Conflict in the C-suite. It’s a phrase that can conjure images of dramatic boardroom clashes, but more often than not, it manifests as something far more insidious: silence. As the CEO and founder of Bright Arrow Coaching, I can tell you that this quiet tension is a hallmark of unaddressed conflict, and it’s something our coaches encounter frequently in our engagements.
We are humans. We are not always going to get along. And frankly, at the executive level, while our intellectual capabilities remain crucial, it’s our ability to manage emotions and cultivate sophisticated relationships with other powerful personalities that truly sets apart a successful C-suite leader.
The Hidden Cost of Executive Silence
When conflict is left to fester, it doesn’t just impact the two individuals directly involved. Our coaches have witnessed how it can shut down an entire executive team. I recall a particular senior executive team we coached several years ago. We walked into the room for our first day of facilitation, and it was dead silent. This was a room with ten brilliant executives, some of the smartest folks I’ve ever worked with.
We quickly realized this silence was related to long-standing, unaddressed conflict between two team members. The ripple effect was immense. Other team members felt they couldn’t speak, fearing they would appear to take sides. What’s particularly challenging is that the individuals directly in conflict are often unaware of how significantly it has impacted the organization. This underscores a vital truth: the hallmark of a healthy executive with a brilliant career is a deep understanding of how to navigate relationships and manage conflict with high emotional intelligence.
3 Warning Signs Your C-Suite Conflicts are Spreading
Beyond the palpable silence, other indicators that conflict is brewing include:
- The formation of organizational “fiefdoms”: You’ll start to see the next couple of layers of leadership below the executive team develop opinions about other executives. This is often fueled by gossip and internal politics that trickle down from unresolved executive tensions.
- Executives speaking “down levels”: Instead of addressing issues with their peers, executives may start talking to those below them in the organization to find comfort and validation for their ideas. This behavior is incredibly dangerous, as it actively builds dissension and fuels those fiefdoms we mentioned.
- Increased anxiety and decreased enthusiasm for work: Executives may dread coming into the office or attending meetings. This can even lead to positioning behaviors or attempts to curry favor with superiors, all because the team’s conflict has not been properly addressed.
These warning signs create a cascading effect throughout the organization. When your leadership team can’t work together effectively, that dysfunction inevitably impacts every level below them.
Why Conflict Becomes Personal (And Why That’s Actually Good)
Conflict is a normal part of being on any team. It’s a normal part of being in any relationship.
I often tell a story about a CEO who once observed, “You’re going to make me develop the same relationship skills my spouse has been asking me to work on for decades.” My response was simple: “Yes, now your employees are asking you to do that same work.”
The truth is, there is no true separation between our personal and professional lives. Our ability to manage conflict in our intimate relationships profoundly influences how we operate at work. In my experience, work can actually be an excellent and safer place for us to learn to handle conflict better, and then apply those healthy patterns back into our personal lives. While it’s still challenging, the expectations and standards at work are often clearer than those we inherit in our personal relationships.
Conflict, when approached constructively, is not something to be avoided. Some of our most brilliant thinkers are in the C-suite, and our ideas genuinely improve through healthy debate and intellectual sparring. A high-functioning team welcomes this because they understand that enterprise-level thinking requires more than one brain and many conversations. It’s perfectly acceptable to sit with a peer and express dissatisfaction or disagreement. The challenge, and the opportunity, is to develop ourselves as senior leaders to do this well.
A Proven 5-Step Methodology for Resolution
When teams have tried everything and still find themselves stuck in a constant undercurrent of conflict, or when specific interpersonal conflicts keep recurring, a qualified executive coach might be able to help. At Bright Arrow Coaching, we’ve developed a comprehensive methodology that serves as a resource for resolving deep-seated C-suite conflict.
Here’s our proven approach:
- Comprehensive Discovery. First, we begin with initial discovery interviews to understand the team dynamics. Our coaches delve deep to grasp the conflict from all perspectives.
