Accidental Mediator Toolbox: Six Key Skills for Navigating Workplace and Personal Conflicts

In this episode of the Conflict Skills Podcast, host Simon Goode explores the essential skillset for anyone who finds themselves in the role of an "accidental mediator," such as managers or HR professionals dealing with workplace conflict. He breaks down six key areas: self-regulation, de-escalation, empathetic listening, coaching (using the GROW model), assertiveness and boundaries, and creating the conditions for success in conflict resolution. Throughout the episode, Simon shares practical frameworks and tips to help listeners navigate these situations more effectively and encourages feedback on this lecture-style format versus case-study discussions.

TIMESTAMPS: 

00:00 "Accidental Mediator Conflict Tools"

06:59 "Exploring Self and Regulation"

11:59 Attention Shapes Mind and Experience

17:06 Navigating Conflict and De-escalation

25:20 De-escalation Through Empathy & Clarity

29:31 Open vs. Closed Questions Explained

35:19 "Empathy and Mediation Strategies"

38:58 Clarity Through Questions in Conflict

46:59 "Positive Confrontation Over Emotions"

49:57 Mediation vs. Performance Management Consequences

56:03 Setting Conditions for Collaboration

59:47 "Accidental Mediator's Key Steps"

Transcript

0:00

Foreign hello and welcome back to the Conflict Skills Podcast. I'm your host, professional mediator Simon Goode. I set up this podcast to provide free resources and tools for dealing with conflict. So if that sounds like the kind of thing that's useful for you, please consider pressing subscribe now. In the episode today, I'm going to be talking about something that I been reflecting on and considering for a number of years now, actually. It's what would we put into the bucket if we were going to think about the kind of skills or the kind of tools that someone might use when they're in the position of accidental mediator? It's like all of a sudden you're navigating conflict between two other parties, so to speak, and, and you're needing to know what to do, how should you respond? What are some of the options that you can use for influencing the situation and how can you shift things or at least begin the process of creating the conditions that the situation might need to shift things forward? Creating the conditions that the situation might need to shift things forward. So I'm going to be talking about some of the options I suppose, that you could look at, and it's really almost a scaffold of the different kinds of communication tools that someone might use if they're in that accidental mediator situation. So I'm really talking about like a HR manager, for example, that gets called in and there's conflict between a team leader and one of their team. Or it might be the same HR manager that gets called in when there's conflict between the CEO and the executive staff member. It might be navigating conflict between the board and the CEO when there's some kind of a difference in expectations or difference in perspectives around what the organization should do in this kind of thing. It could be someone who's navigating conflict between a client and a particular staff member, or a project manager working on a construction project and the subcontractors that are engaged to do the actual hands on kind of work. And so what I've done is to think about, well, if you're in that position, what should you focus on? And so I've got six different topics that I'm going to be elaborating on and explaining a little bit. And really these could all be individual podcast episodes in themselves, I think. Actually, if that's something that you'd like me to put together, that would be quite enjoyable for me and it would be quite handy to have a bit of an outline that I could use for an accidental mediator training workshop or that kind of thing, where to develop it it in the future. So the first topic that I wanted to talk about self regulation. Then I'll go through some options that you could consider for de escalation. Third, I'm going to explain some of the ways that we can think about listening and I use the phrase empathetic listening for that topic. How can we give someone else the impression that we've understood what they've said, that we give them the sense that we get where they're coming from, if that makes sense. So I'm not talking about feeling what they feel. I probably, probably would call that sympathy myself. Although the actual terminology in which definitions we draw tend to be quite different. And a lot of people might not realize that. But I'm thinking about empathy in a different way that other people might think about it, if that makes sense. So I'm saying how can we demonstrate to the other person that we're on the same page to some extent. I'm not saying that we need to feel what they're feeling. So if they're embarrassed or overwhelmed or angry or terrified, disgruntled or whatever, I don't think necessarily it's going to be helpful if I do step into their shoes to the extent that I would limit my perspective to exactly what their perspective is limited to. I mean, there doesn't seem to be a lot of benefit to that, to be perfectly honest, at least if our goal is conflict resolution in a broader sense and you know, long term relationship management, not just dealing with this individual situation that we have in front of us at the moment. So that's what I mean by empathetic listening. Fourth, I'm going to be talking about a simple framework that we could use for coaching. So after we've given the other person the sense that we understand where they're coming from, how can we offer support but do it in a way that doesn't encourage them to put themselves in the victim's shoes? When the person sees themself as a victim, naturally they're looking at some other external force as the persecutor, the government management, this client, whatever, my team leader who's so unfair targeting me or whatever. And if they're in the victim seat, what they're doing is inviting you to step into the rescuer seat. So it's kind of this triangle of persecutor, rescuer and victim. So I find this kind of dynamic which is often talked about in counseling theories like transactional analysis, for example, I don't think that's necessarily helpful for anyone involved. Even if you step in and rescue the person in the short term, like, you should just do this. You just give them the option, for example, give them a bit of advice that they can use to navigate today. Well, you shouldn't probably be surprised then, if tomorrow they show up in your office saying, what should I do now? Or you've got a message from them saying, I urgently need your advice, or that didn't work, what should I do next? This kind of thing. I think as soon as we're stepping into the rescuer mode, the person is almost to some extent enabled to continue being the victim. And what happens is that when you decide to withdraw that support or put a boundary in place, look, this is part of your role. You're going to need to figure this out on your own. Then all of a sudden it can switch and instead of you being the rescuer, you can be seen as the persecutor. They are still down in the victim seat, which happens to be quite convenient for them, not having to reconsider their perspective or do anything different. And they'll look for a different source of rescuing then a lot of the time. So I like the grow model of coaching and I'm going to explain why, how we can use that in practice when we're dealing with something like an accidental mediator situation. Fifth, I'm going to be talking about assertiveness and boundaries, the kinds of things that we might need to do to clarify expectations and then hold on to boundaries moving forward. And then finally, I wanted to talk about the bigger picture way that we can think about these accidental mediator conversations as how can we implement the conditions for success, the conditions to succeed. I'll talk about that in some detail as well. Now, I'd love your thoughts as to how you find this type of episode where I'm just