How to mediate staff in a high conflict workplace

1. Quotable quote

"When all other approaches to conflict resolution fail, conflicting parties can have a mediator intervene. Mediators have no power to make decisions, but they can help clarify the issues, urge participants to co-operate, establish ground rules for interaction, and serve as impartial aids to help the conflicting parties settle their own dispute… By intervening, the manager seeks not only to help resolve the conflict, but attempts to develop rational, effective conflict management skills in others."

2. Smile & ponder

In 'Songs of Innocence', the English poet William Blake (1757-1827) recognised that there is but one outcome for those who bottle-up their anger…

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water’d it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunnèd it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles…
And it grew both day and night…

Mediation can suppress the corroding growth of another’s anger.

3. Viewpoint

"Mediation is based on the belief that no one else can possibly know as much about the conflict as those actually involved and no outsider can conceivably know what will satisfy the disputants as well as they themselves. If a win-win solution is possible, the parties involved themselves are the most likely to be able to discover it." …