- Private Counseling. Next, if we identify two or three people at the heart of the conflict, our coaches meet with them one-on-one. The goal is to help them articulate their view and gain their commitment to working through it.
- Facilitated Joint Sessions. Once we establish commitment, we bring the conflicted parties together. In this small session, we share a summary of what we’ve heard. Then, they commit to working through the issues together.
- Deep Emotional Exploration. In these sessions, we go beyond intellectual disagreement. We ask probing questions to uncover the conflict’s emotional experience. Everyone is allowed to share their perspective. Crucially, everyone else is only allowed to listen.
- Negotiation and Future Commitments. Finally, we guide them through a negotiation. We ask each person what it would take to move forward. At the end, we ask them to reflect on their own behavior and commit to doing things differently.
The Personal Nature of Executive Leadership
This work is deeply personal. It requires emotional maturity and composure. It’s about acknowledging that the old notion of “it’s not personal, it’s just business” is fundamentally flawed at the executive level.
This is precisely why great executive leadership is rooted in emotional intelligence and relationship building. The workload for C-suite leaders is substantial, and they often navigate criticism and behind-the-scenes challenges. Healthy peer relationships are where they find understanding, appreciation, and if the team is truly functional, even genuine care and support.
We’ve helped numerous executive teams resolve conflict completely, and the ripple effect is profound. These leaders then go on to model this new behavior for other teams and teach their own direct reports the same skills.
Moving Forward Together
Inviting an outside, highly qualified professional into your conflict, especially when it keeps recurring, is both an expedient and worthwhile investment. The alternative—letting conflict continue to undermine your team’s effectiveness—is far more costly to your organization’s performance and culture.
The most successful executives we work with understand that conflict resolution isn’t just about fixing problems. It’s about building the relationship skills that enable high-performance teams to tackle complex challenges together.
What signs of unaddressed conflict do you recognize in your executive team? How might dedicated support help you transform those challenges into opportunities for stronger collaboration and better business outcomes?
Ready to address the conflict that’s holding your leadership team back? Let’s explore how our proven methodology can help your executive team work through challenges and emerge stronger. Contact Bright Arrow Coaching to discuss your specific situation.
Links & Additional Resources
People in this Episode
Tegan Trovato – LinkedIn
Transcript
Tegan Trovato:
Today I want to talk about something that shows up in every executive team at some point. Conflict.
It’s not a flaw, it’s part of being human and when it’s left unaddressed it can quietly stall out even the most brilliant teams. I’m going to cover the signs of conflict in the C-suite, how it shows up in the room and across the organization, and why emotional intelligence, not just intellect, is what distinguishes truly effective leaders. I have some examples from the field and I’ll touch on how our earliest experiences with conflict shape how we show up at work and I’ll give you some insights into how we can build healthier more productive dynamics at the executive level.
Recognising the Signs of Impact of Conflict
Let’s dive in. Conflict in the C-suite and on the executive team is a natural thing. We are humans, we are not always going to get along, and I have a lot of really strong thoughts on this topic actually.
And frankly I think what we often overlook for the C-suite is that our intellectual capabilities will remain important until we retire and beyond. But when we rise to that level of leadership it is really our ability to manage our emotions and be in relationship, sophisticated relationships with other very powerful people, other powerful personalities, that really sets apart a successful C-suite leader from someone who’s going to struggle and sets apart the executive who’s going to create tremendous value and followership from the executive who’s going to slowly get things done and be pulling the leash a lot of times. There are several telling signs that there’s conflict in the C- suite.
I think honestly the room itself, so the C-suite team itself, the executive team, will feel it first. What is really tricky is that most executive teams haven’t built the kind of rapport where other members who are not in conflict can call out the members who are in conflict. So for example, several years ago we coached a senior executive team who when we joined them we walked into the room for our first day of facilitation and it was dead silent.
And we’re talking about being in company with 10 brilliant executives, some of the hardest folks I’ve ever worked with. And we had to quickly get to the silence. We knew, we guessed, this was related to some of the discovery we did before we joined them for the workshops because before all of our executive team engagements we do private interviews with each team member and their stakeholders.
