Kate Leto 04/09/2025 Kate Leto 04/09/2025

State of Conflict in the Workplace (Copy)

Why Intelligent Conflict is the Skill Leaders Need Now

Why Conflict is the Voldemort of the Workplace

I spend my days working with leaders on the stuff they’d usually rather avoid — the awkward conversations, the unspoken tension, the trade-offs everyone’s already made in their heads but no one says out loud. It’s meaningful work, but even after a “good” session, I often walk away thinking, “something important is still hanging in the air.”

Nine times out of ten, that missing piece is conflict.

It shows up in the conversation that never happens, feedback left unsaid, tension about priorities swept aside, an apology that doesn’t get made. Or the subtle but powerful differences in work styles, values, or expectations that shape the possibility of doing great work. And of course, at the other end of the spectrum, there’s the big blow ups in the boardroom, canteen, or even weekly 1:1 that still consistently show up.

Somewhat comfortingly, this is not just an issue my clients are facing. Research shows 89% of employees report experiencing conflict at work. (Personally, I suspect the other 11% misunderstood the question.)

These moments of conflict — big or small — are often avoided on purpose. Clients tell me they don’t want to hurt feelings, they worry the conversation won’t make a difference, or they simply don’t have the energy or confidence. Sometimes they assume it’ll blow over. But it rarely does. The tension lingers and grows. It shows up in Slack threads that go sideways, in meetings where no one says what they mean, in decisions that stall for weeks.

That’s why I call conflict the “Voldemort” of the workplace. We don’t even want to say the word and act as if not naming it will make it disappear. It doesn’t. It festers, drains and keeps teams, leaders, and organisations stuck.

Conflict isn’t going anywhere. Instead of willing that to happen, the real challenge before us is learning how to work with it — to normalise it, name it, and build the skills to navigate it — so it becomes less of a silent tax and more of a driver of clarity, growth, and better work. (And through this article, you’ll see that it is possible!)

I’ve gone back through management theory, psychology, conflict resolution, and sociology, and held it up against my own experiences with conflict at work, and what I see in my coaching practice. The result is an evolving set of ideas, coaching tools, and techniques that I’ve been using to help my clients work through their conflict at work. Together, I call it Intelligent Conflict: a reframing that treats conflict not as something to fear or suppress, but as a normal part of working life.

If you’re ready to stop skirting around it — if you dare stare conflict in the face — this is the place to start.

This article is lengthier than my usual writing, so I've divided it into several chapters to help you more easily navigate. Feel free to skip to the section that feels most relevant to you, or turn off your other devices and settle in to read the whole thing in one go!

C onflict Isn’t Always a Fight — It’s Differences That Matter

The Silent Tax Conflict is Charging Your Organisation

Why Conflict is Harder (and More Important) to Handle Today

How to Build Intelligent Conflict: Five Principles You Can Actually Use

What Intelligent Conflict Looks Like in the Real World

Bringing It All Together

Conflict Isn’t Always a Fight — It’s Differences That Matter

To ground this, let’s start with an everyday example of conflict at work:

You know that meeting.

The one where two people keep politely talking past each other, and everyone else is watching the clock, silently begging for it to end. No one says what they’re really thinking. Nothing moves forward. Time ticks by.

Later, the Slack DMs light up with what people should have said — sharp comments fired off without context, interpretations layered on interpretations. Welcome to the spiral of conflict: misunderstandings, snap judgments, old grudges — all combining into the kind of avoidable mess you end up thinking about at 3 a.m.

You might be thinking, Really? That’s conflict? Yep. And that’s one of the problems with how we think about it: We often only label it “conflict” when it’s loud, messy, and impossible to ignore, like the classic boardroom blowup. But the quieter tensions? We excuse those as “passion” and get back to business.

So, how should we define conflict at work today?

After a lot of reading and reflection, I keep coming back to one definition that has stood the test of time. In fact, it’s 100 years old. Which is both comforting (apparently we’ve always struggled with this) and depressing (apparently we haven’t learned much).

It comes from Mary Parker Follett, a management and organisational theory pioneer that Peter Drucker called the “Prophet of Management.” Follett didn’t frame conflict at work as something to eliminate, but as “differences that matter” (Gehani & Gehani, 2007). Differences in opinions, values, priorities, expectations, or resources — the kinds of differences that, when they clash, create friction in every part of an organisation.

