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 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.

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. 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 harder: making it possible for two people who have stopped hearing each other to begin to do so again.

The first thing I did was meet with each of them separately. Not to gather intelligence or triangulate the truth. To listen. I am a trained executive coach, and I bring that training into every individual session within a mediation engagement. I listen beneath the narrative. I ask questions designed not to extract information but to help the person hear what they are actually saying. I reflect back what I am hearing, and I pay close attention to what comes up in me as they speak, because what I notice in myself is often a signal about what has not yet been named.

What I have learned across many engagements like this one is that the substance of the dispute is almost never the real problem. There was a genuine disagreement here: resource allocation, direction of a key initiative, accountability for a decision that had cost the institution significantly. All of it real. None of it was what had made this intractable.

What I discovered, through the patience that deep listening requires, is what I nearly always discover. Beneath the positional arguments, beneath the strategic disagreements, beneath the accumulated grievances, each person was carrying a feeling they had not fully named, even to themselves. For one, it was a sense of having been dismissed: their professional judgment treated as an obstacle rather than a contribution. For the other, it was betrayal: a moment when trust had been broken and never acknowledged.

These are not small things. And they are not irrational. Institutions train their leaders to metabolize harm as strategy disagreement, to convert what is felt into what can be debated. That conversion protects the organization's self-image, but it buries the actual problem. And the actual problem does not go away. It calcifies.

The need that surfaces in individual sessions, once a person has been listened to long enough and carefully enough, is almost never about winning. It is not about getting the other party to concede a point or agree to a compromise. The need that comes to the fore is recognition. Recognition of their humanity. Recognition that harm occurred. Recognition that what they experienced was real.

That realization changes the entire shape of the work. If the underlying need is recognition, then the path forward is not negotiation. It is not splitting the difference. It is creating a moment in which one person can see the other clearly enough to acknowledge what happened between them.

When I finally brought these two together, the conversation I facilitated was not about the budget dispute or the failed initiative. It was about what those events had meant to each of them as human beings. One of them, when given the space to speak from that place, said something I had not heard in our individual sessions. Something true and unguarded. The other person's face changed when they heard it.

That is not resolution. That is not the end of the work. But it is the beginning: the moment when the wall comes down enough to let recognition 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 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 arrive at that conclusion too quickly. Before anyone has been fully heard. Before the real need has been named. Before anyone has been asked not what they want to win, but what they need the other person to recognize.