Where conflicts come from

When two people clash, the first explanation that comes to mind is personality. Check the setup first. Most conflicts at work grow out of how the work is arranged, from four sources:

• Overlapping roles: two rules both claim the same ticket.
• Shared resources: three people want the same two vacation weeks in August, and only one can go.
• Goals that pull apart: two teams aim at different things.
• Metrics that reward different things: a number counts one person's work and hides another's.

That's a structural conflict. Talk to people about their attitude and it returns next week; change the setup and it often fades on its own.

Taras and Maryna snipe at each other in the team chat. Olha points to the structure: when a family reopens one of Taras's tickets, it goes back to the shared queue, and most evenings Maryna picks it up. Taras closes and moves on; the rework lands on her. Each sees the other's behavior, not the rule behind it.

Two kinds of conflict often arrive together. Task conflict is disagreement about the work itself: fast replies versus careful ones. Relationship conflict is personal friction: tone, blame, "some of us actually close tickets".

A popular belief says task conflict always sharpens a team, so a lead should stir it up. The evidence is more cautious. The two kinds rarely stay apart: a dispute about speed turns personal fast, especially in writing. Disagreement about the work helps mainly when trust is high and the discussion stays on the work, not the person.

So the lead's job isn't to encourage arguments. It's to make it safe to disagree about the work, with facts and in the open, and to keep the jabs out. Taras and Maryna's dispute about speed already carries personal digs ("and some of us get them back"), so it needs a fix in the setup and a calmer channel, not more fuel.

When a conflict lands on you, there are five basic responses. Hold your position. Give way. Step back for now. Split the difference. Look for a solution together that meets both sides' needs.

Each one fits a kind of situation. Hold when safety, the law or a customer's money is at stake: a family's card details don't go in the team chat, however much time it saves. Give way when the issue matters far more to the other person than to you: Olha cares about the template order and you barely mind. Step back while tempers are hot, and come back once people have cooled down. Split the difference when time is short and both claims are fair. Solve together when the issue keeps coming back, like the weekly argument about reopened tickets: a ruling won't stop it, a better rule might.

These are choices, not personality types. Nobody is "an avoider" or "a fighter" by nature; a lead who uses only one response will be wrong most of the time.

Some conflicts call for holding your position: when safety, the law or a customer's money is at stake. Insisting there doesn't mean being rigid about everything around it.

On the team call Taras proposes skipping the identity check on refund requests "just during the peak" to reply faster. The check protects customers' money, so it stays, and you say so calmly, with the reason. Halving it ("check every second request") or postponing the question for a month leaves the risk in place. Giving way because "he knows the queue" trades customers' money for speed.

But Taras's point is real: refunds are slow in the peak. So insist on the check and then switch response: ask what slows refunds down, and solve that part together. Maybe the check itself takes too long, or the form asks for things nobody needs. A firm no on the unsafe idea plus a genuine yes to the underlying problem keeps both the rule and the person.

In a remote team most conflict happens in writing, and writing makes it worse in two ways. Text loses tone: "some of us actually close tickets" reads harsher than it might have sounded across a desk, and the reply gets sharper still. A public thread gives everyone an audience: people defend their position because the whole team is watching.

Three habits help. Move a heated thread to voice: a short "let's take this to a call, I'll ring you both" in the thread, and nothing more there. Talk to each person separately before any joint conversation, so you hear each side without an audience and each person hears the plan from you first. Never rule on who's right in the team channel: a public verdict humiliates one person and teaches everyone to fight for the lead's approval.

Ignoring the thread isn't neutral either. Silence from the lead reads as permission, and a long explanatory message adds more text to a fight that text is making worse.

Iryna asks the right question: is this a people problem she should know about, or a setup problem you can fix yourself? Answer it with evidence, not impressions. Look for a pattern that follows a rule, a queue or a number.

Signs that point to the setup:

• the same kind of clash happened before between different people in the same roles;
• the arguments flare up around a rule or a queue, such as reopened tickets returning to the shared queue;
• both sides blame the same rule, each from their own end of it.

Signs that don't: several colleagues saying one person is "just difficult" is a label, not evidence. Different writing styles (short lines versus long paragraphs) explain friction in tone, not why the clash keeps coming back.

If the evidence points to the setup, the fix is yours to make. If it points to one person's behavior across different setups, that's a feedback conversation, and something Iryna may need to know.

Once the cause is structural, the fix is a change to the setup. Test each idea against the source of the conflict: does it change who carries the rework, without naming and shaming anyone?

For Taras and Maryna the candidates are a politeness request, a per-person reopen counter on the team dashboard, taking Taras off evening shifts, and returning reopened tickets to whoever closed them. Only the last one changes the structure: reopened tickets go back to the person who closed them, with the family's new message attached. The cost of a rushed answer lands where it can be prevented, and the hidden rework comes off Maryna's evenings. (Klasna adopts this rule in June.)

The others miss. A politeness request leaves the cause in place. A public counter turns the problem into a league table and a new conflict. Moving Taras's shifts just moves the rework to someone else. And the right fix is reversible, so you can try it for two weeks and check whether it worked.

A good structural fix can still land badly. Olha's warning: nobody likes reading about their own problem in a team announcement. So the order matters.

First, talk to each person separately, with the reason: Taras hears that reopened tickets will come back to whoever closed them because the rework was landing on someone else's evenings, not because he's careless; Maryna hears what changes for her. Then announce the rule to the team as a change in how the work is set up, with no names attached.

Then run it as a trial with checks agreed in advance. The rule is reversible, so two weeks are cheap. Two numbers tell you whether it worked: how many tickets come back at all, and how many reopens Maryna still picks up in the evening. Report them to Iryna in the four lines she asked for: the source, the evidence, the change, how you'll know.

How it fits together: look for the setup first (roles, resources, goals, metrics), keep task disagreement on the work, pick the response that fits, and fix the rule rather than the people. Next, Mediating between two reports: when two people are already dug in.