In a 1925 talk, she argued:

“Think of conflict as neither good nor bad; to consider it without ethical pre-judgement; to think of it not as warfare, but as the appearance of difference — difference of opinions, of interest… We shall not consider merely the differences between employer and employee, but those between managers, between directors at the Board meetings, or wherever differences appear.”

Crucially, Follett also called out that conflict doesn’t just live between people — it lives inside us too. She wrote:

“Conflict means difference. It may be a difference inside an individual as well as between individuals. It may be a difference between groups, or between a group and an individual.” (Dynamic Administration, 1930)

That makes her not only an early thinker on organisational life, but one of the earliest voices I’ve found that point to self-awareness as part of leadership.

Seen this way, conflict scales. Follett wasn’t just talking about disputes between managers and employees — she was pointing to something bigger. The same principle of “differences that matter” applies whether it’s the argument in your own head, the tension between two colleagues, the dynamics in a team, or the culture wars that ripple across whole organisations.

Here are a few contemporary examples to put it into context:

Intrapersonal — The clash inside your own head. A leader knows they need to make a hire but puts it off for weeks — not because the candidates aren’t strong, but because fear of making the wrong call keeps colliding with the pressure to move forward.
Interpersonal — The friction between two people. Two senior leaders stop talking after a disagreement on priorities and investment. Emails get clipped, meetings go frosty, and decisions that should take days start taking weeks or even longer.
Intragroup (team level) — The tension within a team. A product team splits on launch strategy. Half push for speed, half for quality. No one says it outright, but deadlines slip, meetings drag, and other departments are left waiting.
Intergroup/systemic — The bigger collisions: culture wars in a merger, competing incentives across functions that don’t align with strategy, or even public protests when employee values clash with company actions.

That’s why Follett’s framing still works a century later. Conflict isn’t just noise or distraction or raised voices. It’s the differences that matter — from the private debates we avoid inside ourselves to the systemic clashes that can stall entire organisations. And once you see it this way, it’s clear: Conflict isn’t rare. It’s constant. And constant conflict, left unmanaged, comes with massive costs that we’ll look at next.

The Silent Tax Conflict is Charging Your Organisation

If conflict at work were rare, maybe we could shrug it off. But when we apply the framing of “differences that matter,” it’s clearly not not. And when something shows up this often but goes unaddressed, it doesn’t just make work uncomfortable — it makes work more expensive personally, culturally, and financially.

Here’s just a glimpse into the bill we’re running up:

Time and productivity. Earlier research found U.S. employees spend about 2.8 hours each week dealing with conflict — costing organisations roughly $359 billion a year in paid hours lost (CPP Global). A more recent survey put that figure even higher, at 3.5 hours a week, suggesting the burden of workplace conflict is only growing. In the UK, unresolved conflict drains an estimated £28.5 billion annually in lost productivity and staff turnover (CIPD).
“Low-grade” conflict still counts. A 2023 SHRM report on workplace civility found that 57% of employees had experienced incivility — rudeness, dismissiveness, small breaches of trust. One in four said they reduced their work effort as a result.
Turnover and replacement. A 2022 SHRM survey found that 20% of workers who left a job cited toxic culture or interpersonal conflict as a factor. Replacing an employee costs 50%–200% of their salary — with true costs (onboarding, lost productivity, ramp-up time) reaching $15,000–$40,000 per mid-level hire.
Health and wellness. Conflict fuels stress and burnout, driving absenteeism, presenteeism (being at work but not fully functioning), and higher healthcare costs. The American Institute of Stress estimates workplace stress — often linked to unresolved conflict — costs U.S. employers over $300 billion annually. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports presenteeism can cost more than twice as much as absenteeism(Allen and Unger). Employees in unresolved conflict are also more likely to take sick leave or develop anxiety, depression, or related conditions.
Startups aren’t immune. Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman’s research, popularised in The Founder’s Dilemmas, found that 65% of startups fail because of relationship breakdowns among the founders (Entrepreneur, 2021). Not product, not market, not funding or strategy. Relationships. At the very top of the house, mismanaged conflict can kill a company before it ever has the chance to scale.

Conflict isn’t just frustrating in the moment — it’s expensive — emotionally and financially. It eats into time, trust, health, and retention. And because so much of it stays unspoken, most organisations don’t even realise the true cost until it shows up in turnover numbers, burnout rates, or failed strategies.

And it’s happening at a time when conflict at work is becoming harder — and more important — to deal with than ever before.

