I grew up with two loving, clever, and very willful parents. They divorced when I was around three years old, and generally we all got along quite well. However, when I was a teenager, I started to notice a pattern that cropped up over and over. I would talk to my mom and she’d convince me of something or other. Over the weekend, I’d head back to my dad’s place, where I’d parrot my mom’s points at him. My dad would explain patiently why she was wrong. I’d walk away convinced every time. Back at my mom’s a few days later, though, I somehow couldn’t get her to understand. Worse yet, after a short conversation, I’d be sure that she had been right the whole time. I would go back and forth like this quite a few times before I realized that I was carrying out arguments between two people who didn’t even know they were arguing with each other.

Why am I writing about my childhood struggles on this professional blog? It turns out this situation comes up in the workplace all the time. Here are some ways it can show up:

• A junior engineer goes to two different senior engineers for advice about a technical design and keeps getting bounced between their ideas; during the design review, one or both mentors disagree with the plan, and it looks like the junior engineer didn’t do a good job getting advice early.
• A product manager has a super cool idea that needs buy-in from another group. After speaking to their peer PM in that group, both agree on an excellent plan! However, just a week later, the peer PM comes back and says this won’t ever work, giving a bunch of weak reasons that don’t make much sense. This happens a few more times before it starts to negatively impact the working relationship between the two PMs. It turns out that the peer PM was trying to convince an opinionated senior engineer of this idea and kept being talked out of it.

When I don’t feel like talking about my childhood, I refer to this problem as proxy arguing. The “child” is the proxy, and the “parents” are the endpoints.

The best way to break out of proxy arguing is to get the endpoints in the same room to hash things out. First, though, you need to identify that the problem you’re facing is in fact a proxy argument. Depending on your point of view, things might look different. Here is what you might notice from each perspective.

Once you realize you’re seeing a proxy argument, you’ve done the hardest part. It’s time to get everyone back on the same page.

Here’s a basic playbook:

1. Get everyone in the same room. Try to keep this small, ideally just the endpoints and the proxy, to leave space for problem-solving.
2. Clearly state both/all perspectives. Doing this as the proxy is a great way to develop skills & understanding, but it can be done by anyone in the situation.
3. Discuss and find a path forward. There isn’t one right way to do this, and it makes sense to rely on the endpoints here more heavily. If you hit a lot of challenges at this step, you probably have more problems than just proxy arguing.
4. Make sure to document/recap the results of the meeting and bring the decision back to any others who need to be informed.
5. Keep an eye out for the same problem in the future—often this happens multiple times with the same group of people.

In complex organizations, it’s almost inevitable that the divorced parents problem will come up once in a while. But don’t let that scare you—it really is easy to resolve once you start to recognize the signs.