talking about a particular theory or a particular topic. I know I get a lot of more positive feedback when I talk about case study examples. And to be frank, they're a lot easier for me to prepare. So if all you want is case study examples, that's perfectly fine. But if you'd like these more, what would you call it? It's almost like a professional development seminar type of approach, I guess. Let me know because otherwise I'm likely to swap back to the case studies moving forward at some stage. So when I think about self regulation, part of the challenge for people is that they might not have a clear definition in their head about what self they're talking about, like, self regulation, that's fine, but which self are you referring to? Is it just your physical body? Like, obviously, that's what a lot of people think about as themselves. But when you say, is it just your physical body? They might say, no, there's other things going on. And so there's different interpretations as to whether or not humans have a soul and why are we conscious and what's the source of that consciousness, and therefore, what does that mean about our place in the universe and all of these kind of things. And I find all of those questions incredibly fascinating. And that's most of what I spend my time when I'm procrastinating from work, doing is watching YouTube on that kind of thing. But for self regulation, that very ambiguous and amorphous concept of we are an ethereal creature or something, I mean, it's not that helpful when you're right in the middle of a difficult conversation between two of your staff members who are at each other's throats because of something that happened last week or whatever. So self regulation to me needs a functional definition of self. And I have drawn from one of the popular ways of explaining self from Buddhism. In Buddhist theory, though, it's not necessarily that this is the limit of yourself. There are more than this. So the point of sort of outlining the self in this way, in the story, at least, isn't that this is the complete version of yourself. It's more like this can't be the complete version of yourself because there's something else going on, obviously, like free will and consciousness and some of those elements. But for me, having a way of thinking about self so that I can look after myself has been very helpful. So I think about self in my physical body. And then in addition to that, we've got my thoughts, like the cognitive machinations, so to speak, the stories that I tell myself, the expectations that I have, the interpretations that I might draw from something that somebody else done, all of that kind of thing. So there's values and there's beliefs and there's. I don't mind just lumping all of that together under the category of thoughts. It's the mental stuff, the cognitive stuff, I guess. Now, in addition to that, I've got feelings. And again, these are terms that people throw around, but there's no commonly understood idea of what a feeling is. No one seems to be able to explain where they come from or what's the source of them. There's different correlations that get drawn. And I particularly like Lisa Feldman Barrett's way of thinking about feelings is that they're almost signals about what our body is doing to prepare us for the next thing that might happen. Our brain is sitting in our head and it's always trying to anticipate what's going on. Right now, is this a situation that's dangerous, where there's a threat? Well then what it does is prepare us to act. And, and that action often is fight or flight kind of responses. So if that's what's going on internally, then one way of thinking about our feelings is that they're effectively metabolic processes. It's the mechanism that our brain uses because it's thinking fight or flight mode. This is a danger. So we feel angry because it's going to be something that's helpful if we need to fight. If there's actual physical conflict and a physical altercation that might happen. So we've got our physical body, our thoughts, our feelings. I also think in terms of self regulation or self care even to some extent it's helpful to also think about behavior like what am I doing? We've got thoughts, feelings and behavior. And then the final aspect for me is perception. What am I focused on at the moment? So any one of those factors, like my perception will, will be influenced by all of the others. What I'm focused on and what I'm paying attention to will be affected by my physical body. Whether I've had something to eat or I'm going to the toilet, or I'm worked up and ready to go and full of adrenaline, or if I'm in a slow lethargic kind of rest and digest kind of state. I'm going to focus on different things, I'm going to notice different things. The thoughts that I tell myself will influence what I pay attention to. Even just knowing what I expect would be helpful because I'm probably going to start looking for it. This self fulfilling prophecy almost that comes about just because we've got these biases built into our brain. We can't process all of the different data coming in through our senses. So we're always choosing something to prioritize. And that's what we're focused on, that's what we're experiencing to some extent. If I say to you what's your tongue doing in your mouth? All of a sudden you can feel it, whereas a moment ago you couldn't. And I think it's quite helpful to just become aware of what, what you're focusing on, what you're paying attention to, so to speak. So in the same way that what I'm paying attention to will be influenced by my body, my thoughts, my feelings and my behavior. So will all the others be influenced by all the others. And how I'm feeling is going to be influenced by what I'm thinking, maybe the expectations or the story that I'm telling myself or whatever. And, and my physical body, whether I've had something to eat, how much sleep I've had and what I've been doing, if I've been procrastinating for four hours versus if I've been getting stuck in and making progress on a task that needed to be done and what I'm paying attention to. In any one moment there's going to be good things and bad things that I could be noticing. But the human brain often tends to catastrophise and focus on the negative simply because that may have been something that's kept us alive for a long time throughout evolution. I don't know. But it's certainly obvious that we have that propensity to focus on the negative more than the positive. If you've hung out with humans for five seconds, it's something that's immediately clear. So this version of yourself, your physical body, your thoughts, your feelings, your behavior and your perception can be quite helpful for self awareness, which then leads to self regulation. So when you're going through conflict, how do your thought patterns change? What are the different expectations that you have about yourself? What's the story you tell about yourself? Was that a success? Was that a failure? Was that your fault? Was that inevitable? Was that a catastrophe? Was that just a difficult step in a long process and it will affect how you're feeling? When we're in conflict, we get angry and we get frustrated and we get exhausted and we get despairing almost. We get disappointed, we get hurt. There's all those different emotions that come along with it as well. And then we pay attention to different things. When we're in conflict, we might highlight in our memory particular things that the person said that wasn't true. I mean, they might have said 10 other things that were true, but that's the one we focus on. And particularly if you're a self conscious kind of person and they've said or done something that insults you. When conflict is going on, we pay much more attention to it. Whereas if it's a peaceful kind of day, we might just be able to take the same kind of comment or the same kind of criticism more in our stride. So that also will then affect what we do. If I'm feeling Really angry. And I'm telling myself a story like, this isn't fair. I, I haven't been given enough support, then