30-Minutes Team Conflict

Two people on your team aren't getting along.

It's slowing decisions, killing collaboration, and starting to bleed into the work your client sees. You don't have an HR department. You don't have a mediator on speed dial. You've never had a day of management training. And the advice you keep finding — "have an honest conversation" — isn't helpful when you don't know what to say.

This book fixes that.

The 30-Minute Team Conflict is a short, practical guide for small-team leaders, founders, and freelancers who need to resolve a conflict this week — not after a management course, not after reading 300 pages of theory, and not after the problem "works itself out" (it won't).

Inside, you'll find:

Why small-team conflict is fundamentally different from what the management books describe — and why the usual advice doesn't work when every relationship on your team is load-bearing

The five early warning signs that conflict is developing, before anyone tells you about it

A simple diagnostic for the four types of conflict you'll actually face — because the fix depends on the type

The three-conversation script: exactly what to say when you sit down with Person A, Person B, and then bring them together — specific questions, specific language, specific traps to avoid

What to do when you're part of the problem — the hardest chapter, and the most important one

How to handle the genuinely toxic team member — and a decision framework for when to invest in the relationship versus when to end it

How to build a team that handles disagreement before it becomes destructive

What to do after the storm — because most teams never recover from conflict, not because they can't, but because nobody acknowledges it happened

Written by Theo van Stratum, PhD, with 50 years of experience in software engineering and project management. No jargon. No HR frameworks. No therapy. Just the conversations that fix things.

If you've been telling yourself "they'll work it out" — they won't. The conversation you're avoiding is the one that matters most.