When should a manager step into a conflict between two colleagues?

As soon as a third person is affected: a shift is reorganised to keep two people apart, a colleague starts carrying messages, or a guest notices. Before that point, a disagreement is ordinary. After it, waiting is read by the whole team as siding with whoever is winning.

What if the two people are related, or from the same village?

Then the conflict has a history outside work that the manager cannot resolve and should not try to. The manager's job is narrower: to set how the two people work together, on what, and with which rules. Keeping the discussion strictly on work is what makes it possible at all.

Is an outside facilitator useful in a company this small?

Often more than in a large company. When everyone knows everyone, the manager is rarely seen as neutral. A facilitator who has no link with anyone in the room can hold a conversation that an insider cannot, especially once a conflict has lasted more than six months.

Team conflict in Seychelles: the four roles that sustain it

Take a mid-sized hotel on Mahé. The head of housekeeping and the front office manager disagree about who is responsible for late check-outs. It starts as a dispute over a procedure. Six months later, they no longer speak to each other, room status updates go through a third person, and one of the best receptionists has just handed in her notice to join a competitor down the coast.

Everyone describes this as a conflict between two people. It is not. A disagreement between two people burns out in a few weeks. A conflict that lasts six months is being kept alive, and in a small society the people keeping it alive are not always on the payroll.

Four roles are usually involved.

The one who is right

One of the two protagonists is often right on the facts. The procedure really was unclear. The late check-outs really did disorganise the cleaning schedule.

This is what makes the position so stable. Being right removes any reason to look at how one behaves: the tone in the corridor, the complaint made in front of staff, the refusal to answer a message. Each time the facts are discussed again, the position is confirmed, and the behaviour is never examined.

The manager’s move is to separate two questions: was the complaint justified, and did the way it was expressed work? Most people accept the second point easily once it is no longer mixed with the first.

The go-between

In Seychelles, this role is often taken by someone who knows both people well, sometimes a colleague, sometimes a relative who works elsewhere in the company. They carry messages, soften them, explain to each side that the other did not mean it.

The intention is good, and the effect is to make the conflict comfortable. As long as messages travel through a third person, the two protagonists never have to have the one conversation that would settle things. The go-between also pays a high personal price, absorbing the tension that the two others no longer feel.

Asking them to stop does not work. Giving them a new role does: they are usually the person both sides trust, which makes them useful in preparing a direct conversation rather than replacing it.

The arbiter outside the organisation chart

In a large company, the informal arbiter of a conflict is a colleague who listens in the corridor and hands out verdicts. On an island of around 100,000 people, the arbiter is often outside the company: a respected relative, a senior figure at church, a former manager now working elsewhere. Each protagonist tells their version at home or in the community, and comes back to work with a verdict that has already been given.

A manager cannot control what is said outside work, and should not try. What they can do is make the internal decision faster and clearer than the external one. When the question of who handles late check-outs has been decided in writing, by the person with the authority to decide it, the verdicts from outside lose their weight.

The one who leaves

The receptionist who resigned was never part of the dispute. She simply concluded that the atmosphere would not change, and that a colleague at a competing hotel had a better daily life.

In Seychelles, this role costs more than elsewhere. The market is small, the good people are known, and the person who leaves goes to a competitor a few kilometres away, taking with them an account of why they left. For a foreign colleague, withdrawal takes a quieter form: precise, polite, and no longer volunteering anything, until the contract ends.

The order that works

The natural reflex is to sit the two protagonists down together. Done first, it fails: the four roles reform the following week.

Decide the factual question first. If the conflict started from an unclear responsibility, settle it and write it down. No mediation fixes a decision that was never taken.

Speak to each role separately. The one who is right, about the behaviour. The go-between, about their new role. The team, about the fact that the question has been decided internally.

Then bring the two protagonists together, with the factual issue off the table, so the conversation is about how they work together from now on. The method is the one described in non-violent communication at work.

Finally, check on those who have withdrawn. They will need to see a concrete change before they invest again.

The individual behaviours are the subject of Self-awareness and positive communication. The collective version is handled in a Team coaching programme, and the manager’s own posture in The manager-leader toolkit.