it's going to influence my actions. I'm going to write an angry email to my boss. Whereas if I could just pause and slow down a little bit, I might choose more careful wording, for example, or choose a better time to send that email or maybe even reconsider sending it at all. So if I want to change my self, I need to first become aware of myself. And so this is an exercise that you can do. Get a bit of paper and write down thoughts, feelings, behavior, perception and physical body. And then write down in one column next to those, how are you normally like, what do you normally pay attention to? You're a happy, go, lucky kind of person. And how does that change? When you're in conflict, you tend to become a bit overly focused. You find yourself ruminating. So once we can write down how do we change as a result of conflict, we can then begin to think about, well, what options are going to be helpful? Like if you've noticed in the behavior category that when conflict is going on, you speed up and you speak loudly and you interrupt more often or something, well, what do you need to do to change that? And I really like thinking about how can I create the conditions for success here? It's one of the things that I think is also very helpful as a manager. Like, it's not my job to push everybody through. That's true. It's not my job to rescue everyone. That's true. So what is my job as a manager if my goal is to help my team succeed? One of the things that's been helpful for me is considering what are the conditions needed for success. Like how can I set up the environment or clarify the communication or take five minutes before I go into the meeting. That's going to mean that I've got a better chance of keeping calm. I've got a better chance of choosing my words carefully. I've got a better chance of not responding when the other person's provoking me and trying to get a reaction out of me instead of just willpower. And I need to make sure I don't overreact. I need to make sure I don't overreact. Oh my goodness, I just overreacted. It might be thinking about, well, what needs to happen to minimize the chances of me overreacting, making sure I've gone to the toilet and I've not rushing from one horrible meeting into another one. It will Be different for you. So how do you change as a result of conflict? Then helps us to consider, well, what are the different options that might be needed to introduce those conditions which I need to succeed? And in a way, I think that also removes the sense of being such a failure when it goes wrong. Instead of that, it's just feedback in the system. It's okay, these aren't the correct conditions. Let's see what we need to tweak or adjust next time around. The second category that I think about in terms of the accidental mediator skill set is de escalation. And again, this is all about that fight or flight instinct. So initially when I'm focused on de escalation, I'm thinking about how can I reduce the perception of threat for these people? If you've got two staff who are in an argument and they've come to see you and hopefully inviting you to resolve it, and you're thinking, bloody heck, what am I meant to say here? I don't know. It's your job to figure it out. What do you. Why are you bringing it to me? Or whatever. The first thing you might need to do is to calm them down. The more escalated that they get and the more worked up, the less that that frontal section of their brain is working. The cortex. And right up the front is the prefrontal cortex. This is the section of the brain that's responsible for executive function. Higher level thinking, depending on whether you're talking about the left and the right hemisphere. It's things like language, like choosing your words carefully, interpreting someone else and what they've said. Lists like maybe there's three things that you're in dispute about and they can't remember the second two because they're so upset about the first one. It's often logic. People lose track of the consequences of their behavior, so they might take a career limiting move like telling their boss to F off or something else in the moment. The more heated that we get, the less that frontal section of our brain is working, at least to some extent. So we lose that capacity for executive functioning, the higher level thinking. So as the accidental mediator here, before we get to discussing the issues and what's the topic and why are you in conflict? I, as the accidental mediator, need to focus on de escalation. Now to some extent, that's also creating the conditions for de escalation. So if we can think about why someone gets worked up, it's often because of a perceived threat. They think that you're making them look bad. And that's going to affect them somehow. They think that they're losing their autonomy because they're getting pushed around. They might think that their ego is questioned or their ethics are questioned or who knows what. But they are historically thinking about human evolution. All situations where that was a dangerous spot to be, that was a real threat. So it makes sense why we're in fight or flight mode. And if someone's accusing me of stealing something from them, they might attack me. You know, this is thousands and thousands of years before we had the police and even locking houses and all of that kind of stuff. So we're primed for self defense when there's moments of threat. So what I need to do is to remove that sense of perceived threat. Have the meeting separately, maybe. I'd say to them, guys, this does sound like something that's important to discuss and I'm happy to do it. I'm not prepared to do it right now. I need 15 minutes to wrap this up. Could we meet again at 11 or something else? Or could we circle back to it this afternoon? Or could we deal with it in this other way? Or maybe there's this other person that needs to navigate it. So part of de escalation first is thinking about how we speak and even things like body language and facial expression. I often find it helpful in terms of speech to think about the way that Chris Voss talks about de escalation. He says he uses a phrase called the late. I think it's the late night DJ voice or something similar. It's a voice which is a low, steady tone, slower speed and a lower volume. You need to speak loud enough for the other person to hear, obviously. But those are the three characteristics that he would talk about as late night DJ mode. In Australia, it's probably easy listening FM or something. Okay, that last track was from Simon called Where did the Weekend Go. Next up, it's Anthony's greatest hits or whatever. You know, it's that low tone, slower speed and lower volume. And it tends to inherently de escalate the situation. It brings other people down and even if they're yelling and raising their voice, I don't think it's usually helpful to match them. Some people think that's mirroring and I meet them up there and then I bring them down. I mean, go for it. If that's what works for you, then that's fine. But personally I don't think that that's the way that it often works. If you're loud and they're loud, it usually gets Louder. Whereas if you can maintain your calm, often within a few minutes, the other person might begin to calm down. And if they're not calm by that stage, it might be that there's something else going on, like drugs or substance use, or maybe it's a mental health issue and probably misdiagnosed from the psychiatric field. So they're on various different experimental mixes of medication. We don't know. But if my calm way of speaking doesn't calm things down quickly, I might need to then shift towards boundaries or ending the conversation or just saying, I can do this or this. What would you like me to do? Depending on who it is and what the situation is that you're dealing with, of course. So we've got our voice, and then the other aspect is facial expression and body language. You probably don't want to cross your arms in front of your chest, although some people do that, and in some contexts that's fine. You probably don't want to use too many