Sometimes it's good to get things out in the open. But I'm not sure mediation is really my forte.

You may recall me mentioning a certain amount of simmering alpha male tension between my new boy Ace and the previously-unchallenged salesman-supreme, Mammon. My HR lady has been on at me for ages to nip this in the bud, but I wasn't too concerned: a bit of competition wouldn't hurt anyone, I figured, and if it spurred them on to greater heights of salesmanship, who was I to complain?

Well, I'm not saying I was wrong (I rarely admit to that at the best of times). But I decided this week that it was time to step in. What happened was that Ace came to see me on Monday whinging about how unhelpful Mammon was being. Ace is still working his socks off to try and push our new product out to potential customers - and with very few people apparently in the mood to buy anything at the moment, it's proving a tough ask. So Mammon's apparent reluctance to scour his contact book for potential leads has not gone down well. At all. 'This is not easy, SD, and it doesn't help when the people who are supposed to be on your side don't lift a finger to help', he whinged.

Now I wasn't entirely surprised by this. Salespeople guard their contacts with their life, because that's where their commission comes from. If you've spent months wooing someone, you don't then want some jonny-come-lately waltzing in and hoovering up some of your client's budget spend. On the other hand, Ace clearly needs all the help he can get. And I need Mammon to start acting in the best interests of the business as a whole, not just his own pay packet (admittedly this probably means his incentive plan is wrong, so I need to look at this too).

Anyway, I could see that this had the potential to escalate from a drama into a crisis, so I decided that the three of us were going to sit down in a room and work this out. Naturally, the idea of this appalled me. I don't mind having a go at people when I have to, but the prospect of brokering a peace deal between two grown men just isn't my cup of tea. I have many strengths, but mediation isn't one of them. My natural inclination is just to bash their heads together and tell them to stop acting like little kids arguing about who has the hardest conker, but that's not really the done thing in these circumstances. (Back in the old days, I was once rejected from a graduate recruitment interview for being 'too forthright', which I think is a euphemism for 'blunt' or possibly 'rude'.)

Nevertheless, I called the meeting - and my only consolation was that the two of them were even more embarrassed about the whole thing than I was. As they sat across the table looking at me like sheepish teenagers, I encouraged both of them to say their piece to the other, and then (on the advice of HR lady, and against my better judgement) told them to talk about something they admired in the other person.

Words cannot express how exruciating that bit was.

Still, painful as it was, it does seem to have cleared the air a bit between them. And if it gets the two of them to work together and generate me some more new business, I suppose that meeting will have been worth every cringeworthy second. But I've no idea how professional mediators actually do this stuff for a living.