Why Conflict is Harder (and More Important) to Handle Today

If conflict were only a drain on time and money, that would be reason enough to take it seriously. But today’s context makes it harder — and more important — to address. Three shifts stand out:

The conflict of conflict - The perfection of AI vs the reality of humans.

In a recent interview, relationship expert and psychotherapist Esther Perel pointed out that that AI promises a flawless, frictionless reality. It works the way you want, when you want — no hesitation, no resistance. Humans are nothing like that. We’re unpredictable, imperfect, full of misunderstandings and missteps. That contrast adds a new layer of complexity to conflict at work. The more we grow accustomed to seamless interactions with AI, the more intolerant we risk becoming of the messiness that is simply part of being human. Unless we learn to see and work with that gap now, avoidance will only grow — and with it, disconnection, ghosting, and the very breakdowns that make work harder.

The loss of the “third place.”

In his book The Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about the three places that anchor our lives: the first (home), the second (work), and the third (community spaces like cafés, churches, libraries, pubs). That third place has been shrinking for decades, and with it we’ve lost one of the best training grounds for learning how to navigate difference and build tolerance. Increasingly, people expect work to fill that gap — to provide belonging, purpose, even community. And for those without strong “third places,” workplace conflict looms even larger, because it isn’t balanced out by other spaces to practice and process human difference. As a result, conflict shows up not on the margins but at the center of our expectations of work.

The post-pandemic workplace.

For many people, “back to the office” is really “first time in the office.” A whole cohort started their careers remotely, never picking up the everyday social skills that help us read the room, disagree constructively, or repair trust after a misstep. Others are relearning how to sit in the same space after years of Zoom. No wonder the cracks show quickly — we weren’t taught how to deal with the conflict that naturally erupts when humans work side by side.

In short: Conflict has always been costly. But in this moment — with AI reshaping a lot of our work, our “third places” disappearing (or already gone), and a workforce still learning how to work together again — it’s not just costly, it’s defining how we work, what we will accomplish... and what we won’t.

I believe it’s time for a different approach.

How to Build Intelligent Conflict: Five Principles You Can Actually Use

And that different approach is what I call Intelligent Conflict. It’s not about erasing conflict — that’s impossible, and honestly, undesirable. Conflict is the friction that can sharpen ideas, deepen trust, and push work forward — if you know how to work with it. The challenge is to normalise it, to treat it as part of working life, and to deal with the differences that matter in ways that make them constructive instead of corrosive.

To do that, you need to build both the inner game (your story, your body, your emotions) and the outer game (your relationships and how you put it into practice). You can’t really separate them. Without inner clarity, the outer work doesn’t stick. Without outer practice, the inner work stays theoretical. Intelligent Conflict is about linking the two so conflict becomes a source of clarity and connection, not corrosion.

So what does that actually look like? For me, it comes down to five principles — a progression that starts with your inner game and carries through to the outer one. These aren’t abstract ideas. They’re the Five Principles of Intelligent Conflict I’ve been studying, testing, and refining with clients in real workplaces — from one-to-one coaching conversations to leadership teams navigating transformation.

The Five Principles of Intelligent Conflict

1. Know your conflict story

We all carry a story about what conflict means, and most of us started writing it long before we set foot in an office. Maybe growing up, conflict meant shouting until someone stormed out, or maybe it meant silence for days.

Those early chapters still shape how we react now — often without us realising it. Intelligent Conflict begins with understanding that story so you can get clearer on what’s driving your current responses and decide whether to keep following the old script or write a new one.

Once you’ve spotted the story, the next challenge is learning to recognise what happens when conflict actually hits your system — and that takes us into biology.

2. Work with your body’s natural response

Our bodies are wired for a good overreaction. A curt email, a raised eyebrow, a Slack ping at the wrong moment — and suddenly your nervous system is convinced you’re under attack. Adrenaline floods in, logic floods out. Palms get sweaty, and your pulse goes into high gear.

The good news: That chemical surge usually burns off in about 90 seconds if you let it. You’ve just got to do what might feel like the hardest thing in that moment: Pause, breathe, and wait.

Part of Intelligent Conflict is understanding these physical mechanics — how your brain and body react to threat (be it perceived or real) — so you can actually use that gap instead of being hijacked by it. Once you know what’s happening under the surface, you can choose how to respond rather than letting biology write the next line of the story.

And if biology shapes the immediate surge, emotions shape the ongoing narrative. That’s the next layer.