gestures. If you're the kind of person that speaks a lot with your hands, that might not be the most helpful way to deal with a situation where you need to de escalate. You want to probably limit your movement, be relatively still. I often think about the king in a play. Like, I'm upright, but I'm calm. I've got it all together. I'm very composed. There's this action going on between my minions over there, but I'm largely unbothered. I'm not flustered, I'm not flapped. We can get through this. I'm exuding confidence to some extent, and that becomes infectious. In the same way that if we use a lot of hand gestures or speak very quickly or whatever, that extra energy tends to be injected into the conversation somehow. And they copy us. They reciprocally respond, and then off we go. It just gets louder and faster and uglier. So what can you do to communicate openness in the sense that you're paying attention to the other person? It's probably a level of eye contact, normally 70% or so, although there's very different cultural expectations in terms of eye contact and what it means not speaking too much, like not interrupting them, not using technical jargon, not speaking for 10 minutes without giving them a chance to respond, not, you know, being disrespectful or whatever else it might be. So we don't want to seem aggressive, we don't want to seem critical. We don't want to seem like we're scrutinizing them, and we don't want to seem like we're in a panic or at risk of an immediate reaction kind of thing. So that might be things like a neutral kind of facial expression, nodding, the non verbal or para verbal cues that we might send, like uh huh, okay, ah, right. All of those kind of elements. It's probably having visible hands. People tend to trust you more when they can see your hands. So if you're standing up, I often recommend just keeping them relaxed at your side. You don't want to be pointing in their face typically, but even walking up to someone with your hands in your pockets. I think there's a bit of another of these evolutionary processes that we're stuck with in our biology that we don't trust people when they're coming at us with their hands in their pocket. They might have a weapon to some extent. Now if this is the HR manager and I'm meeting them for a recruitment interview or something, it's probably not very likely that they have a knife in their pocket. But that's what my evolutionary biology has prepared me for, if that makes sense. You might also consider the factors that David Rock outlines, which are status, certainty, relatedness, autonomy and fairness. He describes these as to some extent fundamental drivers that guide human experience. But I think in terms of de escalation and what causes escalation, these are often very accurate or helpful ways of thinking about those different factors. So status is we don't want to make them look bad, we don't want to embarrass them in front of one of their team. You don't want to give the impression that you're just brushing them off and dismissing it. So how can we give the person the sense that we, we're paying attention to the things that they care about, that we are concerned about the things that they're concerned about. So that might be verbal things that you say or escalating it in some way or prioritizing it or agreeing to meet with them or whatever certainties, letting them know what to expect. Like before a meeting with two people, if you're going into an accidental mediator kind of conversation, there might be things that you can give them related to the details of the conversation. Like this is how long we're going to meet for, this is where we're going to meet. This is how the room will be prepared. This is what I'm suggesting in terms of an agenda. This is the structure at the beginning. I'm going to give an introduction and then I'll ask you both to give me a bit of an overview of your perspective on the current state of the situation and what needs to be different moving forward, like even specific questions. I'm going to ask you these three things. You might like to prepare ahead of time and maybe even bring some notes in. That's perfectly fine. You might say to them, we're going to have tissues, I'm going to have notepads and pens for you to use. We're getting lunch brought in. These are the people who will be there. My manager or this senior person, or we've invited a HR representative or whatever. When people know what to expect, it's almost like it feels like they're standing on solid ground. And that can be an incredibly helpful thing when it comes to de escalation. So we've got status and certainty. Relatedness is the kind of ways that we can demonstrate empathy. Give the person the sense that we understand where they're coming from and that we're listening, that we get it, that we're on the same page. Then we've got fairness. It might be saying something like, given my role, these are the constraints that I'm dealing with. Or from my perspective, I would like to do this. The challenge is that I can't for this kind of reason. And then finally we want to give them autonomy, give them a choice. Well, look, if you'd like, I can meet with you both now and we can talk it through. But if either of you would prefer and you think the afternoon might work better, that's also an option. What would you like to do? So I'm letting them decide. And when I meet them, I often say things like, look, do either of you need to grab a drink or duck to the bathroom or anything, or you're ready to go? Like I'm giving them that ability to decide. I'm putting them in the driver's seat. So that's another incredibly helpful factor that we can consider in terms of de escalation as well. So I've gone through their self regulation. How can you look after yourself? The thought, feeling, behavior, physical body and perception. De escalation, that low tone of voice, slower speed, lower volume, the facial expressions, the non verbal cues and the para verbal cues that we can use. The next tool that I think is vital in the Accidental Mediator toolkit is empathy. And I think about empathy as a verb, like how can we demonstrate empathy? So when I'm talking about empathetic listening, I'm sort of saying giving the person a sense that we've heard them. Giving a person the sense that they've been understood. And to me, I really like the EAR acronym ear. As I think about, well, how can I demonstrate empathy? Well, first I need to explore, then I need to acknowledge, sort of give the person the impression that I've heard them. And then finally I need to respond like they might be asking me for a bit of advice or response to a question or even they might not need anything from us. It might just be they just wanted an empathetic EAR kind of thing. And I could respond just by saying, I'm not going to do anything else, I'm not going to escalate this further, I'm going to keep it confidential or whatever. So the explore often is about giving the person the opportunity to tell their story. I like to think about a mix of open and closed ended questions. Open ended questions are often things like how did that happen? Or what happened next? How did you respond? How did that affect you? What needs to happen now moving forward? They're helpful because the other person's largely in control of what they talk about, which topics are important and how much level of detail to share. I guess closed ended questions though can also be very helpful when it comes to empathy. Like when did that happen? That's a closed ended question to some extent because there's only a limited number of responses. Or when you say that Kevin shot you down, was that an email that he sent or a phone call or how did that communication happen? Was that just the two of you there or were there other people in the room? So they're closed ended questions. It's just a yes or no question. It was just the two of us. But I can use them strategically. If the other person's very escalated and as I explained earlier, it's likely then that the executive function higher cognitive level section of their brain isn't working