A conflict with a co-worker that drags on for months: why it doesn’t resolve itself

At eight in the morning you walk into the kitchen for a coffee. She is already there. You greet each other — politely, briefly, without eye contact. You wait for her to leave before you pour your own. In meetings you sit at opposite ends of the table. Whatever you need to tell her, you put in an email, even though she sits two metres away. And it has been like this since March.

Nobody would say the two of you are in a dispute. You do not shout or accuse each other out loud. But everyone in the office knows. And every evening, when you shut your laptop, you carry a piece of that atmosphere home with you.

A conflict with a co-worker that drags on for months is one of the most draining forms of stress at work — precisely because it seems too small to do anything about and too big to forget. In this post I will explain why such a conflict almost never resolves itself, how it slides down step by step, who is involved in it without knowing, and how to start the conversation you have probably been putting off for too long.

Why it does not resolve itself

Most of us hope that time will do its work. That the tension will settle, that one of you will move to another department, that something will happen to reset everything. Sometimes it does. But more often something else happens: the conflict does not disappear, it moves below the surface. It becomes part of everyday life, part of how you move around the office, who you invite to lunch and how you reply to messages.

How much time this takes is hard to measure, but there are estimates. In a large survey carried out in 2008 by the company CPP, employees in the United States estimated that they spent an average of 2.8 hours a week dealing with workplace conflict. That is not time spent arguing. It is time spent thinking about the conflict, avoiding it, talking about it with colleagues or repairing its consequences.

A conflict that is avoided does not stand still. Every week it gathers a few new fragments: a look you read as contempt, a message without a greeting, a piece of information he received and you did not. Because none of this is talked about, you interpret each fragment on your own — and as a rule you interpret it in line with the story you already have. And so the story hardens without anyone saying a word.

Nine steps down

The Austrian conflict researcher Friedrich Glasl described how conflicts escalate. His model has nine stages, divided into three levels. At the first level both sides can still win. At the second, the aim is for one to win and the other to lose. At the third, it matters more that the other side loses than that you win — even at the cost of harming yourself.

The point of the model is not the precise counting of stages. The point is that, without intervention, a conflict generally moves downwards, and that with each stage it becomes harder to go back. In the first stages you are still talking; only your positions are harder. At the third stage actions replace words: you stop talking and present the other person with a fait accompli instead. At the fourth, concern for your image and the search for allies begin — and this is exactly where a conflict between two people spreads to the whole team.

Disputes between co-workers that last for months often do not reach the final stages. They get stuck somewhere between the third and the fifth: you no longer talk directly, each of you has your own allies, each of you worries about how others see you. This is a state that can last for years — calm enough that nobody intervenes, and toxic enough that everyone feels it.

Glasl stressed something else that matters: in the first stages, you can resolve a conflict yourselves, by talking. In the middle stages you generally need a third person who is on neither side. In the final stages the outcome is usually decided by someone from outside — management, a court, a resignation. The earlier you act, the more remains in your own hands.

When the conflict moves from the task to the person

In the 1990s the researcher Karen Jehn distinguished between two kinds of conflict in work groups: task conflict (how to do something, which solution is better) and relationship conflict (personal tension, dislike, the feeling that the other person does not respect you). According to her findings, the first could, under certain conditions, even be useful. The second was almost always harmful.

A later meta-analysis by Carsten De Dreu and Laurie Weingart darkened this picture somewhat: task conflict, too, was on average linked to poorer team performance and satisfaction. But what we notice in everyday life is even more important — the two kinds of conflict easily spill into one another. A disagreement about how to run a project turns, after a few weeks, into “he doesn’t respect me”. At that point you are no longer arguing about the project. You are arguing about who you are.

This is exactly why conflicts that last for months are not resolved by a better argument. On the level of content you might even agree. But on the level of the relationship each of you is guarding something else: recognition, respect, the sense of not being overlooked. You can read more generally about what conflict is and why it is not necessarily bad in the knowledge base under conflict.

Triangles: why everyone knows except the two of you

In his work with families, the American psychiatrist Murray Bowen noticed that a relationship between two people under tension is unstable. When the tension rises, one of them — or both — turns to a third person. They complain to them, seek their understanding, pull them onto their side. The tension between the two eases for a moment, because three people are now carrying it. Bowen called this a triangle; today we often speak of triangulation.

In relational family therapy, which I am training in at the Franciscan Family Institute, the triangle is one of the basic concepts. And at work it is perhaps even more visible than in a family. When you have a dispute with a co-worker, you are probably not the only one talking about it. You told the colleague who sits next to you. She told someone else. Your co-worker told his version to his people. Your manager has heard both, but from neither of you directly.

Triangles bring relief, but at the same time they freeze the conflict. When you have someone who agrees with you, it is less urgent to talk to the person you actually have the problem with. Your story hardens in conversations with third parties. And the team slowly splits into camps — I have written about how this happens and where you fit into it in Office coalitions.

The rule that follows is simple and hard at the same time: talk about the conflict first with the person you have it with. Not because talking to friends is wrong, but because that conversation cannot replace it.

What each of you brings along

A months-long conflict with a co-worker almost always has two layers. The first is what really happened: someone took credit for your work, ignored you in a meeting, did not do their part. The second layer is what that event stirred up in you.

If you grew up as a child who was not seen at home, a co-worker who presents your work as his own will hit something much older than your shared project. If in your family you were the one who had to take care of everything, a co-worker who does not do his part will stir up an old anger. This does not mean your reaction is wrong or exaggerated. It means there are not only two people in the room, but also their stories.