How Conflict Spreads Across the Organisation
So we were aware that there were two members of the team who had been in long-standing unaddressed conflict and it had gotten to the point where it was shutting the entire team down because certain members of the team felt like they couldn’t speak in agreement to member one because it would make it look like they weren’t supporting member two who is in conflict with member one, right? And we all know the story. We’ve seen it.
One of the telling signs, first and foremost, is that the team itself has been impacted by the conflict to the point where more than just the two in conflict are shut down. There’s a lot of silence and silence from really brilliant leaders is so telling. They exist to speak.
They exist to ideate and innovate and be together and collaborate. And when that stops, when you walk into a room, you know there’s conflict in the room. So other hallmarks of conflict is that you start to see fiefdoms being built in the organization.
So we will see that the next couple of layers of leadership down from the executive teams have opinions about the other executives and who tends to have the best ideas. And it sounds like there’s drama stories is the best way to say it. So other leaders below the executive team will start to gossip about the other executives who they may have no contact with, mind you.
So it’s all storytelling behind the scenes. Another hallmark of a C-suite team being in conflict is that they will stop talking to each other and start speaking down levels into the organization to find comfort and validation of their ideas, their positions, or their beliefs. And that is really dangerous behavior because that is where the drama and dissension comes from.
That’s how the fiefdoms are built. And then generally speaking, here’s another really painful one that will resonate for all of us. Another hallmark of conflict in the executive team is that the executives are not looking forward to being at work.
There’s high anxiety about going into the office. There’s high anxiety about going into meetings. And they may begin pandering to their boss in hopes of positioning themselves because they have not tended to the conflict on the team.
So you know we really need to stop pretending that the conflict isn’t creating negative impact. It is. The tricky part is that the folks who are in conflict are often unaware of how very much it has impacted the organization.
And this is why I said in the beginning that the true hallmark of a healthy executive and those who really have brilliant careers are the ones who really understand how to be in relationship and how to navigate conflict and have high emotional intelligence as part of their leadership philosophy and tools. Conflict is a normal part of being on any team. It is a normal part of being in any relationship.
And here’s something that I want to share that I think I’ll just never forget this. I was working with a CEO several years ago who said, oh you’re gonna make me do the work my wife’s been asking me to do for decades. And I was like, yeah now your employees are asking you to do that work.
Right. I didn’t suggest the work. The work came through the stakeholder feedback from the organization.
And I’m sharing that because there is no separation truly at the end of the day. Our ability to do conflict well with the intimate relationships in our lives, our families, our spouses, partners, children, friends, is extremely telling of how we will go to work and do it. What’s interesting is my personal opinion is that it’s safer to do the conflict at work because there are clearer expectations and standards for how we interact at work.
Where in our personal lives we don’t have those as much. We inherit a lot of those patterns and lack of boundaries often in how we do conflict, how we express anger in our homes and in our personal lives. But there’s a lot more safety in my opinion at work in terms of what’s normalized and expected and what is not acceptable.
It’s still messy and it still varies by organization and culture. But it’s my personal belief that work is an excellent place for us to learn to do conflict better and to seed that back into our personal lives if we need it. Conflict can be so helpful in a team.
As I’ve said several times and I’ll always say it, I think some of our most brilliant thinkers are in the C-suite. Frankly our ideas improve by having a little contention and a little sparring. And a team who’s really healthy welcomes that because they understand that in order to think for the enterprise it takes more than one brain and it takes many more than one conversation.
And often we have to remake decisions several times, the same ones, to get to the right choice eventually. That only comes through a little bit of contention and sometimes conflict. And it is okay to have to sit with a peer and tell them you’re unhappy with how they spoke to you or to tell them you’re not in agreement with their strategic direction or that you have concerns over some things you’ve heard or are experiencing.