at least to full capacity, then closed in the questions are much easier to answer. Was that just the two of you then? Oh gosh. So that was probably why it's prompted you to give me a call. Was it like they're very easy questions to answer? Yeah, it was. That is the topic I wanted to talk to you about. But when someone's escalated, it's almost like it doesn't tax their cognitive system much and it doesn't risk them looking silly. It's just, yeah, it was just the two of us. So I like a few closed ended questions almost always. To be honest, I found it to be an incredibly helpful tool at opening up teenagers or your children after school and they don't want to talk and you say to them, how was their day? Fine. What did you get up to? Nothing. What did you do at lunch? I don't know, like those kind of things. They're open ended questions. And I suppose one way of thinking about why teenagers don't like answering them is that it's exhausting and they're probably already exhausted. So a closed ended question might be more helpful. Did you have music today? Did you have pe? Was it raining? Was this friend there? You could say something like, did you end up getting the bus home? Or whatever. And then often that leads to them expanding. Yeah, I did. And this kid was throwing food on the bus or something like that. I love it. It's like opening a very difficult can of worms when there's somebody who's very much cramming to keep it shut. But once it opens, people often begin to expand. And that's where we can use the next step in that ear acronym, which is to acknowledge there's small kind of acknowledgements that we can send, like, oh, gosh, far out, dude, that's crazy. Or whatever. The, you know you're going to use your language in terms of how you respond, but it's sort of connecting. And what I'm talking about there is. I'm connecting with what they're feeling in the situation they're talking about. Like if they were frustrated, I might act a bit frustrated and say, oh, seriously or whatever. And I'm empathizing, I'm demonstrating the almost the emotions that they're describing. If they're saying it was a great day, I'd be like, oh, awesome, that's so fantastic. Or if they're telling me it's been a really crap day and really hard, I might slow down and act a bit more sad and okay, that wasn't probably the day you were looking for then. Or okay, gosh, it sounds like it was off to a bad start from the word go. So to some extent I'm demonstrating that connection. I'm showing them the emotion that they're describing. But I'm also responding in a way that's coherent with it. If it's good or bad or they were treated unfairly, I act as if they're telling the truth and as if they're right. And it does sound a bit unfair in some ways. Sure, it makes sense because you're expecting this and this didn't happen. So that's when we can get into the summaries. I like to do that in a long and a short kind of way as Well, a short summary might be something like far out. That does sound like a bit of a nightmare every day. Oh, wow. It sounds like yesterday was bad, but today's been even worse. Like a little summary like that. It's like, I get where you're coming from. It sounds like it's a little bit like, this is it. And sometimes you get it wrong. And I don't find that necessarily to be a massive problem. They'll often just correct you. No, it wasn't totally bad. This good thing happened or whatever. Again, it's like a little bit more leverage in the can of worms that begins to open, which something that you want if you want your kids to talk to you, but it might not necessarily be what you want if you're dealing with a situation where staff are in conflict with one another. But we do need to do it. If we're going to demonstrate empathy, they need to tell us what's going on or to communicate it in some way. And we need to find some way to communicate that we get it. So for me, I like that EAR acronym of the explore, then the acknowledge. And then the third step is whatever we decide to do to respond. It might be nothing. Maybe they were just having event. They just want to debrief. It's just fire out. Well, thanks for letting me know. Or fire out, let me know if I can do anything. The sarvo. Or let me know if this changes or I'm wondering if this might be affected. Does this kind of support sound like something that would be helpful or whatever? Sometimes it's nothing. Sometimes we might offer support or offer to do something or just tell them that we're going to do it. I'll get this organized. Sometimes it's saying, no, I get where you're coming from. It sounds like this happened and then this. And this was difficult for this reason. So that's why you're asking for it. Look, that makes sense. The challenge for me is this. So I'm not able to agree to it because of this. And I might say something like, I'm sorry, it's not negotiable. Or I might say, if you can do this, this is what I'd do for you. Or I might say, come back to me in a couple of days, I'll see what I can do. Or maybe I'd refer them to someone else. You'll need to actually talk to someone in HR about that. Or that's a question for the senior manager or whatever. But however I decide to respond, it's going to be Received very differently. If the person has a sense that I've understood them and that they've had a chance to explain, which is the explore and that I get it, which is the acknowledge. And even when we're delivering bad news, like saying no, that would be received very differently when the other person has had a chance to express themselves and they've got a sense that you understand where they're coming from. Now, there are many different ways that we could respond, but one of the options to consider as an accidental mediator is, is coaching. So I've gone through self regulation, de escalation, some options for demonstrating empathy. I think the next step a lot of the time for an accidental mediator is how can you shift things forward. Maybe it's a friend situation and you've got two friends who are not talking to each other. That's also a situation where you want to offer support. But a lot of the time the challenge is that you can't fix it. There's no magic wand that you can wave. And it might not necessarily be your job to fix it, but at the same time you're wanting to offer some support to the people involved. The same thing happens at work. It might be a team leader and they've got conflict between two of their team members. Or more often I think it's conflict between different sections within an organization or competing managers with different priorities and insane KPI structures or whatever else it might be like. There's so much going on for everybody that's involved in workplace conflict. A lot of the time when we're in an accidental mediator position, we don't want to be the rescuer just because we've got other fish to fry. There's other things on our plate. We've got different sets of priorities that we need to be focusing on right now. So how do we offer coaching? I find the GROW model the most helpful way of thinking about coaching. I've read many different books and been across several different particular practical models and even tried some. But the GROW model for me is still just far superior. So GROW is another acronym. It stands for Goal, Reality, Options and Way Forward. So these are the four types of coaching questions that you can use if your goal was to implement this grow coaching model. So a goal question might be something like, what do you need to see from the other person moving forward? Like that's a goal, I suppose to some extent, but that's an outcome goal. Like that's saying, what do you wish they would change? What do you wish was different? Another Goal kind of question we could ask is what would make a healthier relationship between the two of you? Or it sounds like this decision making process has been a challenge. What needs to be different for that not to be an issue moving forward? So instead of like, what do you wish they would do differently? It's saying to them, what kind of relationship you actually aiming