3. Make sense of your emotions

After the initial physical surge, your mind kicks in and starts making meaning. You label the rush as an emotion — anger, fear, anxiety — and almost instantly spin it into a feeling and a story: “I feel disrespected… they must not value me.”

The emotion itself is automatic; the story you attach is optional.

This part of Intelligent Conflict means slowing down to name the emotion before jumping into conclusions about intent. Ask yourself: Is it true? What evidence do I have?

By pausing here, Intelligent Conflict helps you use emotions as data, not as a script you’re doomed to follow.

Once you’ve got a clearer handle on your emotions, you can step outside yourself and pay attention to the space between you and others — because that’s where most visible workplace conflict lives.

4. Read the dynamics

Conflict doesn’t just sit in one place. It can flare inside you (“Do I push ahead or hold back?”), between two people, or across a whole team. Wherever it shows up, it lives in the space between — between competing priorities, clashing values, or even different parts of yourself. Relational awareness means noticing the dynamic you’re part of, whether it’s internal or external. Once you can see the pattern, you have a chance to shift it.

This is where Intelligent Conflict shifts from self-awareness to systems-awareness: Once you can see the pattern you’re in, you have a real chance to change it.

But awareness alone isn’t enough. Conflict skills, like any skills, only stick when you use them in the real world.

5. Put it into practice

Conflict skills don’t grow from theory — they grow from action. One difficult conversation, a reflection on what worked (and what didn’t), then another try. It’s experimentation, not perfection.

And this is where everything comes together: your conflict story, your body’s reactions, your emotional clarity, and your ability to read the dynamic.

Surprisingly, most of the time, it isn’t nearly as bad as you expect. (Yes, the monster under the bed is usually smaller than the one in your head.) Often, the very conversations you dreaded are the ones that unlock trust, clarity, or relief.

Progress is messy, human, and iterative — but that’s exactly how conflict skills take root and how old conflict stories get rewritten.

The five principles build on each other for a reason: They take you from the inner game of conflict (your story, body, and emotions) to the outer game (your relationships and practice).

Skip the inner work and the outer work won’t stick. Skip the outer work and the inner insights never see daylight. Intelligent Conflict connects the two — so that conflict becomes less of a tax on your team and more of a driver of clarity, trust, and progress.

What Intelligent Conflict Looks Like in the Real World (and Where We’ve Been Going Wrong)

The five principles of Intelligent Conflict aren’t theory — they’re practical tools for the messy, human moments of working life. But most organisations don’t use them. Instead, based on my experience, they tend to default to one of two broken models:

Exploit — treating conflict like a badge of honour, glorifying tension as “passion” without offering any real support. Conflict gets paraded as proof that people care, but rarely managed in ways that make it constructive.
Avoid — brushing tension under the rug, delaying the hard stuff, muttering “nothing to see here” while real issues simmer just out of sight.

Both sit at opposite ends of the same spectrum, and both fail — just in different ways. And the costs show up everywhere: individuals second-guessing themselves, relationships fraying, teams losing momentum, and organisations bleeding time, talent, and trust.

Read on for four examples based on real-world case studies — each showing what usually happens, and what an Intelligent Conflict approach—applied through the inner and outer game—could look like instead.

Case 1: Intrapersonal — When your own story trips you up

What happened

A VP in a global company heard whispers that his role might not survive an upcoming reorg. No one had spoken to him directly, but the speculation was enough to flip his system into overdrive. Within hours, he’d drafted and sent an email offering to resign. On the surface, he said it felt like control — he was “getting ahead of the situation.” In reality, it was avoidance. The hard, clarifying conversation that could have surfaced the truth never happened.

Why it happened

This was intrapersonal conflict at work. His body went straight into survival mode, pushing him toward escape before he even checked the facts. An old story about conflict — that it’s safer to leave than risk being pushed — made the whispers feel like certainty. The assumption (“they’ve already decided to cut me”) became more powerful than reality.

What Intelligent Conflict would look like

An Intelligent Conflict approach wouldn’t erase the fear, but it would interrupt the spiral. It would mean noticing the physical surge and giving it time to pass — with some compassion for yourself, because that response is human, not failure. It’s also about recognising your own patterns: This is usually where I go into flight mode, or This is when I shut down. Then comes the naming of the raw emotion: I feel scared and uncertain. The reframing question: Is it true? What evidence do I have? And finally, the shift to the outer game: surfacing the concern directly, requesting a meeting, having the conversation, and finding out what was real.

Outcome

Luckily, his boss didn’t accept his resignation. But the episode shows how quickly an unexamined reaction can snowball into a career-altering decision.

