Ask what unresolved team conflict costs and most organisations cannot answer, because none of the costs have a code. They are absorbed into how work gets done, and by the time anyone names the problem, most of the money has already been spent.
Where the Cost Actually Sits
Work routed around people. Colleagues learn who not to ask, and tasks travel a longer path to avoid a particular desk — adding a step to a process permanently. Information withheld or not volunteered, not maliciously but because sharing requires a conversation nobody wants to have; decisions then get made on partial information. Escalation of things that should be settled peer to peer, which consumes management time daily and trains the whole team that disagreement goes upward. Meetings that achieve nothing, because the real conversation is not available in the room. Duplicated effort where two functions have stopped coordinating and each covers itself. Managers spending significant time on containment — managing the interface between two people, relaying messages, smoothing over — time that is invisible because it never appears as a task. And the largest: the people who leave, who are disproportionately the ones with options, and who typically cite something else in the exit interview. Add the absence, the recruitment, the lost knowledge and the onboarding, and a single unresolved team conflict comfortably outruns the cost of addressing it — usually by a wide margin, and usually within one year.
The Structural Cause Wearing a Personal Face
Before treating it as a relationship problem, it is worth checking whether it is one. Team and interdepartmental conflict very frequently has a structural cause and a personal presentation: overlapping responsibilities nobody ever defined, incompatible targets that make cooperation individually irrational, a process that fails precisely at the handover point, or a resourcing decision that left one function absorbing another’s workload. Where that is what is happening, facilitating a conversation about mutual respect changes nothing, because the incentives that produced the conflict are all still in place on Monday morning — and a mediation that identifies this and says so plainly is worth more than one that produces a warm session and no change. So part of the output in these matters is a recommendation back to management about the fault mediation cannot itself fix. Where genuinely personal conflict has grown on top of a structural fault — which is common, since people blame each other for problems the system created — both layers need addressing in that order. And the process design matters: individual conversations with everyone first, always, because in a group the loudest account is rarely the most accurate and the quieter members usually hold the information that explains it. The full page is here.
A diagnostic worth running: ask three people outside the team to describe what the problem is. If you get three different answers, it is probably several conflicts sharing a label rather than one — and those need entirely different processes. A single group session convened over that will achieve nothing at all.
A team everyone is quietly working around? 01 5827148.
Richard O’Shea — Solicitor & Mediator
Solicitor at Mary Molloy Solicitors (established 1981) and holder of the Law Society of Ireland Diploma in Mediation. The firm also runs a substantial employment practice, which is why the honest sorting question — whether a situation needs a mediation or an investigation — gets answered at the first call rather than halfway through. Workplace mediations are conducted on site, at neutral venues, at The Ormond Building on Ormond Quay, at the Kilkenny office — or fully online. The mediator is appointed by both sides and acts for neither. 01 5827148 · richardoshea@marymolloysolicitors.com · LinkedIn
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