for here? So when I'm talking about the goal as the accidental mediator, you're not the one that tells them the goal. You might not say, this is what you need to change and this is what you need to change. Maybe. But as a mediator, often we need to remain impartial and part of that is being seen to remain impartial. The other challenge with giving them the answer is that you step into rescuer mode and of course then they can still sit there as a victim. Whereas when we use the coaching approach, we're encouraging accountability, encouraging them to think about what they can do as well as what they expect from the other person. So I like those questions around what, what, what's working in your relationship and what do you wish was different? But the bigger goal question is what would a healthy relationship look like here? You don't need to be friends, you don't need to be mates, you don't need to agree on this and this. You can have different values, different perspectives. These three things need to be clear. How do you make these decisions? What meeting structure are you going to use? How does that information get communicated to your team? So the goal question is how would you like things to be? Or how do things need to be? Or what would an improvement look like? The reality questions is the next category of question, the R that's asking questions like what's happening at the moment, where are things up to? And what's happened in the past? And so often people talk about conflict in very black and white, often emotionally laden language. You know, they are ridiculous, they just won't see common sense or whatever. And so a reality question that we can use in the grow coaching model might be something like, so what have they done that's given you that impression? Or when you say that the meetings are a complete nightmare, how do they normally begin? Is there any agenda set? Who's normally present? How is the room set up? So by drilling down into the specifics of the data, so to speak, like what are the facts? What's actually happened? We move people naturally out of this very black and white, I'm good, and they're bad version of conflict into more of a it's like a differentiated perspective. They're not experiencing it in the same way, they're just describing it. Like they can hop in the helicopter and zoom out a little bit and all of a sudden they can begin to describe the terrain. How did the meeting begin? That's going to encourage the person to actually talk about what happened. And then that naturally leads to a new level of awareness. A lot of the time, whereas they're describing things, they might begin to realise, oh, that was probably setting us up to fail. Or actually, given the fact that three other people have been in conflict with this person, it might not be something that I need to take as personally or whatever. It's like these light bulb moments inherently begin to come about simply as a result of helping them focus. I think about it almost like a lens in photography that's out of focus because they're very angry and it doesn't really matter if that's this kind of bear or this kind of bear. Let's just run. The more that we go into fight or flight mode, our brains just like react, react, react, quicker, quicker, quicker. Our body changes, we get faster breathing and heart rate and all the rest of it, because that's how we're going to need to act. But by focusing on the detail, we counteract that natural process that occurs during escalation. And instead of just the black and white story, it's tell me about the edges, tell me about the nuances, tell me about the exceptions, tell me about the options, all of that kind of thing. The third step in the coaching model is actually describing the options specifically. So it's asking the person questions like, what do you think might help? How can things move forward? What needs to be different for things to improve? And again, I'm not the one that tells them the options. I elicit the options, I facilitate the brainstorming to some extent. And there's no really wrong questions you could ask. You could use things like, how have you dealt with these kind of issues in the past? Who do you know who's good at dealing with these kind of challenges? What would they do? What advice have you been given? Who else could you go to for support? You might write them down sometimes or just do it verbally. That's perfectly fine as well. But what I'm doing is encouraging the other person to begin to develop, I guess, the initial steps of a plan. I guess they've got these three options. These two aren't going to work for this reason. And then we can go into the final step, which is the W the way forward or what will you do? And we don't want the other person to walk away saying something like, great, thanks very much, Simon. I'll go and talk to them about it when I have a chance. I would be like, yeah, no worries, mate. Can I just grab you for a sec? What's going to be the best timing for that conversation, do you think? What do you need to do to prepare? What's going to be the most helpful way of setting it up? Given that there's a bit of tension that's sitting there between the two of you at the moment, who else do you reckon needs to be in the room? What are you going to do if they don't agree to meet with you or you don't get the result that you're looking for? I want them to tell me the steps. And I'm thinking in my head, the more specific they are about the steps involved in the plan, the more likely they are to follow it. I might even begin to introduce some type of accountability there as well. It might be saying to them, could you let me know once that conversation's happened and just give me an idea of how it went? Would it be okay if I call you this afternoon and just see how you've gone with all of that? I know some of it might be difficult given you've got this other thing going on as well, or whatever. It's kind of like this is the consequence. Can you let me know or I'm going to call you or if it doesn't change, this is what's going to happen. If it does happen, like if you can do the plan as you've described it, this is the good outcome for you. This is the thing that you're working towards. So I like that grow model of coaching. First we empathize and listen, then we offer support by coaching. But I'm not holding their hand, I'm not giving them the answer. I'm not coming and having the difficult conversation for them. The fifth step, I think, as an accidental mediator, is enforcing those boundaries. You are often going to get people that do continue to see themselves as the victim and they're going to continue to invite you into those two other seats in the triangle. Are you the persecutor? I was never given any support for this role. That's easy for you to say. You're not the one going through this. You're always going to have people that continue to push, continue to push, and it's not going to be give and take. It's going to be take, take, take, take, take. So we need to, I think, after we've empathised and coached, consider options for saying no, for insisting and for assertiveness. Now, at the beginning, it might just be explaining the expectations very clearly. I think a lot of people would consider that to be just a helpful first step in assertiveness. Sometimes you need to put it in writing, even if it was a verbal conversation or a verbal meeting. I've just outlined the notes below to capture some of that conversation. Let me know if I've misrecorded anything or misunderstood. This is what I understand. You're going to do this and this by this date or something similar. Sometimes that's helpful, sometimes that's way over the top and it just seems so weird. If you're in a different kind of field and it's all, I don't know, people who don't use emails and don't use written communication, then formalizing it might have a completely different connotation. But there are different options that you might need to consider for how to be assertive, how to hold on to those boundaries. So from there you might look at things like, if you. Then