When students, professors, and faculty understand the tasks associated with their institutional roles, it can help them more easily negotiate power differentials and take conflict less personally. Our framework of role-to-role relationships reduced explosive drama in a case study with a higher education president and vice president locked in a job-threatening conflict. Role-to-role relationships helped them see how what was being said about them by staff and students was not personal but belonged to their roles. They found the courage to share the awful things they heard about each other in order to analyze it for data about the deeper questions the university was trying to work through. In their reclaimed teamwork, they were able to minimize community gossip via establishing staff protocols for transparency and accountability and strategize how to help staff and faculty create a new narrative about what was happening on campus.