Conflict interview questions: the variants, with the other side told fairly

A colleague presented work to a client that was substantially mine, without attribution — and I want to tell it fairly, because the story looks worse for him than it turned out to be.

The substance: we'd both worked on a rebrand pitch. The concept the client loved — the modular logo system — had come from my sketches, developed over a weekend. In the presentation, Tom walked the client through it fluently, first person plural throughout, and when the client asked 'whose idea was this?', he said 'it came out of the team process'. Which was technically defensible and felt like theft.

What I did with the first 24 hours: nothing. Deliberately — I've learned my first-day version of these conversations is prosecutorial. Then I asked him for a coffee, away from the studio, and opened with the substance rather than the verdict: 'the modular system came from my weekend sketches, and in the room it became nobody's. I want to understand how you saw it.'

His answer genuinely reframed it: he'd assumed the client question was a trap — that naming one designer would make the studio look like a one-person shop, and he'd been coached by our old creative director to always answer 'team'. He hadn't clocked what it cost me. I believed him, partly because he then did something cheap talk wouldn't: he emailed the client that afternoon, unprompted by me, crediting the concept's origin — 'Priya's modular system' — in a follow-up about next steps.

What we built from it: a two-line norm we proposed to the whole studio — concepts get named in pitch decks, 'team process' is for process questions. It's still on the pitch template.

We worked together for two more years and I'd work with him tomorrow. The conflict was real. So was the repair.

My shift manager wanted to keep both loading docks running through a fortnight when we were three trained banksmen short — and I thought one dock should close on nights. The disagreement was genuinely hard because both positions were right about different things.

His case, stated fairly: peak season, contractual despatch windows with penalty clauses, and closing a dock on nights meant certain missed slots — real money, real customer damage, his accountability. Mine: the workaround rota had agency staff doing banksman-adjacent tasks they weren't signed off for, and my near-miss log showed two incidents in the first four nights — a reversing wagon and a pedestrian walkway breach. Not catastrophes. The shape of one.

What I did, in order: raised it with him directly at the end of shift two, with the log in hand — not in the morning meeting where he'd have an audience and I'd have a grievance. When he made the despatch-windows case and decided to continue, I asked for two specific mitigations rather than restating my position louder: exclusion barriers on the walkway, and the agency staff moved off the yard tasks even if it slowed us. He gave me both — which I've since understood was him meeting me halfway, not dismissing me.

Then the near-miss that ended the argument happened anyway: night six, a wagon reversed against an unsecured cage, no injury, £3,000 of stock damage. He closed the night dock himself the next morning — and here's the part I'm genuinely proud of: I never said I told you so, publicly or privately. He knew. What I said was 'what do we tell despatch?', because the penalty problem was now ours, not his.

What it built: he brought me into the following year's peak-season planning from the rota-design stage — the disagreement had made me more trusted, not less, because of how it was conducted on both sides.

Our fundraising lead and I spent a month in conflict over case studies — she needed them to raise the money, I ran the programme whose participants she needed them from, and we were both doing our jobs.

The collision: a major grant application needed three detailed beneficiary stories in a fortnight. Two of the participants she'd shortlisted — from an old newsletter — were people I knew to be in fragile stretches: one mid-way through a housing appeal, one who'd recently asked us for more anonymity, not less. I said no to both names. She heard obstruction; from her side, the programme team was blocking the funding that paid for the programme. The month got professionally frosty — copied-in emails with careful sentences, the whole genre.

What unfroze it was moving from positions to interests, which sounds like a textbook and in practice meant one honest ninety-minute meeting. Her actual need wasn't those two people — it was three stories with depth and recency by a date. My actual need wasn't 'no' — it was that participation never cost a participant anything, including emotional cost they'd feel unable to refuse. Once both needs sat on the table, the solution was almost embarrassing: a standing consent-and-readiness list, maintained by my team quarterly — participants who've actively said they want to tell their story, with what they're comfortable including. Fundraising draws from the list; nobody gets cold-approached in a fragile month.

The grant application went in with three stories from that first list — one of them stronger than either name she'd originally wanted, her words. The application succeeded.

What I'd own about my side of the frost: my first 'no' came with no alternative attached, which made it read as territorial. I've not made that mistake since — a no with a path beats a no with a principle, even when the principle is right.

Early in my buying career I fought a returns-policy disagreement through email for three weeks — and I made it worse in almost every way available to me.

The substance was ordinary: our online returns manager wanted serial returners flagged and restricted; I opposed it on customer-experience grounds. A perfectly good professional disagreement that deserved a meeting and got, instead, nineteen emails. My contributions to the mess, specifically: I wrote when irritated and pressed send anyway — twice with that little flare you get where the politeness is doing the aggression ('as I've now explained several times…'). I widened the audience twice, adding my manager, then hers, as silent copied-in witnesses — which I told myself was transparency and was actually artillery. And I let the thing become about winning: somewhere around email twelve I could feel that I'd stopped evaluating her arguments and started mining them for weaknesses. I knew it, and continued.

How it ended is the embarrassing part: our directors met for twenty minutes and settled it with a threshold compromise either of us could have proposed in week one. Both of us looked worse for the month; neither position had been unreasonable — only the conduct.

What I actually changed, and have kept for years since: a personal two-email rule — if a disagreement survives two email exchanges, the third contact is a conversation, no exceptions. And no silent copy-ins, ever: if I add someone to a disagreement, I say why in the first line, to everyone. The returns manager and I, incidentally, got to a perfectly good working relationship afterwards — she took my apology gracefully, and once said the whole thing was the best worked example of email being the wrong room that she'd ever been part of.

What I'd do differently is almost everything except the position I held.