Priya & the Atif–Rekha Rivalry: How Political Awareness Saved a Project

    When two department heads refused to work together over an old rivalry, Priya did not pick a side or escalate. She read the room. This is the full story of how political awareness rescued a stalled IT project – and the playbook you can copy.

    Priya & the Atif–Rekha Rivalry: How Political Awareness Saved a Project

    Priya & the Atif–Rekha Rivalry: How Political Awareness Saved a Project

    Priya was leading a project that needed two departments to work as one – and the two men and women running those departments had not spoken civilly to each other in over a year. No amount of project-management software was going to fix that. What fixed it was political awareness, applied patiently, one meeting at a time. This is the full story, and the playbook hidden inside it.

    In short

    Where this sits on your Winning Kite

    This story lives on the RQ – Relationship Intelligence – side of The Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework), under the trait of Political Awareness. In my framework, a leader is a kite that only rises when all four sides are in balance – the top is Success, the left is EQ, the right is RQ, and the bottom is PQ. Priya's problem was not technical and it was not a productivity problem. It was two people, two egos, and a wound that had never healed. She could only solve it by working the RQ side of her kite, using EQ underneath it – empathy, patience, self-control – to hold the whole thing steady. That is why this single example belongs to the chapter on Political Awareness, Savvy and Intelligence, one of the twenty-five traits that make up the EQ and RQ sides of the kite.

    The situation Priya walked into

    Picture an Indian IT company. Priya is leading a project that everyone agrees is important – the kind that needs collaboration from multiple departments to hit its deadline. On paper, this should be routine. Departments work together on cross-functional projects all the time. But this particular project needed two department heads – Atif and Rekha – to sit at the same table, share resources and coordinate their teams. And Atif and Rekha were not cooperating. Not a little friction. Not the usual turf-guarding you see in any large office. A long-standing rivalry, openly known across both teams, that had calcified into something close to a standoff.

    Priya had inherited a project with a live landmine buried inside it, and nobody had warned her how deep it went until the first joint planning call, when Atif's team showed up without him and Rekha's calendar mysteriously had "no availability" for the entire month.

    The background: how the rivalry started

    The root of the problem was not personality. It was history. Atif and Rekha had clashed on a previous project – the kind of dispute that happens in every organisation, over ownership, credit, or a decision that went wrong. What made it toxic was the outcome: that earlier dispute led to Rekha's promotion, and Atif walked away feeling unfairly treated. Whether Atif's grievance was fully justified or partly a matter of perception did not matter anymore. What mattered was that the resentment was never acknowledged, never resolved, and never spoken about openly. It simply went underground and waited for the next project that needed both of them to cooperate.

    This is worth pausing on, because it is exactly how most workplace rivalries in India actually form. It is rarely a single dramatic blow-up. It is an unresolved promotion decision, an uneven credit split, a public correction in a meeting – something that was never revisited once the immediate storm passed. The wound scars over, but it stays tender. And it resurfaces the moment two people are forced to depend on each other again, exactly as it did for Priya's project.

    Priya's approach: read the room before you move

    Here is where the story becomes a genuine masterclass, and where most project leads would have gone wrong. The easy, tempting responses were all available to Priya: escalate immediately and let senior leadership force the two to comply; pick whichever of Atif or Rekha seemed more reasonable and build the project around that person while working around the other; or simply plough ahead with the plan and hope the friction would not show up in the delivery. Any of these would have bought short-term movement and long-term damage.

    Instead, Priya used political savvy to handle the situation with care. Her approach had four distinct pieces, and each one matters.

    First, she understood the organisational culture before acting. She did not assume she knew the full history – she took the time to understand how this company handled inter-department conflict, what was acceptable to say out loud and what was better left unsaid.

    Second, she sought guidance from her senior manager. This is a detail people skip when they retell stories like this, but it is one of the most important moves in the whole playbook. Priya did not try to be the lone hero solving an inherited feud by sheer willpower. She went to someone senior who understood the organisation's power structure and history, and got their read on how to navigate it. That single step protected her from walking into landmines she could not see from her own vantage point.

    Third, she treated both Atif and Rekha professionally and with respect, without exception. She did not let her private judgement of who was "right" in the old dispute leak into how she engaged either of them. Neutrality, held consistently, is what earns you the right to be trusted by both sides of a rivalry.

    Fourth, she identified key allies within their departments and understood each person's individual strengths and weaknesses. She was not just reading Atif and Rekha – she was reading the wider system around them: who influenced Atif, who Rekha trusted, where the informal power actually sat inside each team. That is political awareness in its purest form – seeing the map of relationships, not just the two names causing the visible problem.

    The strategy: turning awareness into action

    Awareness on its own does not move a stalled project. Priya converted what she had learned into a concrete strategy, and it is worth listing exactly what she did, because every step is repeatable in your own workplace.

    She arranged separate meetings with Atif and Rekha – not a joint sit-down where old wounds would immediately resurface in front of each other, but individual conversations where each could speak freely about their concerns without performing for the other. This is a deliberately sequenced move: you cannot ask two people who do not trust each other to be vulnerable in the same room on day one.

    In those conversations, she highlighted the benefits for their departments and the company – not abstract appeals to "be professional" or "let's move past this," but a concrete case for what each of them and their teams stood to gain by cooperating. People rarely change their behaviour because they are told to. They change when they can see what is in it for the outcomes they actually care about.