What we can learn from this story

Intrapersonal conflict is often invisible, but it’s costly. Intelligent Conflict helps leaders pause, check the story they’re telling themselves, understand its source, and choose a step that leads to clarity rather than self-sabotage.

Case 2: Interpersonal — When Two Leaders Talk Past Each Other

What happened

A senior leader with a strong track record at a well-known scale-up thrived under her original boss: clear expectations, direct communication, shared ways of working. Then came an acquisition—and a new boss. His style was the polar opposite. She lived for structure and preparation; he thrived on improvisation and quick pivots based on short-term market demand.

She did what most of us would: She asked for clarity on “what good looks like.” His answer? “I’ll know it when I see it.” Translation: chaos for her, freedom for him. She kept adjusting in small ways but soon found herself second-guessing everything. He read her as incapable. She saw him as careless. Meetings got icy, projects slipped away, and she began to feel like she was being quietly fired. Before long, it wasn’t just a feeling — she was out.

Why it happened

This was interpersonal conflict in slow motion. Two work styles clashing, but no one naming the difference. She carried a story that success means following the rules; his story was that agility is king. Add in the emotional spin — “He doesn’t respect me,” “She can’t adapt” — and they were stuck in a loop. Neither was wrong, but both were blind to the pattern.

What Intelligent Conflict would look like

The inner game comes first: catching the frustration before it hardens into intent (“He’s trying to push me out” or “She can’t cut it”). Ask: Is it true? What evidence do I have? Then the outer game: name the real difference — structured vs. improvisational — and actually listen to each other.

That’s where duo coaching comes in (sometimes called dyad or partnership coaching). Most workplace conflict isn’t about one person — it’s about the space between them. So instead of coaching someone in isolation, I bring both sides into the room. Think of it as marriage counselling for work: a chance to get honest about what’s really happening in the relationship, and to practice new ways of working together in real time. It’s the fastest way to stop talking about each other and start talking to each other.

Sometimes it’s conflict resolution at a very acute point, sometimes it’s a partnership tune-up. Either way, it gives people equal airtime to say what’s working, what’s not, what they want to build together, and helps them learn new ways to actually make that happen.

One of my favourite tools is Nancy Kline’s Time to Think exercise. Three minutes on the clock: one person talks, the other stays quiet. Then swap. Back and forth until the heat drops and the words finally land. It sounds ridiculously simple, but it works. Equality. No interruptions. No posturing. Just two humans hearing each other for real (with the help of a small timer.)

Outcome

In this case, they never got there. The silence stretched, mistrust hardened, and she eventually left. A good leader walked out the door — not because of capability, but because the conflict stayed unspoken.

What we can learn from this story

Too often traditional 1:1 coaching gives us only half the story. Intelligent Conflict widens the frame: Get both people in the room, give them equal airtime, and suddenly differences aren’t fatal — they’re fixable.

Remember, since we're dealing with humans and all their imperfections, we can't always guarantee a "perfect" ending to the story. But the Intelligent Conflict approach gives us tools that we can carry with us to future relationships and increase our chances of handling conflict more adeptly the next time we encounter it.

Case 3: Intragroup — When Teams are “Too Nice” to Move Forward

What happened
A newly formed leadership team was tasked with guiding an organisation-wide transformation. On paper, they had the right mix of experience and credibility. In the room, they looked like harmony itself: smooth discussions, nods of agreement, everyone quick to show unity. If you walked in, you’d think, what a collaborative bunch.

But scratch the surface and a different story showed up. Real disagreements never made it into the room. Decisions dragged. Risks only surfaced once they’d already turned into problems. Side conversations in private messages were more candid than the official meetings.

To the outside world, the team looked “nice.” Inside, they were stuck. And it wasn’t accidental: They openly admitted they worked in a culture of “nice,” where you didn’t challenge colleagues and you certainly didn’t call people out.

Why it happened

This is the trap of confusing trust with psychological safety. They trusted each other’s competence, but they didn’t yet feel safe enough to disagree openly. Because they were new, no one wanted to rock the boat. “Nice” became the default setting — but nice isn’t the same as aligned. Without alignment, the transformation work they were hired to lead was already wobbling.

What Intelligent Conflict would look like

We started with the inner game: helping each person notice their own discomfort with disagreement. In individual 1:1 coaching, leaders began to name what felt hard about speaking up, and to recognise that silence was its own form of conflict.

