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How Come Your Workplace Mediation Training Continues to Disappointing: A Brutal Assessment
End Attempting to Resolve Your Way Out of Problematic Organizational Environment: How Effective Improvement Demands Organizational Fixes
I'm going to tell you something that will most likely offend every human resources director who encounters this: nearly all company tension isn't caused by interpersonal issues or character differences.
The real cause is generated by dysfunctional structures, poor leadership, and problematic organizational environments that pit employees against each other in conflict for limited recognition.
After eighteen years of training with organizations in crisis, I've observed many good-intentioned companies squander massive sums on dispute management training, team building retreats, and dialogue training while totally ignoring the structural problems that cause tension in the first place.
Here's a classic example. Recently, I was brought in to help a major investment institution business that was dealing with what they described a "interpersonal problem."
Units were continuously fighting with each other. Sessions often turned into heated confrontations. Staff turnover was extremely high. Customer issues were increasing dramatically.
Leadership was certain this was a "personality problem" that could be resolved with enhanced conversation training and mediation techniques.
We used two weeks investigating the actual situation, and I discovered what I found:
Their company had created a "performance management" approach that rated workers against each other and tied compensation, promotions, and even employment continuation to these comparisons.
Units were assigned competing objectives and then expected to "collaborate" to reach them.
Budget were systematically held insufficient to "encourage competition" between groups.
Information was restricted by multiple teams as a tool of power.
Career growth and acknowledgment were given arbitrarily based on personal connections rather than real results.
Obviously people were in ongoing conflict! The whole company framework was designed to make them against each other.
Zero level of "communication training" or "mediation workshops" was able to address a basically broken system.
We persuaded leadership to totally redesign their business systems:
Changed competitive evaluation approaches with collaborative goal setting
Aligned departmental targets so they complemented rather than competed with each other
Enhanced funding availability and made distribution decisions transparent
Created regular organizational communication exchange
Established fair, merit-based advancement and reward standards
The outcomes were dramatic. After 180 days, organizational disputes fell by more than 80%. Employee morale scores rose substantially. Customer experience increased remarkably.
Furthermore this is the crucial insight: they reached these improvements lacking a single additional "dialogue training" or "dispute management sessions."
The lesson: resolve the systems that generate tension, and nearly all communication conflicts will end themselves.
Unfortunately this is why most companies choose to work on "relationship training" rather than resolving structural problems:
Structural transformation is resource-intensive, difficult, and necessitates management to acknowledge that their current approaches are basically flawed.
"Communication training" is cheap, comfortable to executives, and allows organizations to fault personal "behavior issues" rather than questioning their own leadership practices.
The team worked with a healthcare facility where medical staff were in constant tension with executives. Healthcare workers were upset about dangerous staffing levels, inadequate supplies, and growing demands.
Management continued organizing "communication sessions" to resolve the "relationship conflicts" between employees and leadership.
These sessions were counterproductive than ineffective - they were directly harmful. Healthcare workers would share their legitimate concerns about care quality and job circumstances, and facilitators would react by proposing they needed to work on their "communication skills" and "approach."
Such an approach was offensive to dedicated healthcare professionals who were struggling to provide quality patient treatment under extremely difficult situations.
I worked with them change the emphasis from "communication development" to resolving the actual systemic issues:
Recruited extra medical personnel to decrease patient burdens
Enhanced medical supplies and improved supply access processes
Established systematic staff input systems for operational decisions
Established adequate support assistance to eliminate administrative burdens on patient care staff
Worker satisfaction rose substantially, care quality ratings got better considerably, and worker turnover improved significantly.
The key lesson: when you fix the organizational roots of pressure and tension, people automatically work together effectively.
At this point let's examine another critical problem with traditional mediation methods: the idea that each organizational disagreements are fixable through dialogue.
Such thinking is dangerously unrealistic.
Some conflicts exist because one person is really problematic, dishonest, or unwilling to modify their behavior irrespective of what approaches are attempted.
For these cases, maintaining mediation processes is beyond being futile - it's significantly destructive to company morale and unjust to other workers.
The team consulted with a software organization where one experienced engineer was systematically sabotaging team efforts. The person would regularly ignore commitments, provide incomplete work, blame other team members for issues they had created, and become aggressive when challenged about their work.
Supervision had worked through numerous mediation processes, provided coaching, and actually restructured project assignments to work around this person's problems.
None of it succeeded. This individual maintained their disruptive actions, and good colleagues began asking for reassignments to alternative teams.
Finally, I persuaded executives to cease trying to "fix" this person and instead work on protecting the morale and satisfaction of the rest of the team.
Management implemented specific, objective performance requirements with immediate accountability measures for violations. Once the toxic individual refused to reach these requirements, they were let go.
Their transformation was remarkable. Development output rose dramatically, satisfaction improved considerably, and they stopped suffering from valuable engineers.
This reality: in certain cases the most effective "problem solving" is getting rid of the cause of the disruption.
Organizations that won't to make tough staffing decisions will continue to experience from ongoing disruption and will fail to retain their highest performing staff.
Let me share what genuinely creates results for addressing workplace conflict:
Systemic approaches through good business design. Create transparent systems for performance management, information sharing, and issue resolution.
Quick response when issues develop. Handle problems when they're minor rather than permitting them to worsen into major disruptions.
Specific expectations and fair implementation. Certain actions are plainly inappropriate in a workplace setting, irrespective of the underlying reasons.
Focus on systems improvement rather than individual "repair" approaches. Most employee disputes are symptoms of deeper management issues.
Successful conflict management is not about making everyone satisfied. Good management is about creating functional organizational environments where good staff can focus on doing their responsibilities effectively without ongoing conflict.
Quit working to "fix" your way out of organizational problems. Begin building workplaces that reduce avoidable disputes and address inevitable conflicts effectively.
Your staff - and your bottom line - will benefit you.
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