Four Reasons Mediation Fail: 1. High Intensity

The referee carefully evaluates the fairness and viability of both sides’ proposals.

The problem may also require facilitating compromise and trade-offs or finding ways to expand the pie to move the parties out of a win-lose mentality. There may be more common ground than you think.

The next task for the mediator is to assess whether the dispute is primarily a win-lose competition. If so, you need to be prepared to support firm and fair negotiations between them. The referee models how to effectively bargain and horse trade and efficiently settles outcomes. The referee also ...

The fixer can address tight constraints by calling them out and if necessary, discussing and solving them with the involved parties to make the necessary accommodations. This can trigger a more cooperative dynamic. The fixer can also leverage certain constraints to begin to lower the aspirations ...

Conflicts that occur between people or groups who are solely competing against one another, especially over coveted resources, are also prone to fail in mediation.

For example, perhaps those two department heads are fighting over sparse funding allocations or even the attention and recogni...

The standard mediator’s role is ideally to open dialogue and then disappear, allowing the parties to reach their own resolutions. Once the mediation is underway, you want to offer a relational, non-judgmental approach by asking questions, reflecting on the answers, and reframing what’s being said...

Problems can’t be resolved in open dialogue if important issues are kept hidden. For example, perhaps there are tensions around gender equity in the office, and the department heads in this scenario are of different genders. Mediations that involve issues that organizations aren’t talking openly ...

Another critical task is to identify any major constraints on the mediation. Here the fixer makes an assessment with the goal of pushing restrictive situations toward new possibilities. Are there external constraints like bad timing (a pressing deadline makes it impossible to think), lack of priv...

A mediator’s first task is to gauge and control the intensity of a conflict. For those highly volatile ones, it’s important to play the role of medic by triaging the conflict to reduce its intensity. A mediator in medic mode is active — they remain highly present throughout the process and enforc...

Efforts that are greatly constrained by time, law, norms, or other factors are also prone to flop. To suggest that two employees can work out their issues in a single, two-hour meeting might be wrong.

Working things out takes as long as it takes, and mediation doesn’t always respond to the...

The counsellor’s tools are listening, coaching, questioning, clarifying, and probing the history of the dispute, all while taking their time.

This approach often gets frustrated parties to open up about sensitive issues like workplace inequity, such as concerns about wages, access to promo...

The medic’s best tools are controlling the process, managing emotions, and providing a structure that finally lets the parties involved hash it out, in a reasonable amount of time. Simultaneously, it’s up to the medic to model a positive example of self-composure and self-expression, and to reass...

Many managers are aware of the upsides of mediating conflict between employees. But mediation can break down, and the authors’ research explains four reasons why that may happen. Being aware of these potential tripwires allows managers to watch out for them and devise strategies to navigate each....