Corridor politics: how conflict in the leadership team affects your health

The meeting ends at six. Two members of the leadership team head off to their own offices without a word. Over the next hour a third receives two calls. The first: “Did you see how he turned everything back on himself again?” The second, twenty minutes later: “I hope you understand why I had to say what I said.” Both times the third nods into the phone, both times says something soothing. They get home at eight and realise they can’t remember what they had for lunch. At two in the morning they are lying awake, replaying both conversations.

Most people who work in senior roles know evenings like this. A dispute that isn’t yours, and yet you carry it. Corridor politics that never make it into the minutes, yet often decide more than the meeting itself. This piece is about what goes on in relationships like these — and why the body takes them far more seriously than we would like.

Conflict itself is not the enemy

First, something that is easily forgotten: a leadership team without disagreement is not a healthy leadership team. If the people deciding the fate of an organisation never argue about anything, it is more likely that they don’t dare say what they think than that they truly agree on everything. In the 1990s the researcher Karen Jehn proposed a distinction that has stayed in team research to this day: task conflict (what to do, how, with what resources) and relationship conflict (who doesn’t trust whom, who can’t stand whom, who feels overlooked).

Later, a meta-analysis by Carsten De Dreu and Laurie Weingart showed something that surprised many: on average, even task conflict was linked with poorer team performance, not better. The explanation the researchers offer is simple. In real teams the two kinds of conflict rarely stay separate. A disagreement about the budget quickly turns into a question of who was right, who embarrassed whom in front of the others and who will pay it back one day. When that happens, it is no longer about the matter, but about the relationship.

In the knowledge base, conflict is described as something that is not only unavoidable in relationships but can also be useful — if people are able to hold it. The trouble isn’t that people disagree. The trouble is where the tension goes when nobody can hold it directly.

The body counts every dispute

Conflict in relationships is not merely unpleasant. The body responds to it as if it were a danger. One of the most vivid studies of this comes from Janice Kiecolt-Glaser’s laboratory. Couples were given small wounds on the arm and then asked to discuss a topic they disagreed on. In the couples whose conversations were most hostile, the wounds healed at about 60 per cent of the rate at which they healed in the least hostile couples. Higher levels of inflammatory markers were also measured in their bodies.

A board is not a marriage. But people who lead an organisation together also spend a great deal of time together, depend on one another and have little chance of avoiding each other. In their intensity, the relationships between them are often closer to family relationships than to ordinary working ones. And when tension in such a relationship lasts a long time, it shows — in poorer sleep, in tense muscles, in flaring up or withdrawing at the slightest provocation.

I have written about why the same argument keeps coming back, even when at first glance it revolves around trivia, in It is not about the dishes: what really lies underneath recurring arguments. The same principle holds in the boardroom: an argument about a date or a figure is often just the surface of something that has been building between two people for a long time.

Triangles: where tension goes when two people can’t hold it

While observing families, the psychiatrist Murray Bowen noticed a pattern he called the triangle. When tension between two people rises far enough, one of them — or both — unconsciously draws in a third. A mother who can’t talk to her husband talks to her daughter about how difficult her father is. A father who can’t face his wife spends more time with his son, who is “the only one who understands him”. The tension between the first two eases a little. But it doesn’t disappear — it simply moves onto the third, who now carries something that isn’t theirs.

Bowen believed the triangle is the smallest stable system of relationships and that people create triangles wherever they spend a long time together. The rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman later showed how the same patterns repeat in organisations — in congregations, schools and companies. You will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under triangulation, and more on how the family works as a system in The family as a system: why one member’s change moves the whole family.

In leadership teams, triangles are almost always present. Not because people are malicious, but because talking directly about tension is hard and a third person is always at hand. In this sense a triangle is more a sedative than a plot: for a while it lowers the anxiety in the system, and the person caught in the middle pays for it.

What triangles look like in the boardroom

Triangles in leadership teams take a few typical forms. You may recognise yourself in one of them:

• The confidant. Both people in the dispute tell you their side. You feel important and useful, but also trapped: anything you say to one can be taken as betraying the other.
• The messenger. “Could you tell him that …” Messages travel through you because the first two no longer talk directly. And you carry not only the content but also the anger that comes with it.
• The scapegoat. Two people who disagree find a shared culprit — a department missing its targets, a new colleague, the supervisory board. The tension between them vanishes because both turn against the third.
• The peacemaker. In every meeting you are the one who softens sharp words, steers the conversation elsewhere, suggests a break. The others are grateful. And you can’t sleep at night.
• The cc line. A modern triangle: a disagreement between two plays out in emails that always include a third — sometimes as a witness, sometimes as a judge.

All of these roles have something in common: they keep the system stable without anything really being resolved. And all of them cost the person who plays them.

Your place in the triangle is no accident

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we often notice that people at work unconsciously take up a place similar to the one they had in their family. Someone who as a child calmed parents who were fighting will probably be the one smoothing tensions in the leadership team too. Someone who was the family scapegoat may be quicker to feel they are to blame for everything that goes wrong. How childhood roles live on is the subject of Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours?

This doesn’t mean your family is to blame for everything. It means that in situations of high tension we all fall back on the patterns we learnt earliest. And because these patterns are so old, we often don’t see them as a choice but as “just how I am”. One way to see them more clearly is a genogram — a family tree that also shows relationships and roles. We can draw one together in a longer session, A Look into the Past.

