Two colleagues, one critical path
You are leading a six-person project to move a face-to-face licensing service onto an online form. Go-live is in four weeks and the web content is on the critical path. The communications officer, Priya, has missed the last two content deadlines. When you raised it in the team meeting she said the service manager, Derek, keeps rewriting her drafts without telling her. Derek says her drafts are unusable and that his director asked him to quality-assure everything the service publishes. Both have now started copying their directors into emails about each other. Neither of them reports to you. Your own manager says: 'Sort it out between them - don't escalate unless you absolutely have to.'
1. What do you do in the next 48 hours?
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Treat it as two problems: a handoff that doesn't work, and a relationship that has gone public.
In the first 48 hours:
- Ten minutes with each of them separately. My only question is 'walk me through what happens to a draft from the moment Priya writes it'. I want the actual sequence, not the grievance.
- Ask Derek's director what was actually requested - sign-off or rewrite. Those are different jobs, and the confusion may not be Derek's invention.
- Then a 30-minute three-way with a written protocol: Priya sends drafts to Derek only; Derek returns tracked comments within one working day; Priya owns the final text and decides what to accept; if they disagree twice on the same page it comes to me, not to a director.
- Replace the copied-director behaviour with something: a short Friday status note that I write and both approve.
In parallel, protect the date. Four weeks out with content on the critical path means I need a scope fallback now - for example six core pages at go-live and the rest phased - so that a content dispute cannot take the whole launch down. Fixing the relationship is necessary; it isn't sufficient.
2. 'Don't escalate unless you absolutely have to.' How do you interpret that instruction, and when would you escalate?
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It is an instruction about the relationship, not about the risk. My manager is telling me not to dump a personality clash on their desk, which is reasonable - running a handoff protocol doesn't need anyone's permission.
It is not an instruction to hide a slipping critical path. So I would escalate on a trigger, and state the trigger in advance: no agreed content by the end of next week, either director copied again, or the fallback scope not agreed. When I go, it's three lines - what is at risk, what I have tried, what I need - not a complaint about Derek.
I would also tell my manager what I am doing rather than asking: 'I'm running a protocol with them this week; I'll come to you only if go-live is at risk.' That respects the instruction, keeps the decision where it belongs, and means that if I do escalate later I'm bringing a risk, not a feud.