So here’s the question worth sitting with: the last time two of your people clashed, did you reach for your authority or for the cause?
There’s no shame if it was the title. Most of us were handed the old playbook — the one that says the leader’s job is to be the final word. But the leaders who build teams that actually heal, the ones whose people work things out without running for cover, figured out something better. They stopped being the judge and started being the reminder of why everyone showed up in the first place.
Your title can make the fighting stop. Only the cause can make people want to come back together.
Have you ever watched a shared purpose pull two people back from the brink? Or seen a leader pull rank and make it worse? I’d Love to hear your take — drop a comment and tell me how you’ve handled it.
The post Leading Back to the Cause first appeared on Servant Leadership Coaching | Practical Leadership Development | Doug Thorpe.