I. This is what I can do for you. In order for me to do that, I need you to do this. As the behavior doesn't change, or if someone's continuing to push the boundaries, then I think the next step is thinking about how can we confront them. I asked you to do this or this was what you agreed to, but it hasn't happened. This is what's happened instead for that. Positive confrontations. I really like Barbara Pachter's way of thinking about that. It's the WAC model. The wac. What is it? What has the person done? That's the first step. The second step is ask. This is what I'd like you to do differently. Could you stop doing this? Could you start doing this? Could you change this? Whatever this is what's happened, this is why it's a problem. Ask for a specific change and then the final step is check. Is there any issues with that? Let me know if that's not going to be possible. For whatever reason, I'd prefer them to let me know if there's an issue rather than me saying, you need to do this or this needs to be different, and then I walk away. And in their head they've got an excuse like, well, Darren doesn't ask me to do that or I might just be too busy or whatever. I'd prefer them to tell me this is an issue for this reason. And then I can decide how to respond. I might drop it, or I might negotiate, or I might still insist. So the what ask check model of positive confrontations, I find that so superior to these other, in my mind, just really quite stupid ideas. Like, I don't know if you've ever come across this, but a lot of communication professionals, they say that you could communicate, like, when this happens, this is my emotion. Would you change this? I don't see very many examples, at least in workplace conflict, let alone couple conflict, where it's all that helpful to continue to talk about your emotions, given the fact that they're entirely subjective and your feelings, your emotions are going to be affected by your thoughts, your physical body, what you're doing and what you're perceiving, what you're focused on. I'm just not so sure that that's this huge recipe for change. When you're late, it makes me frustrated. It's like, okay, well F off. You know what I mean? I've got kids or I'm looking after my elderly parent or whatever. I just don't understand it. Whereas using the what ask check acronym when you're late, this is the problem that it causes. Could you do this? Could you make sure you're on time moving forward? Could you let me know if you're going to be more than 10 minutes late and then the check. I'd be happy to negotiate a different starting time. If that's just realistically what's needed, please let me know because I'm happy to consider flexible options. At the same time, we can't have a situation where people all in the office arrive at different times. So the what ask check. This is what you've done. Could you do this differently? Are there any issues with that? I just find that so much more helpful than when this happens. This is what I feel, but I don't know. What do you think? Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding the when this happens, then I feel would you kind of model. But I've just never known it to be very successful personally. So we're thinking about an escalating level of assertiveness. Initially, it might be clarifying expectations. Then it might be some quid pro quo kind of option. Like if you. Then I. Then we might need to move to an option like when this happens, it's creating this problem. Could you do this differently? Let me know if that's an issue. The what ask check framework. I think a final option for assertiveness is often something like how can we deliver an ultimatum now as an accidental mediator, this introduces a number of different challenges, particularly in regards to impartiality, like how can I be seen to be impartial when I'm punishing them if they don't attend, or when I'm, you know, having this perspective or this bottom line or whatever. To me, I often find it helpful to use ultimatums as a choice. And what we want to do is to put the negative option first and the positive option second. So I'll explain a bit more about what I mean by that. If someone refuses to attend mediation, at some stage, you're going to need to let them know that there's a consequence. So I'd put the negative option first. If you decide not to attend mediation, we will need to look at other options for performance management plans or similar. So I'm kind of saying to them, look, if you can't sit in the room and talk to your colleague about this issue, that's going to be a formal issue in terms of performance. Or this is where we introduce the choice. If you would agree to at least attend a meeting with this person to express your perspective and to hear their take on the situation, then we can delay or potentially even avoid any performance improvement, performance management kind of processes, or that's not likely something that's needed or that's not going to be something that we're considering at this stage. It's kind of like this is the bad option, you don't want to come, or you're continuing to be late at work, or you refuse to follow the agreement that you've made previously or something. This is what you're doing and this is why it's a problem. And this is what's going to happen if it doesn't change. I'm going to let you go. I am not going to use you anymore as a subcontractor. I'm going to make a formal complaint to the senior manager. Whatever the thing is that you're going to need to consider doing, or this is what I want you to do. If you would let the other person speak without interrupting, if you would agree to follow that agreement that you've made previously or whatever, this is the more positive consequence for you. So I've gone through self regulation. How can we look after ourself de escalation, the kind of tools and options that work for calming down somebody else. Then I talked about empathetic listening, demonstrating empathy, the, the explore, acknowledge, respond way of thinking about it. In coaching I talked about some Options for grow coaching and then for assertiveness. It's that gradually escalating level of assertiveness, beginning with expectations, something else, maybe the what ask check model, and finally finishing with an ultimatum. Now, above all of this, there's a bigger category that I tend to think about. It's what I call the conditions necessary for success as an accidental mediator. There are things that you can do directly with the people involved, like coaching or listening or boundaries or whatever, but there might be other things that you can do in terms of the structure or the context or the environment necessary, the conditions for success. The. The way that I initially started thinking about this phrase was I was watching that Netflix Formula one show. Part of it for me is thinking about conflict. These are incredibly high performance teams. So I find it fascinating thinking about how do the mechanics and the pit crew work together and how do they navigate the inevitable challenges that they have to face as a team, often in split seconds, with immense amounts of pressure and so much riding on the line. And then they've also got things like, I love focusing on the way that they talk to the drivers. These are people whose adrenaline would be pumped up to 110%. They would be literally in fight or flight mode as they're whipping around the course and enduring physical, you know, G force and all of those different elements. And so you'll often see the drivers almost yelling into the microphones like, what the bloody hell's going on? And we can't do that. Or sometimes the engineer will say to them over the radio, mate, we need to preserve these tyres. And the driver might respond, I know that. Stop talking to me. Or whatever. It's because they're in fight or flight mode. And the people who speak to the driver, I think they're called a race engineer. They all use a very similar kind of way of speaking. And guess what? It's that lower volume, slower speed and lower tone. Okay, roger that, Lewis. No more messages