The Situation

I am Dora Zielske, and this is a personal intra-company experience from earlier in my career.

While working in London for a company managing VAT transactions and declarations for large corporations globally, I was hired as VAT Solution Manager to oversee the development of a new tax management application.

Coming from Oracle and SAP, I was used to working at the intersection of business, finance, technology and regulation. In that world, a “technical update” would normally mean a software upgrade, new functionality, a change to the technology stack or some other change to the system itself.

Here, a “technical update” meant something very different: a country had changed its VAT rate.

The Head of Tax Declarations and the Head of Software Engineering needed to work closely together to create the new tax-processing application. Yet by the time I joined, they were in a massive dispute and refused to even enter the same room.
They were fighting over terminology, requirements and, ultimately, the feeling that the other side simply did not understand what they were talking about.

The Challenge

The irony was that they could not do their jobs successfully without each other.

Tax needed the application to reflect the relevant tax requirements. IT needed Tax to explain what the application had to do.
Both were highly competent and good people in their respective fields. But they had reached a point where every discussion seemed to reinforce the conflict rather than solve the problem. The issue was no longer simply technical. The communication between the two professional worlds had broken down.

The Intervention

Against the warnings I received, I brought them together.

I did not try to decide who was right. I started translating. When Tax explained what was required, I helped IT understand what was behind the request. When IT explained what could or could not be delivered, I helped Tax understand the technical reality behind the answer. We gradually moved away from arguing about terminology and towards understanding what each side actually needed.

My previous experience at Oracle and SAP was critical here.

As a financial application localisation and globalisation expert, I had spent years working with accounting and taxation experts, lawyers and business specialists from different countries. My role was often to understand the legal requirements behind a business need, translate them into something technology could work with, and help create pragmatic and sustainable solutions.

And I learned something that has stayed with me ever since: behind every requirement, there is a human being trying to solve a problem and wanting to be understood.

The Result

The two functions were able to work together again. 🙂

But the outcome went much further than getting the application delivered. Two years later, the two people who had once refused to enter the same room had become friends. They even organised and travelled together to my wedding in Germany. And we had a lot of fun then but also during our working hours.

The Lesson

Some intra-company conflicts are not really about the issue that appears on the surface.

They are about different professional worlds that have stopped understanding each other. In complex organisations, someone who can understand these different worlds and translate between them can sometimes unlock a situation that has become impossible for the people involved to solve themselves.

This is one of the strengths I value most in business mediation.

And these skills are not simply a matter of personality or intuition. They can be learned and trained. In an agile business environment, the ability to understand different perspectives, translate between professional languages and address tensions early is increasingly indispensable.

This is also why we offer Dispute & Solution Capability Training for Leaders and Teams — helping organisations build these capabilities before conflicts become entrenched.

Why This Matters

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Complex corporate conflicts often arise between people who are individually highly competent but operate in different professional languages. The earlier those differences are recognised and translated, the more options an organisation has.

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Sometimes the first step towards resolving a conflict is simply making sure that everyone is finally talking about the same problem.

 

 

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