Navigating Conflict · A six-week 1:1 engagement
One particular conflict is consuming your headspace.
With a colleague, a manager, a leadership team, or an external partner. You know the conversation that needs to happen. The approaches you have tried haven’t resolved it, and every week it continues it costs you in terms of performance, energy and standing.
In six weeks we resolve it. Not manage it – resolve it.
Private · 1:1 with Deepa Natarajan · For VP and C-suite leaders
Sound familiar?
The conflict may be loud. Or it may be hiding behind surface-level politeness.
Both are equally costly. This engagement is for senior leaders and executives inside international organisations facing a specific, named conflict with a peer, a direct report, a board member, a leadership team, or an external body. A conflict that is:
Consuming headspace
It’s the thing you think about on the drive home. It follows you into meetings that have nothing to do with it.
Affecting performance
Decisions slow down. Information stops flowing. Your team feels it, even if nobody names it.
Resistant to what you’ve tried
The careful email. The clearing-the-air meeting. HR’s advice. Waiting it out. It’s still here.
The two paths
If you don’t face conflict head-on, it follows you.
Workplace conflict simmers beneath the surface like a ticking time bomb. You have to understand it, not avoid it. Choose a path and watch where it leads.
Why it hasn’t resolved
The apparent problem is almost never the real problem.
By the time a conflict really seizes your attention, you’ve already run it through your own interpretation. Work on that version and you spend months on the wrong problem, which is exactly why the approaches you’ve tried so far haven’t worked.
Navigating Conflict strips the situation back to what was actually said and done, finds the structural dynamic underneath, including the cultural dimension that almost always goes undiagnosed, and prepares you for the one real conversation that resolves it.
Before we go further
Where is your conflict right now?
Click the line that sounds most like your situation. Most leaders misread the phase they are in.
Early tension
Patterns of avoidance. Trust beginning to erode. Nothing has been said out loud yet.
Positions hardened. Both parties know it is happening. Others are starting to notice.
Near collapse
The relationship is functionally broken. Formal action is being considered.
Early tension is the cheapest moment to act.
Right now the conflict is still a private weather system: avoidance patterns, shorter emails, meetings that route around the person. This is the phase where a structured intervention costs the least and resolves the fastest, because positions haven’t hardened. Six weeks from now this can be a working relationship again, before anyone else ever knew it was at risk.
The engagement
Six stages. Six weeks. One resolved conflict.
Eight live 1:1 sessions with Deepa, in a structured sequence. Every stage answers one question and clears a path to the next. Click on each stage to see more..
The real problem
“What is actually happening, and who am I in this conflict?”
We strip the situation back to what was actually said and done, and map how you show up under conflict, so we work on the real problem, not the story about it.
Why it’s stuck
“What is perpetuating this, and what path forward is needed?”
We identify the patterns, assumptions and behaviours keeping the conflict in place, then clarify what needs to change to create movement.
Cultural intelligence
“What cultural dimension is generating friction I haven’t fully understood?”
We explore the cultural dynamics influencing the conflict and surface the differences that may be creating friction without being explicitly recognised.
Preparing for the real conversation
“Who do I need to be before I walk into this conversation?”
We prepare you to enter the conversation with clarity, self-awareness and the capacity to stay grounded when the conversation becomes difficult.
The real conversation
“Can we meet each other, not perform at each other?”
We create the conditions for an honest conversation where both people can listen, speak openly and move beyond defensiveness or performance.
Integration and closure
“What has changed, what is committed to, and what holds?”
We clarify what has changed, what has been committed to, and what needs to hold moving forward so the work becomes sustainable beyond the conversation.
What makes this different
Most conflict work ignores the cultural layer. This puts culture at the core.
In corporate and multinational environments, conflict almost always has a cultural dimension nobody has named: different norms for directness in communication, giving and receiving feedback, building trust and navigating disagreement.
Deepa has spent 15 years as an intercultural practitioner inside global organisations across four continents. Cultural intelligence isn’t an add-on here; it is a dedicated stage of the engagement, often the one where the conflict finally makes sense.
Your practitioner
Deepa Natarajan
I work with C-suite, VP and Director-level leaders in international organisations, where inner and outer tensions cost dearly and impact is felt at a systemic level.
My one-to-one coaching sessions have been developed with years of experience and expertise. I support you in handling dilemmas that keep you awake. I accompany you on your path to lead with soul and create meaningful impact, taking you to your next level as a leader.
Designing and delivering leadership workshops and coaching executives to lead with courage, clarity, and conviction, especially in times of conflict, change, and complexity, so that they can lead with steadiness and bring growth and wellbeing to their systems.
hours working with senior leaders across numerous well-known international organisations.
What clients say
Leaders who have done this work with Deepa
Deepa knows how to make an executive team successful. Her support and leadership was a big part of the success of our leadership summit!
Deepa’s insights, expertise and human touch were keys for achieving the targets. She coached several managers including myself, to bring us smoothly out of our comfort zone and bring efficiency and sharpness in our activities.
Group Head IT Delivery, Caceis Investor Services
Deepa is a truly compassionate, intuitive, and energetic individual. She isn’t afraid to challenge her clients, pushing them towards areas where they can leverage their strengths and achieve success. It has been a true honor and pleasure to work with Deepa and learn from her.
SVP, Randstad RiseSmart
"Conflict is not a sign that something has gone wrong.
Conflict is a sign that something important is trying to happen."
The conversation you’ve been avoiding is the path through.
Book a confidential call with me. We will talk through your situation, and I will tell you if navigating conflict is the right instrument for you.