The challenge and the opportunity is that we upskill ourselves as senior leaders so that we get better at doing that. The tricky part is, and I’ve seen this plenty of times coaching executives, you may have a highly skilled individual, someone who’s really skilled in navigating conflict. Their partner that they need to work with, however, may not be.
And so it almost makes a greater onus on the person who’s more skilled to do it well. So it’s challenging and sometimes unfortunate because you have someone who may have worked really hard to become great at expressing their dissatisfaction or their displeasure with something or their own needs that may be in conflict with someone else’s. And then they’re even more responsible because the other party perhaps isn’t as skilled.
And frankly, with a diverse team, that is natural. So think about this. You may have folks who’ve only been in the workforce for 15 years or so on the executive team and some who’ve been in the workforce for 30.
We’d like to say if you’ve been in the workforce for 30 years that you may be more skilled at conflict, but that is not the math. I’m just using that to demonstrate the differences in experience levels that we could easily have exist on the team. Oftentimes the earlier career professionals are more skilled in conflict because we’ve been talking about conflict since they entered the workforce.
So that’s something interesting to think about. So we encourage conflict, but we encourage the skill development around it. And that starts at an individual autonomous level.
And frankly, in private coaching, we will often work with our executives, independently of the team, to help unearth where did you learn to do conflict? How was conflict modeled for you in your home with your parents or your caregivers? And we will start the conversation there because the ahas come quickly of like, oh, my dad used to explode, or my mom used to explode, and my dad used to shut down, or no one did conflict.
You just didn’t talk about the hard things. You’d sweep it under the rug. Well, this is what informs how we do conflict at work.
We are not psychotherapists. So that’s really the extent of the questions we may ask about someone’s family system. But it immediately asking that question.
So ask yourself this question, if you’re listening. What is your habit for conflict sourced in? Did you inherit it from your parents?
Has it been refined or worsened through your romantic or interpersonal and personal relationships privately? And what are you bringing into the workspace now? What are you bringing into the executive team that’s informing your behavior?
And how do you like it? Are you proud of yourself? Are there things you wish you did differently?
Do you want to end a family pattern you inherited? Do you want to stop the way it’s been going in your marriage that you’re repeating at work or vice versa? These are all your choices as an individual executive first.
And then you bring it up to the partner level in your team, one-on-one with someone. And further, you may have multiple people in a team in conflict, and that’s a different level of skill.
That’s a skill that a team has to encompass together by creating norms and standards for how they will treat each other, speak to each other, and hold each other accountable. So this is where the norms come in on teams that help to support healthy conflict. Some of our patterns and habits for conflict are rooted in what we’ve experienced at work.
So we’ve talked a lot about family patterns and romantic partner patterns and what we cannot overlook that we’ve also learned over decades by watching other people, and mostly not stated overtly, how we do conflict at work. So if you’ve worked in cultures who, like some family systems, sweep conflict under the rug, you know not to be the one who’s not sweeping it under the rug. Or it may call for a really new level of bravery to speak that into truth that, hey, we as a team don’t do conflict and it’s stalling us out.
How might it feel to be the one brave one who puts up your hand? But we don’t want to be remiss that all of these patterns are informed. Prior to work and outside of work, we have many years of experiencing sometimes multiple different companies and teams and mentors who may have guided us in particular ways that tell us how we do conflict at work.
And frankly, when you join a new company, you are assessing for that as an executive. How do we have the hard conversations here? And then it becomes our choice as to if we fold in or if we would like to push the envelope a bit and create healthier patterns for conflict if it’s necessary.
So there are a ton of conflict management frameworks out there, if you will. Well, first of all, we all know the book Radical Candor, Crucial Conversations. Like some of those are on the cusp of what conflict is about and limited communication that leads to conflict.
There’s something called the Tom and Kilman conflict mode instrument that we sometimes use as coaches to assess people’s conflict style, there’s the conflict resolution process model. Then there’s the conflict analysis framework.
There’s the interest-based relational approach. There’s the circle of conflict. I could go on and on.
