"During my time at 123 Incorporated, I was managing two training supervisors. One managed trainers who facilitated classes in customer service skills such as effective communication, active listening, and other soft skills. The other managed hard skills trainers who facilitated sessions in computer navigation, data processing, and the like. Let's refer to the soft skills supervisor as Supervisor A and the hard skills supervisor as Supervisor B.

One day, Supervisor B came to me to complain that she felt she shouldn't be the one developing the plan for a course on email etiquette. Because email writing is a communication skill, she thought it should be assigned to Supervisor A. I asked her why she took on the task to begin with. She mentioned that she was intimidated by Supervisor A. I asked what the other supervisor had done to make her feel that way, and she answered that there were a couple of incidents during which Supervisor A was complaining out loud to the entire team about his bandwidth. Supervisor A was feeling overwhelmed with his tasks and was vocal about not taking on more work. At that point, Supervisor B had only been in the company for two months. My first step was to speak with Supervisor A separately about his current workload. He mentioned that he had been having difficulty managing his time but was not aware that Supervisor B had taken on the email etiquette course. He also mentioned that one of his trainers was experienced in the subject and would be happy to work with Supervisor B. Next, I had all three subordinates in a meeting to plan our way forward. We were able to delegate tasks reasonably in which Supervisor B would oversee the training plan from the trainer, and Supervisor A would work with Supervisor B on feedback."