from here. Okay, Lewis, we'll let you concentrate from here. Good job, Lewis. Okay, Lewis, I wanted to let you know that there's a fire in the back of your car. We need you to pull off the track as soon as possible. Like, even when there's actual crisis, like there's a fire or they still use that low tone of voice, slower speed and lower tone. Why? Because those are the factors that often help for de escalation. The same as if you're in an accidental mediator conversation and you're in the hot spot trying to navigate conflict with two people who are revving up, but it's not because they're in the middle of a fight. Formula One race, they're revving up in a completely different way. So I like the characters, I like the conflict and I really like particularly the personality dynamics. And there's a particular eccentric character that showed up, I think, in season four or something called Flavio Briatore. I don't know if I'm mispronouncing that or not. He's got these brightly colored glasses and I think he used to be involved in modeling and all of this kind of stuff. And he just exudes arrogance. He just seems like he's so full of himself. This is the kind of guy in Australia that would obviously get ripped on by his friends. The tall poppy kind of syndrome would try their best to hold him down, but nowadays I think he's so rich and successful, he probably wouldn't care. But what do you do if you're the big boss of a Formula one team which has hundreds or even thousands of staff members, millions and millions and millions of dollars. So much pressure on week after week as you're literally traveling internationally in this moving roadshow all around the world. Imagine that you're brought in as the general manager. How would you think about your job? Like, what is your role in that situation? When Flavio was brought in and I think he was returning to a previous team or something, I can't remember exactly, he used this phrase of I see it as my job to introduce the conditions necessary for the team to do their best so that they can win. So the conditions needed for the team to perform in order for them to win. It's a really interesting way of thinking about it. My job isn't to focus on the performance itself. He thought about what are the conditions that are needed for the performance to occur, like salary structures and role descriptions and communication and hierarchy and budgets and timetables and supports and interactions between different sections. How can we set up KPIs so that they're not encouraging competition, but they encourage collaboration between different sections of the organization? How can we clarify team roles so that everybody is very, very clear about what they need to do in any moment? Given the fact that there's often split second decisions that need to be made in that context, there's obviously going to be particular conditions that work. And the same thing is true in conflict. So if I'm an accidental mediator, I've thought about all the individual things I need to do that I've gone through previously. Now I might think about what are the conditions that are needed for things to succeed? What are the conditions needed before that? The step is for these two people to perform differently, to change, to communicate so that they can win, so that they can succeed. And there I'm not thinking about specifically what they need to do and they need to do. It's like, how often do they need to meet? How often should I be involved in that? When should they cc me in and when should they not cc me in? What's too much? What's the level of accountability that's reasonable from this person to expect from each other? And how are they going to manage it if someone else reneges, if they break the agreement? How can we set up the conditions to minimize the chance of things escalating in that sense? Now, I like personally to do this with the people involved a lot of the time. Wow, we've made some progress. I've been very impressed by the fact that you're both willing to listen to each other, even though you've got very different perspectives on all of this. You've talked about some of the things like this and this. On the other hand, you're focused more on areas like this and this. I can get where you're coming from, and I suppose that makes sense that you're going to have different expectations, given the fact that you've got different backgrounds and different experiences in all of this. It sounds like you're prepared to do this and this and you're prepared to do this and this. Now, I just wanted to talk together with the two of you while we're here. What else do you need or what structural things should we consider? What do you need from me or support from other managers in the organization so that this doesn't go backwards. You're really at the beginning of building trust between the two of you. So part of that is going to be clarifying these expectations. But what else needs to happen so that we don't end up here in six months and we're back to square one? So that might be the team or the. Anything really, the roles or the communication or the job descriptions or anything. I like to use a collaborative way of doing all of that, but it might just be you. And I think this would be Flavio's option. You thinking about that bird's eye view, that bigger picture perspective. And I think that's one of the unique things that you offer as an accidental mediator is that you're not swept up in the conflict, you're not carried away in the emotions of it. All in the same way that the two people involved are. So you can see the conditions that might be needed here. Maybe it's separating them, maybe it's just giving them some space. Maybe it's very small steps. Like you've got two friends who will not talk to each other. Maybe you just need to lower the stakes and ask them if they would agree for a quick phone call or a quick coffee meeting. Instead of needing to meet for a formal meeting or something. Maybe you could just meet them yourself. Or they could meet off site and do it privately, away from the other team members if that's something that they're both going to be unhappy about or aware of or feel pressure from or whatever. Like what conditions are going to be needed is something that the accidental mediator often has a unique perspective on. And I suppose if you haven't thought about that as part of your role, I would encourage you to what are the conditions that are needed so that these two people can quote, unquote, perform? So that they can quote, unquote, win. So that's the way that I think about that role of accidental mediator. It often begins with you self regulating and keeping calm yourself, then de escalation followed by empathetic listening. Some type of coaching or practical support is often helpful. Then we often need to consider assertiveness and how we hold onto boundaries. And finally, as Flavio would say, what are the conditions needed for success and how can we implement these? But how does that resonate with you? I'd love to hear back from you and email is usually the best way to do that@podcastimongood.com if you've got an idea for a future episode, a case study that you're dealing with at the moment that you would like me to talk through, please feel free to send that through and I'd love to know your feedback. How did you find this? More of a lecture type of episode, I suppose, as opposed to a case study. And then I'm going to be experimenting with a number of options as well for conversations with other people too, particularly in next year. That's something that I'd like to do more frequently, but let me know. I just want to make the podcast really as helpful as possible. So the thing that's really helpful for me is getting feedback and if it is helpful for you, I'd be incredibly grateful if you would leave a positive review. If you'd like more resources and tools for dealing with conflict, consider pressing subscribe. But otherwise thank you very much for listening. I'm very grateful and hopefully see you again in a future episode of the Conflict Skills Podcast. Bye for now. Sam.