Do Not Mediate a Transgression

The two approaches outlined above work 95 percent of the time. But there is an assumption built into both of these processes: no one is really right or wrong. When an executive has to deal with a personality conflict, each person involved in the conflict is convinced that he or she has been terribly wronged by the other. But 95 percent of the time, when the neutral senior executive looks at the issue with a more objective set of eyes, what he or she finds is a personality conflict with no clear right or wrong.

Every now and then, however, the personality conflict is the result of one person having committed a clear wrong and the other person being clearly in the right. In such situations, you, as the arbiter of the dispute, must throw compromise out the door. You cannot, for example, compromise when one employee is committing sexual harassment against another. You cannot compromise when one employee is advocating a legally questionable accounting tactic or a course of action that would breach the organization's contracts or regulatory requirements. Many top executives have been ruined by scandal when they tried to mediate a situation where there was clear wrongdoing. The result is that the executive is eventually accused of tolerating and tacitly condoning improper or unethical conduct—and the accusation often comes by way of a civil rights or whistleblower lawsuit, or, in the worst cases, a federal investigation. It only happens about 5 percent of the time, but you have to be on the lookout for situations where "personality conflicts" are the result of clearly unethical or improper behavior on the part of an employee. In such cases there is no room for compromise. You discipline or fire the offending party and you commend the person who reported it.