A conversation might sound like this (a composite, not a real person):

“I don’t understand why I’m always the one who ends up between them. I’m not even in that department.”
“What happens inside you when one of them comes to you and complains about the other?”
“First relief that he isn’t angry with me. Then a feeling that I have to do something so they calm down.”
“Is that feeling familiar from anywhere else?”
“… Yes. That’s how it was at home. My mother always told me what my father had done to her.”

A realisation like this doesn’t change anything overnight. But once you see that you step into the triangle out of habit, you can start choosing when you will step in and when you won’t.

Nights after meetings

Conflict in a leadership team leaves a very recognisable mark on sleep. It isn’t necessarily that you can’t fall asleep. More often you wake in the middle of the night and immediately start replaying the conversation — what someone said, what you should have said, what you will say tomorrow. In a study of thinking about work after hours, Dawn Querstret and Mark Cropley showed that it is above all emotionally charged rumination — not problem-solving — that is linked with poorer sleep and greater fatigue.

That difference matters. Thinking about work isn’t the problem. The problem is reliving the tension over and over in your mind without resolving anything. In the knowledge base we call this rumination. At night it is especially persistent, because there is nothing else to interrupt it. Why the film in your head starts just when you should be switching off the light is explained in Overthinking at bedtime: why the mind starts the film just when it should be switching off.

Whoever sits at the top of the triangle is especially vulnerable to this. They carry not only their own conflict but other people’s, which they have no authority to resolve. It is one of the most draining forms of stress: great responsibility and little control. Add the pressure to be a model of calm, and you quickly find yourself in the kind of tiredness described in When you have to set the example: the tiredness you can’t show.

When a dispute about the matter becomes a dispute about the person

Because task conflict so readily turns into relationship conflict, it helps to be able to recognise the moment it happens. It isn’t always obvious. People are still talking about figures and deadlines, but the tone changes, glances last longer, meetings drag on and decisions don’t get made.

Once you recognise that the dispute is about the person, a conversation about figures won’t help. Only a conversation about the relationship will — and for people in senior roles this is often the hardest, because it feels “unprofessional”. Bowen would say that the ability to stay in contact with another person while remaining clear in your own position is the core of maturity. He called it differentiation. For leaders, Friedman used the phrase non-anxious presence: a leader who stays calm and connected without taking on other people’s anxiety or retreating from it.

Exercise: a map of triangles

For this exercise you need a sheet of paper and twenty minutes in which nobody will disturb you.

1. Draw the people you work with most often in the leadership team. Each as a circle, yourself in the middle. Don’t think too long about the layout.
2. Connect those between whom you sense tension. Use a dashed line for tension that goes unspoken and a solid one for open conflict.
3. Mark where you are the third. With which dashed pair do you talk to both separately? Who brings you messages about the other? Where are you the one who calms things down?
4. For one triangle, write down what the role gives you and what it costs you. Importance, closeness, information — and sleep, energy, time you could be giving to your own work.
5. Choose one small step out of the triangle. For example: next time one of them tells you about the other, calmly ask, “Have you told him that?” Don’t fix, don’t judge, just return the conversation to where it belongs.

This step will probably feel uncomfortable — for you and for others. Systems resist change, even when it is good for them. But every time you hand a dispute back to the two people it belongs to, something in the system shifts. And your nights get a little easier.

Where this view isn’t enough

The systemic view is useful because it shows that tension isn’t only a matter of individuals. But it has limits too. Not every conflict is a triangle, and not every problem lies in relationships. Sometimes a dispute in the leadership team is the result of unclear responsibilities, senseless targets or a structure that puts two people into unavoidable competition. Then working on yourself doesn’t help — what helps is changing the structure.

There are also situations that are not “conflict” but abuse of power: repeated humiliation, threats, exclusion, systematic undermining. This is not a dispute between equals and it can’t be solved by talking about the relationship. Slovenian employment law explicitly prohibits workplace bullying, so in such a case it makes sense to seek advice from a lawyer or a designated confidential person in the organisation, not only from a therapist.

And finally: if after months of tension you notice that you aren’t sleeping, that your heart races for no reason, that you need alcohol to calm down, or that you no longer feel anything, talk to your GP. If thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, in Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.) or the Samaritans line Zaupni telefon Samarijan on 116 123, available 24 hours a day. In an emergency, call 112.

What changes when one person steps out of the triangle

Bowen believed a system doesn’t need everyone to change. It is enough for one person to start acting differently — more calmly, more directly, taking on fewer of other people’s burdens — and the system has to adapt. This is both good news and demanding news. Good, because you don’t have to wait for the two people in conflict to change. Demanding, because at first the change will probably cause unrest: those who are used to you calming them down may be angry when you stop.

Many people in senior roles only truly feel how much they have been carrying once they put it down. It often turns out then that their sleep was poor not because of the amount of work, but because of the number of other people’s disputes they took home with them. If you are right at the start of a new role, you may also find this useful: The first hundred days in a new role: the stress nobody sees.

What to remember

• Disagreements in a leadership team are not a problem in themselves. The problem begins when a dispute about the matter becomes a dispute about the person.
• The body takes long-lasting tension in relationships seriously — it shows in sleep, muscle tension and health.
• Tension that two people don’t voice to each other often goes looking for a third. Whoever is at the top of the triangle carries a conflict that isn’t theirs.
• The place you take in a triangle is often familiar from the family you grew up in.
• One small step out of the triangle — “Have you told him that?” — can move the whole system.