A reader writes:
Over the last few months, one of my people (Alice) has repeatedly come to me about conflict with a neighboring department’s person (Mary). Both are at the same fairly junior level — they’re a few years out of school. The conflict has always seemed odd, and fairly amorphous, but both Alice and Mary have been very upset, including claims of bullying and issues with sharing of materials.
I observed their interactions, and they seemed somewhere between tense and rude. I coached Alice on professional behavior in the workplace, and Mary’s manager did the same with Mary.
Mary’s manager and I spent a lot of energy trying to figure out what was happening, and if one of the two of these people was the aggressor. Part of the problem has always been how little reason there seemed to be for this disagreement — nothing that happened seemed to justify the outsized anger at each other. For example, Mary once told me that she could not be in the same room with Alice without blacking out with overwhelming fury.
HR got involved, as did the union, and I have talked with more union reps and HR members in the last few months than I had in the preceding several years. This affected office morale enough that Mary’s manager and I have had conversations with the union about the path towards firing both of them, despite the fact that both are very high performers.
This week Alice came into my office and happily told me that it had been solved: she and Mary have made up and have begun dating. This comes after a long week last week of complaints about Mary’s behavior, and a further escalation up the ranks in HR.
I am furious. I don’t consider myself a person who gets angry easily, but I am there now. I coached these young women through a workplace conflict in good faith, and it turns out this was just some highschool pigtail pulling? I genuinely trusted Alice, and (while keeping open eyes about her faults) have taken the point of view that it is my job to protect my people.
I have not said anything, and I don’t know what I want to say. I certainly won’t address it until I can think this through with a level head, and maybe I should just be glad everything is over and let this go. Any advice?
Oh my goodness.
This is like the plot of a bad movie, where two coworkers’ despise each other so much that their hatred finally combusts into fiery passion.
I think I’ve seen that movie several times, but it doesn’t normally happen in real life.
I can see why you’re frustrated, if your sense is that all of this “hatred” was some kind of juvenile flirtation or a twisted game that they drew other people’s energy and person-hours into.
But … you’ve got to consider that maybe it’s not. It seems nonsensical but it’s possible, maybe even likely, that their conflict was real until something shifted. They weren’t necessarily acting in bad faith before now. Or maybe they were, but that’s not something you should try to sort out.
However, it’s fair to let this affect your assessment of their maturity, judgment, and credibility. That was fair earlier on, too! Mary couldn’t be in the same room with Alice without “blacking out with overwhelming fury”? That’s a problem, regardless of their status now.
And frankly, their inability to get along with each other previously — and the amount of time and energy that other people had to spend on solving it — is also still a problem; it doesn’t magically go away just because now they like each other. These are still two people who were rude, hostile, bullying, and (it sounds like) excessively dramatic. That doesn’t all get erased by them saying “never mind.”
You can still hold them accountable for that. You can let them know that regardless of their feelings toward each other now, what happened gives you serious pause about their professionalism and judgment and will factor into what type of opportunities you can and can’t trust them with. For example, I’d have serious reservations about letting either of them coach a more junior employee or work with VIPs or important clients; I’d be too concerned about immaturity.
That’s not because they’re now dating; it was the case before their love connection, too. If you have this conversation, make sure you emphasize that. You don’t want their takeaway to be that they’re in trouble for dating, because that’s not the issue.
