Two Vice Presidents, One Broken Partnership

They had not spoken directly in three months. Not because they disliked each other — though by the time I arrived, that had also become true — but because at some point the communication between them had become so loaded, so exhausting, so reliably painful, that silence had started to feel like the responsible choice.

Both were smart. Both were deeply committed to the organization. Both were, in the independent assessments of nearly everyone who worked with them, excellent at their jobs. And they had somehow arrived at a place where their shared work had become almost impossible.

I was asked to help.

What Executive Mediation Actually Is

Executive mediation is not what most people imagine when they hear the word. It is not arbitration — I am not a judge, and there is no verdict. It is not couples counseling rebranded for the workplace, though the emotional territory is sometimes not entirely different. And it is not conflict resolution in the sense of helping two people agree to be nicer to each other.

What it is, at least how I practice it, is something more specific and more demanding: the creation of conditions under which two people who have stopped hearing each other can begin to do so again.

These two had a real disagreement. It was not a personality conflict that had been misdiagnosed as a strategic dispute. They had genuinely different views about how their organization should allocate resources, which direction a key initiative should take, and who bore responsibility for a decision that had cost the institution significantly the previous year. The disagreement was substantive. It had also been badly handled — on both sides, in different ways — and the accumulated weight of bad handling had calcified a professional difference into something that felt personal, because by then it partly was.

The Question That Changes the Frame

The first thing I did was meet with each of them separately. Not to gather intelligence or triangulate the truth. But because each of them needed, before anything else, to be fully heard by someone who had no stake in the outcome — someone who was not going to take what they said and use it as a data point in an argument against them.

I listened to each of them for a long time. And what I noticed, as I almost always do in situations like this, is that both of them were right about something important. Not about everything. But about something.

When I finally brought them together, I did not start with the dispute. I started with a question I ask in almost every mediation at some point, in some form: What do you most want this other person to understand about where you are coming from?

Not what do you want to win. Not what do you want them to concede. What do you want them to understand?

The shift in that framing is not trivial. The conflict frame is about prevailing. The understanding frame is about being known. And in my experience, most professional conflicts — even when they involve real stakes, real money, real organizational consequences — are sustained less by the underlying disagreement than by the experience of not being heard. Of having your perspective flattened, dismissed, or simply never acknowledged as a legitimate way of seeing things.

One of them, when asked that question, was quiet for a long time. Then said something I had not heard in either of our individual sessions. Something true and vulnerable and, I think, surprising even to them.

The other person's face changed when they heard it.

What Comes After the Wall Comes Down

That is not resolution. That is not the end of the work. But it is the beginning — the moment the conversation becomes possible, when the wall comes down enough to let a little light in. Everything that followed over the next several months was built on that moment.

I am not romantic about mediation. Some professional relationships cannot be repaired. Some conflicts are too structurally embedded, or too personally costly, to be resolved from the inside. There are times when the most honest thing I can tell an organization is that the problem is not the people — it is the design.

But in my experience, we get to that conclusion too quickly. Before the conversation has really been tried. Before anyone has been fully heard. Before the question has been asked: What do you most need the other person to understand?

It is a simple question. It is almost never asked.