    She then proposed a teamwork approach with clear roles and responsibilities – people from both departments working together, but with well-defined ownership so neither side felt exposed to being blamed for the other's mistakes, or overshadowed by the other's credit. Ambiguity is what rivalries feed on; clarity starves them.

    Finally, she organised a team-building event for both departments to rebuild communication and rapport at the ground level – not just between Atif and Rekha, but across the wider teams who had absorbed the tension of their leaders' cold war for months.

    The outcome

    In the end, Atif and Rekha realised that working together served them both far better than continuing the standoff, and they put their rivalry aside. Their departments began working together efficiently, and the project was completed successfully. The company benefited from increased revenue as a direct result of the collaboration Priya had engineered – and Priya's own leadership and political savvy were recognised by the organisation. A project that had been stuck on the starting line, held hostage by a year-old grievance neither party had processed, became a visible win with her name attached to it.

    The moral of the story is direct: political awareness is a critical quality for success in any organisation. Priya's ability to navigate the delicate situation between Atif and Rekha shows the importance of understanding an organisation's culture, being alert to alliances and rivalries, and grasping the larger human forces at play beneath any project plan. By employing political savvy – not manipulation, not favouritism, just clear-eyed reading of people and patient relationship-building – Priya brought two departments together toward a shared goal, and turned a stalled project into a recognised success.

    What this teaches you about leading through rivalry

    Most of us will, at some point, inherit a version of Priya's problem – a project, a merger, a cross-functional initiative that needs two people who cannot stand each other to somehow row in the same direction. The instinct is almost always to treat it as a scheduling or process problem: put them in the same meeting, assign clear deliverables, move on. Priya's story shows why that instinct fails and what actually works instead.

    The psychologist Daniel Goleman, whose work on emotional intelligence has shaped how the world talks about EQ, has long argued that reading emotional undercurrents in a group is itself a form of intelligence – you cannot manage what you refuse to see. Priya did not pretend the rivalry did not exist, and she did not treat it as noise to be muted. She treated it as the actual project she had to manage, with the technical deliverables as the secondary layer riding on top of it.

    Notice also what she did not do. She did not gossip about the old dispute to build her own case. She did not go to senior leadership to complain about Atif or Rekha individually. She did not try to solve it in one dramatic joint confrontation. Each of those shortcuts would have felt faster in the moment and cost her far more in trust over the following months. Political savvy, done right, is patient by design – it respects that broken relationships heal in stages, not in a single meeting.

    If you are managing a cross-functional initiative today and you sense a Priya-shaped problem underneath your Gantt chart, the sequence is worth copying almost exactly: get guidance from someone who knows the history you don't, stay scrupulously neutral, map the informal allies around the two central people, meet each of them separately before you meet them together, anchor your ask in what benefits their side, build a structure with clear roles so nobody feels exposed, and only then invest in rebuilding the human rapport at the team level. That sequence is the whole of political awareness compressed into one workplace story – and it is why this example sits at the heart of the Political Awareness chapter in Stars at India Inc.

    This is also exactly the kind of scenario I work through with teams in my signature leadership programs – because reading it in a book is one thing, and rehearsing your own version of the Atif–Rekha conversation before you need it is another.

    Bring These Ideas to Your Team

    Avinash Chate turns the traits in Stars at India Inc. into live leadership & emotional-intelligence workshops. TEDx speaker · 11+ yrs training Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW & 1000+ leaders.

    ✅ Thanks! Avinash team will reach out within 24 hours.

    '}).catch(function(e){f.outerHTML='

    Something went wrong. WhatsApp +91 8793630001

    '});return false;">Select ServiceKeynote / Motivational SpeakingLeadership Development TrainingTeam Building WorkshopManager DevelopmentEmployee TrainingBook Avinash Now →

    Or WhatsApp directly: +91 87936 30001

    Work with Avinash Chate

    Avinash Chate

    TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · Author of Stars at India Inc.

    Avinash has trained the Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership, emotional intelligence and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is the Priya, Atif and Rekha example about?

    It is a workplace example from Avinash Chate's book Stars at India Inc. Priya leads a cross-department IT project that stalls because two department heads, Atif and Rekha, refuse to cooperate due to an old rivalry. Priya uses political awareness to bring them together and complete the project successfully.

    Why did Atif and Rekha refuse to cooperate?

    In an earlier project, a dispute between them ended with Rekha getting promoted and Atif feeling unfairly treated. That unresolved resentment carried into the new project, and neither was willing to work with the other.

    What exactly did Priya do differently?

    She did not take sides or escalate immediately. She sought guidance from her senior manager, treated both leaders with respect, identified allies inside each department, met Atif and Rekha separately to hear their real concerns, tied the project to benefits for their own departments, built a teamwork structure with clear roles, and ran a team-building session to rebuild rapport.

    What is the leadership lesson from Priya's story?

    Political awareness – understanding culture, alliances, rivalries and the larger forces at play – is a critical skill for getting results through people you do not control. It is emotional and relationship intelligence working together, not manipulation. Explore more in The Winning Kite framework or get in touch to bring this training to your team.

    Related Articles by Avinash Chate

    Avinash Chate services

    Corporate Training · Leadership Development · Team Building · Motivational Speaking · All service locations

    ← Back to all articles · Book Avinash Chate

    By Avinash Chate — Maharashtra’s #1 Corporate Trainer & Motivational Speaker. .