Where we fall short on executive teams is that we are able to intellectually synthesize those things, and we find them interesting. But when a team is emotionally enmeshed in its conflict and tender or uncomfortable, you really need an unbiased party to help you integrate new habits from any framework that you find interesting for your team, including norms.
That may not take a ton of work from an outside consultant or coach, but I do think it’s difficult when a team is in conflict or has been in distress or has pockets of conflict within itself to be able to pull itself fully out without having a neutral, super objective party, to be able to hold everyone in the challenge of new language, new norms, and healthy accountability holding.
And we ideally have another adult teach that to us by modeling it for us. So when I’ve been in the room with executive teams in conflict, I may say, okay, Steve, I’m going to stop you right there. With your permission, could I rephrase what you said in a way that might be received better and help us move beyond the conflict?
And with his permission, I will then restate it in a different way. And you watch the room go, oh, okay, right? So there’s a place for frameworks.
I mean, I’m a coach. I love a good framework. But there’s a ton of opportunity for modeling, especially for us as senior leaders.
We’re in such a place where we’re constantly watched and scrutinized. We seldom have an opportunity to be taught anymore. We learn from each other as peers, but we’re only going to learn from the person who’s stronger, better, more experienced than us in the room.
And at some point, we run out of those people, you know? So I think it’s important to seek out counsel and other folks who can model the skill for us of doing conflict well. I would love it if I saw more executive teams try to mitigate conflict sooner.
I will watch executive teams leave a room after a meeting, and we all know that something wasn’t complete in the conversation or a decision wasn’t fully made because there was contention. And so the statement will often be, we’ll put this on the agenda for next time, and the thing rolls and rolls over, over and over.
No one ever says we’re not getting to the decision or the choice here because we’re in conflict. And then what happens is the meetings after the meeting, and then that builds the emotional energy and tenor around the conflict. And then you end up in a big yucky thing.
Moving Through Conflict: Coaching, Repair, and Cultural Change
So what I wish would happen more often in the C-suite is that we would acknowledge in the moment, like, hey, we’re not seeing eye to eye on this one. Maybe we need to have a conversation just around this. Or hey, why don’t you and I go talk about this?
I can feel we’re not aligning on this. And that way, when we come to the next team meeting, we’ll be clearer together. Think about though, like, oh, I so seldom see that kind of behavior.
And I think it would help us all tremendously if we could just take ownership of the conflict the minute it’s there, and not ignore it, and not need to continue to see it as conflict, but just that we need to intimate this together. Like, we need to just be in this conversation, just you and I, or just us three, or whoever it is, and not have an audience. And that, as you can feel, takes a ton of emotional maturity and calm.
Because I’m offering this up as a suggestion, and it sounds so easy on its face. But what we forget is that leading up to that lack of agreement is potentially months or years of tireless work and lost weekends working towards a particular thing. So it is emotionally charged.
And people may have sacrificed parts of their lives in free times on this particular topic. So they have very real attachments to the direction they want something to go in. So I always understand why we end up in conflict.
And I always understand why there’s so much emotion around it. But if we could just have exemplary EQ in the C-suite, that the minute those things pop up, we say, Oh, guys, we’re just totally missing the mark on this one. We need some time on this one.
Or we need some space on this one. Or we simply just need to acknowledge we’re not seeing eye to eye on this, and we’ve got to figure it out by X date. What do we want to do?
And that, I think, can help us cut conflict off at the pass by just naming it and being okay with it. There’s nothing wrong with anyone that we don’t agree all the time. And so really, I think part of the way we can mitigate conflict is by normalizing it.
And just being okay with the fact that we’re not always going to agree. It’s natural. If you’re a team who has tried all the things, and you still have folks in conflict, or your team is in conflict, or just generally doesn’t operate smoothly, there can be a low hum of constant conflict without it being a particular topic oriented, rather, conflict.
Here’s what I’d suggest. I think it is time for a well qualified executive coach to support you in that. What that sometimes has looked like for us is that we will do those initial discovery interviews, we’ll really get to know the team.