Then we moved to the outer game: introducing small, low-stakes structures for candour. Retrospectives gave everyone equal airtime to share what was working and what wasn’t. Simple clarifying questions — “Can you say more about that?” — helped shift the tone from agreement-at-all-costs to curiosity. And duo coaching gave pairs of leaders a safer space to practice more direct conversations before trying them in the group setting.

Outcome

The “niceness” didn’t vanish — and that wasn’t the point. Instead, honesty began to layer slowly on top of the supportive tone. Small disagreements surfaced earlier. A few decisions moved faster. They weren’t suddenly a high-conflict, fast-moving team, but they were no longer stuck in the shadows.

What we learn

Politeness can look like alignment, but it often hides avoidance. Intelligent Conflict helps teams experiment with honesty in small, structured ways — enough to start building safety without losing the goodwill they already have.

Case 4: Systemic — When Cultures Collide: Lessons from Microsoft + LinkedIn

What happened

When Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016 for $26 billion, the logic was clear: Microsoft’s platform muscle plus LinkedIn’s professional network. But under the shiny press release was a bigger challenge — two very different cultures trying to coexist. Microsoft leaned product-driven, methodical, and process-heavy. LinkedIn thrived on speed, relational energy, and quick iteration. Classic conditions for a culture clash.

What Intelligent Conflict could look like

Here’s the twist: Instead of forcing integration or tiptoeing around the differences, CEO Satya Nadella did something counterintuitive. He let LinkedIn maintain its independence while slowly cultivating collaboration. Through the Connected Apps initiative, the two companies built voluntary projects where teams could test what might actually work together — like weaving LinkedIn profiles into Microsoft Office or developing joint AI tools.

In Intelligent Conflict terms: Nadella didn’t erase the conflict, he created containers where differences could be tested and explored. This created space for the inner game, where leaders at both companies could notice their own cultural triggers (“Why do they move so slowly?” “Why are they so chaotic?”) without letting them harden into assumptions. And it also facilitated the outer game with structured, low-stakes collaboration that made the contrasts visible but manageable.

What this offered was the chance to reframe difference as useful data, not a deal-breaker. It strengthened the inner game by building awareness of patterns and biases, and the outer game by creating practical ways to work across them. In short: a way to build trust without forcing sameness.

Outcome

It worked. LinkedIn’s revenues grew from $2.9 billion at acquisition to $16 billion by 2024. Just as importantly, LinkedIn kept its culture intact while gaining access to Microsoft’s vast resources.

What we can learn from this story

Systemic conflict is messy — it lives in incentives, processes, and whole cultures, not just in individual relationships. It’s also an area of active enquiry in my own practice — one I’m exploring and creating in real time, learning alongside clients as we design new ways to work with it.

What I see in the Microsoft–LinkedIn example is a master class in Intelligent Conflict at scale. Instead of avoidance (burying differences) or exploitation (glorifying friction), Nadella built structures for constructive collision. That’s the heart of Intelligent Conflict at the system level: not erasing difference, but turning it into a long-term advantage.

Read more about the Microsoft + LinkedIn story here.

Bringing it All Together

Here’s what I've seen, learnt and believe deeply:

Conflict is inevitable — it’s part of being human.
At work, it shows up as differences that matter — in how we think, decide, and relate.
We spend staggering amounts of energy avoiding it, when in reality it’s never as bad as we build it up to be.
Handled well, conflict opens doors: to trust, clarity, growth, and better decisions.
Handled poorly — whether through avoidance or exploitation — it quietly drains time, money, and energy from teams and organisations.

Conflict isn’t going away — which means we always have the chance to get better at working with it. Intelligent Conflict gives us a way to turn tension into progress: Not by pretending it’s healthy, not by sweeping it under the rug, but by building the inner and outer skills to use it well.

This is the work I do every day with senior leaders, co-founders, and executive teams: helping them have the difficult conversations they’re avoiding, shift the patterns that keep them stuck, and practice conflict in ways that build stronger organisations- so they stop burning energy avoiding the hard stuff and start making faster decisions, keeping talent, and actually moving their business forward. I do this through one-to-one coaching, duo coaching, and team development programmes inside fast-growing and transforming organisations.

If you recognise your team — or yourself — in any of these pages, let’s talk. Because conflict isn’t the problem; the problem is what happens when we don’t learn how to use it constructively.

Kate Leto 28/05/2019 Kate Leto 28/05/2019

Blog Post Title One

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.