How you can stop letting workplace conflicts simmer
Lessons from transformative mediation
A lot of us spend much of our time at work unhappy or on edge because of simmering tensions that remain from unresolved conflict. We may feel we have to walk gingerly around certain people because conflict is easily triggered between us and we don’t know why that happens or what to do about it.
Conflict is such a big part of life in community, yet most of us are never shown how to manage conflict effectively in our early years. Later, in work contexts, we are expected to know how to handle conflict when it arises. Often we do not handle it well, and this affects team morale and productivity.
Avoiding conflict doesn’t make it go away
Before I trained as a mediator, I thought I was good at handling conflict. I had often been the peacemaker on the playground as a child, and later in the workplace. I thought of myself as a calming influence, a voice of reason. And I truly did just want everybody to get along.
That was fine when it was somebody else’s conflict, where I was on the side-lines. It never worked so well when I was facing a conflict situation myself. Like most people, I am conflict averse. My usual response is to try to pacify the other person, though I also can get stuck for a while in a cycle of defensiveness and blame.
Conflict hurts. I realise now the way I used to handle conflict — my own or others’ — was all about removing the hard symptoms of conflict. The hard words, the threat of physical violence, the heavy emotions. All of those scared me. They still scare me.
I see now that for a long time I thought I was helping by trying to remove the heat of the moment. I assumed that once we all reached a state of calm people would see reason and the problem would evaporate. If I could see past the conflict, surely any rational person would too. Yet walking back from the heat of conflict always left me with some anxiety. Rather than resolving things, it just gave me a sharper sense of where I needed to tread carefully to avoid triggering further conflict.
Leaning in to conflict
The biggest surprise for me when I trained in transformative mediation was that the heat of the moment really matters. Shutting it down makes it harder to get to what is really at the heart of the conflict.
In the transformative mediation approach the mediator follows the heat in the disputing parties’ conversation. Reflecting back to them their hard words and heavy emotions helps them hear themselves and each other differently. This enables them to find clearer ways of expressing their own needs and concerns.
The mediator is there to support them to listen better and express more clearly what they need to say. Hard words and emotions mask their feelings of helplessness about how to fix the problem between them. As long as they are feeling disempowered, they are not ready to hear the other party’s perspective. But hard words and emotions are the window into working through the conflict.
Rewiring your relationship with conflict
I was well into my professional career as an anthropologist when I trained as a mediator. Making sense of other peoples’ conflicts and how they dealt with them was a big part of the work I had been doing. So, I thought I already knew a lot about conflict. Yet I discovered that I did not know much at all about working through conflict effectively. Most of what I thought I knew meant only that I was good at shutting conflict down, not dealing with it.
Mediation, I learned, was not about pacification or compromise, but about empowering people to do conflict better. And the training was about learning practical skills — active listening, reflecting not just words but the emotions and values they carry, monitoring one’s own neutrality, and avoiding directive language. Although some of this was familiar to me, it was mostly head knowledge and I had to re-learn it as embodied practice.
That has changed my relationship with conflict. I have learned how to support other people through conflict — helping them listen to each other, helping them get clearer about their own needs and concerns, and helping them feel able to make decisions about the issues between them.
The transformative mediation practice I work with does not just deal with working through acute conflict. It also helps disputing parties transform their relationship with conflict and with each other. And it works.
If unresolved conflict is affecting you or your workplace, mediation may be what you need to try. Confidentiality is critical, as is the mediator’s neutrality. That often means you should be looking outside your organisation for a mediator.
Send me a direct message if there is a conflict situation you need help with.
You can find me on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-pilbrow
Substack: https://socialcontext.substack.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@tim.pilbrow