And then if there are members of the team who need to work together privately on their conflict, we’ll pull them into partnership or triad conversations, however many people are involved. And the coach will help them through that conflict privately. You don’t always need to air it out for the entire team.
Sometimes it would damage the team more for them to be privy to the conflict that’s more interpersonal in nature. So we have more than a dozen times over the last probably five years had team engagements where the coach has identified two to three people who are in conflict and requested private counsel with those executives. What the coach will do then is meet one-on-one with each person that’s in conflict to help them understand the nature of the conflict from their view.
So the coach goes in understanding all the perspectives and then do some private counseling with each of those leaders, get their agreement that they are committed to working through the conflict with the folks that we’re talking about and the team. Because if they don’t all sign up, there is no work to be done. All the execs who are in conflict have to agree that they are ready to try to work through it and move forward.
So after those one-on-one meetings, then we’ll pull the two or three people together in a small session. With their permission, we can share the summary of like, here’s what we’ve synthesized is going on among you. And today we’re making a commitment in this session to begin working through this.
Thank you for opening your hearts and minds to trying a different way and to healing the conflict on this team. So and so, tell us what this is rooted in for you. Everyone is only allowed to listen and not respond.
And then we let each person share their piece. We’ll ask more probing questions so that we can get down to the level of not just the intellectual experience they’re having of the disagreement, but the emotional experience of the disagreement, how it’s impacted their day-to-day work and their happiness and their job. And then we ask each of them to, this is a potential way we would go about it, there’s several different ways we could slice it, but a lot of times we’ll then ask each of them to tell us what it would take for you to move forward on this.
Then we’ll help them then negotiate their way through that conflict. And then at the end of that conversation, this could be more than one conversation, but the end of the experience of resolving that conflict interpersonally in the team, we ask them to reflect back on their own behavior privately, what they would commit to doing differently going forward in order to be a healthier, more productive team member. And then there are some times where we will ask that subset of the team if there’s anything they need to do or say with the broader team.
It’s not unusual, they may feel the desire to apologize to the broader team for stalling them out. Or they may ask for certain accountability from their peers, like, hey, when you see me go in this direction or start demonstrating this behavior, you have my permission to call me out, for example. So listen to how intimate this is, though.
You know, like, the whole idea that it’s not personal, it’s business, is dead to me. It’s been dead to me for decades, but I’m calling it out here. This work is the epitome of personal, and conflict is the hyper epitome of personal.
And this is why at Heartborne, great executive leadership is rooted in EQ and relationship. Listen to what it takes to make an executive team hum. It’s a lot of work.
And that’s on top of their intellectual workload, which is substantial, right? I have a lot of reverence for what it is our C-suite leaders need to go through. And knowing that all the time they’re going through this privately, that they’re in positions of being critiqued a lot and unappreciated, and their work is often unseen.
It’s a heavy load. It’s a heavy load. And I say that part because this is why we need our peer relationships to be healthy and well.
That is the space where we’re most understood and appreciated, and if we’re healthy, loved in that team. So the work is worth it. And it is expedient to invite an outside, highly qualified party into your conflict when you feel like you just can’t figure it out yourselves, or if it keeps rearing its head.
You can put it to bed fully. We have helped more than one executive team do it, and it’s a beautiful thing. And then they go on to other teams to model that new behavior, and then they teach their leaders the same behavior.
So it is an investment that is well, well made. As we wrap up, I want to leave you with this. Conflict isn’t something to avoid.
It’s something to understand, and to work through, and to become more skilled at. The most effective executive teams don’t pretend it’s not there. They build the skills to navigate it with clarity and care.
Doing this work takes emotional maturity, self-awareness, and a willingness to grow, not just as leaders, but as people. And when we do it well, everybody benefits. So with that, I hope we’ve expanded your mind about what can be possible with executive coaching.
I would always love to hear back from you. If you have challenges to this information, if you have more questions about how to find a great coach. Otherwise, keep doing your great work out there and we’ll see you in the next episode.
