Case guides · Hard conversations · HC-03

What do I do when two of my engineers are in open conflict?

Separate the problem from the people by looking for the interests under each person's position. Hear each one alone before you bring them together. Own the working agreement, not their friendship, and decide who decides. If you hear disrespect, exclusion or harassment, stop mediating and go to HR.

The situation

Two of your engineers can't work together. Code reviews have turned into arguments, one of them has stopped coming to the design meeting, and the rest of the team has started to pick sides or avoid both. Each has come to you separately, and each story makes sense on its own. A shared project starts in three weeks. If you wait for it to settle, the team will learn that this is how things go here.

This is coaching, not legal, HR or medical advice. Employment and health rules differ by country and by company. Check local law and your HR team before you act on anything here.

What matters most

  1. Separate the problem from the people. Most engineering conflict starts as a real disagreement (design, ownership, standards) and turns personal when it isn't resolved. Fisher and Ury's Getting to Yes: look for the interests under each person's position. "Your way is wrong" usually hides "I'll be the one on call for it".
  2. Hear each person alone before you bring them together. You are looking for three things: what each one wants, what each one fears, and what they both care about. The shared part is where the joint conversation starts.
  3. You own the working agreement, not their friendship. They don't have to like each other. They do have to review each other's code on time, disagree in the open and accept a decision. Make those the goal, in those words.
  4. Decide who decides. A lot of conflict between peers is really an unowned decision. If two people both think they own the architecture, no conversation will fix it. Name the owner, or name how a tie gets broken (you, a tech lead, a written design review).
  5. Watch for the other cause. Sometimes this isn't a disagreement at all: it's disrespect, exclusion or harassment. If what you hear includes anything about a protected characteristic, threats or repeated humiliation, stop mediating and go to HR. That is a different process.

How this lands in teams across Asia

The Western advice assumes conflict is loud. In many teams in the region, it's quiet, and that makes it harder to see and slower to fix.

  • The conflict you can see is the late stage. Where open disagreement is seen as rude, people signal it indirectly first: slower reviews, "forgetting" to invite someone, going through you instead of each other, very polite messages with nothing warm in them. By the time it's visible, it has usually been going on for months. Erin Meyer's The Culture Map ranks cultures on how openly they disagree; many in Asia sit toward the "avoids confrontation" end.
  • A joint meeting can be a public loss of face. Putting two people in a room and asking them to "get it all out" can feel like a trial with an audience of one: you. Do the individual conversations first, agree on the goal with each of them, and only bring them together when they know what the joint meeting is for and roughly what will happen in it.
  • Seniority changes who can say what. If one is older, more senior or longer in the company, the junior one may never say the real problem to their face. Give the junior person a way to say it to you, and then carry it yourself, framed as a work problem.
  • Cross-country camps. When the two are in different offices, a personal conflict can quickly become "the Singapore team vs the Bangalore team" or "HQ vs the satellite". Others join to defend their office, not the person. Name it early as a disagreement between two people about one thing, and fix the structure that feeds it (who reviews whom, who owns what, which time zone meetings favour).
  • Language and channel cause a lot of it. Short written review comments in a second or third language often read as colder than the writer meant. Before you judge intent, read the actual thread with that in mind. Moving one hard review to a call can remove half the heat.

A way to open

“I've noticed that working with [name] has been hard lately, and I want to understand it from your side before anything else.”

The rest of the script is in the app.

Rehearse it

Paste this into any AI assistant:

Play the other side of a hard conversation with me. The situation: Two of my engineers are in open conflict. Each side's story makes sense on its own, and the team is starting to pick sides. You are the person across the table and I am their manager. Invent a believable person and keep what is really on your mind to yourself until I ask well. After eight exchanges, tell me what I missed.

Rehearse in the app

Sources

  • Roger Fisher & William Ury, Getting to Yes (1981): separate the people from the problem; focus on interests, not positions.
  • Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan & Al Switzler, Crucial Conversations (2002): making it safe to talk when stakes and emotions are high.
  • Erin Meyer, The Culture Map (2014): the "Disagreeing" scale (confrontational vs. avoids confrontation) across cultures.
  • Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002): fear of conflict, and why artificial harmony costs more than an honest argument.

Published by Polanyi Works · Updated