In relational family therapy we talk about this as the interweaving of the inner world and the relational one. The same pattern repeats itself because we bring it with us into every new relationship — more on this in Why the same fight keeps coming back. And importantly: the same is true of your co-worker. He, too, brings something of his own into your dispute that you cannot see.

How to start the conversation

Once you decide to talk, the hardest part is the beginning. In their research with couples, John Gottman and Sybil Carrère found that the very start of a conversation about a disagreement — the first few minutes — was a good predictor of how it would end. Couples are not a workplace, but the rule seems universally human: a conversation that begins with an attack generally ends with defence.

So it helps to prepare the beginning. Not as a speech, but in a few steps: where, what happened, what it did to you, and what you suggest.

This is how the beginning of such a conversation might sound (the dialogue is composite and not about a real person):

“Have you got ten minutes? I’d like to talk about how we work together, because I don’t think it’s good for either of us right now.”
“If this is about that project again …”
“It’s partly about that. At Tuesday’s meeting you presented the analysis as if it were only yours. I was angry, and I’ve been avoiding you since. That’s not a solution.”
“… I didn’t know it hit you that hard. I had the feeling you didn’t care about the project, because you didn’t get in touch for a month.”
“I didn’t know that. Can we agree on how we’ll split who presents what next time?”

Notice what happened. Nobody admitted all the blame. But each of them learned a piece of the story they did not know. For months each had lived with their own interpretation — this conversation at least put the two interpretations side by side. It is not the end of the conflict. But it is the first time it has moved upwards rather than downwards.

If the conversation starts to escalate despite everything, it helps to know how to stop it before it gets out of hand. The tools that research describes for couples also work between co-workers — more on them in Repair attempts and Taking a break during an argument. When you feel flooded, it is fair to say: “I’d like to carry on, but I can’t stay calm right now. Can we continue tomorrow?” That way you stay within your window of tolerance, rather than saying something you cannot take back.

Exercise: before you speak

Before you go into the conversation, take twenty minutes and a sheet of paper.

1. Write the story of the conflict in three sentences — the way someone on neither side would tell it. No judging adjectives.
2. Write how your co-worker would tell the same story. Not as a caricature, but in a way he would recognise himself in. This is the hardest step and the most important one.
3. List everyone you have talked to about the conflict. What did you get from those conversations? Is any of them now on your side — and what does that mean for the team?
4. Assess which of Glasl’s stages you are at. Are you still talking? Have you reached actions instead of words? Are you looking for allies?
5. Write a single opening sentence — a description of what happened and what it did to you. And one concrete thing you would like to achieve.

If you cannot manage the second step because it seems to you that your co-worker simply has no legitimate side, that is important information. Perhaps it really is so. More often, though, it means the conflict is already so deep that you can no longer see past it on your own — and that the view of a third person would help you.

When talking is not enough: mediation

When a conflict has already reached Glasl’s middle stages, a conversation between the two of you is often not enough. Every attempt ends in the familiar pattern; you are both too hurt to listen. This is when a third person who is on neither side can help — a mediator.

Mediation is not a trial. A mediator does not decide who is right and does not prescribe a solution. Their task is to create a safe frame in which both of you can tell your side, be heard and find an agreement together. It rests on voluntariness, impartiality and confidentiality: what is said in mediation generally stays there.

In some organisations the HR department can help with this; in others it makes more sense to find an external mediator who is not in a working relationship with either of you. What matters is that the third person really is not part of the triangle. A manager who already has an opinion about who is to blame is not a mediator, even if they are trying to help with the best of intentions.

Mediation makes sense when you are both at least partly willing to take part and when there is no great difference in power between you. If one side is the other’s superior, or if there is repeated humiliation, mediation is not the right tool — more on this in the next section.

When it is not a conflict

I want to be clear here, because the word “conflict” can be misused.

A conflict assumes two sides with roughly equal power. If a co-worker systematically humiliates you, excludes you, withholds information from you or spreads untruths about you — and this goes on for a long time — it is no longer a conflict to be “resolved together”. It may be workplace bullying. In that case an invitation to talk or to mediation can expose you even further. I have described how to tell one from the other in Workplace bullying or just a difficult relationship? How to tell them apart and what you can do about each For legal questions you can turn to a trade union, legal aid or, in Slovenia, the Labour Inspectorate of the Republic of Slovenia; psychotherapy does not replace legal advice.

You do not have to resolve every conflict. Sometimes the most mature decision is to accept that you will never be close to this person. That your relationship will stay correct and limited to work. This is not a defeat if the choice is a conscious one and it does not take away your peace of mind. It helps to be clear with yourself about what you do and do not expect from him — more on this in Setting boundaries.

Sometimes the answer is to leave. If you have tried talking and mediation, yet the conflict remains and is costing you sleep, health or the joy of your work, it is legitimate to think about another department or another job. Not as running away, but as a decision that your health matters more than “winning”.

And if you notice that similar conflicts keep recurring — in different jobs, with different people — this may be a sign that part of the pattern is yours. That does not mean you are to blame. It means there is something worth looking at, perhaps with a therapist.

What to remember

• A conflict with a co-worker that you avoid does not stand still — every week it hardens with new fragments that you interpret on your own.
• According to Friedrich Glasl, without intervention a conflict slides downwards: from harder positions to the search for allies and loss of face. The earlier you act, the more is in your hands.
• Talking to third parties brings relief but freezes the conflict. Talk first to the person you have it with.
• The start of a conversation often decides its end: describe what happened, what it did to you, and suggest one concrete thing.
• When you are both too hurt to talk, a mediator can help. When it is bullying, conflict is not the right word, and you need a different kind of help.