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, it’s already passed 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 its origin, uncovering 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 is beginning to erode. Nothing has been said out loud yet.
Positions have 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 least expensive moment to act.
Right now the conflict is not openly visible: 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 highly collaborative relationship, 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, structured so that each stage answers one question and clears the path to the next. Click through to explore each one.
The real problem
“What is actually happening, and who am I in this conflict?”
We strip the situation back to the origion and map how you show up under conflict, so we work on the real problem, not the story around 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, surfacing differences that create friction long before they're ever named.
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, rather than 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 how accoutability is held?”
We clarify what has changed, agree on committments, and the accountability needed to move forward so the change becomes sustainable beyond the conversation.
What makes this different
Most conflict work ignores the cultural layer. This puts culture at the core.
In most international environments, conflict almost always has a cultural dimension that nobody names: different norms for directness in communication, giving and receiving feedback, building trust and navigating disagreement inform how systemic conflicts are built into interactions.
Understanding how systems function along with 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
Deepa works 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.
Her one-to-one coaching sessions have been developed from years of experience and expertise. She supports you in handling dilemmas that consume your headspace. She accompanies you on your path to lead with soul and create meaningful impact, taking you to your next level as a leader.
She designs and delivers leadership workshops and coaches 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 well-being 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. It 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 Deepa. We will talk through your situation so you can decide if navigating conflict is the right instrument for you.