Mediation Maven Musings - August 2026
I was driving my daughter back to college a few weeks ago, half-listening to a podcast to fill the silence, when I found myself actually tuning in to the show. The show was The Diary of a CEO, and the guest was someone I'd had a pretty firm, and not particularly generous, opinion of going in.
The interview ran long. Really long. And sometime past the first hour, something happened that I didn't expect: my opinion about the guest started to shift. Not because I suddenly agreed with the person's politics or values because I still didn't. But because I was hearing them talk, at length, without a soundbite doing the work for me. And it's a lot harder to hold onto a flattened version of someone once you've actually heard them think out loud for two hours.
That got me thinking about something I see constantly in my work: how much of workplace conflict is really a personality conflict between two people, and how much of it is a conflict between two people who don't know each other, and the narrative each one has built about the other without attempting a real conversation first.
There's been a lot written lately about a "workplace friendship recession": fewer of us report having a close friend at work than we did a decade ago. I don't think this is a story about people getting worse at making friends. I think it's a circumstantial story, and, without pointing fingers at remote work, which has real and legitimate benefits, one honest side effect of the post-COVID shift to more remote and hybrid work is that we simply have fewer unscripted, in-person time with our colleagues. Fewer in-person interaction means fewer chances to be humanized to each other. And when there's no real relationship to fall back on, it's much easier for a single bad interaction, a misread email, or a rumor to calcify into a fixed, negative story about someone — a story that's rarely as accurate as it feels.
Some of my closest friendships today started as work relationships, including my business partner at Inquiring Minds, Amy McDowell. We didn't set out to become close; it happened because we spent real time working alongside each other, disagreeing sometimes, and getting to know how the other actually thinks.
This is, in a lot of ways, the whole premise of what I do. Whether I'm investigating a workplace complaint or mediating a conflict between two employees, the work often comes down to the same thing: getting people talking again, long enough and honestly enough, that the flattened version of "that person" in their head has a chance to become a real person again. Sometimes that changes the outcome entirely. Sometimes it doesn't, but it always changes the conversation.
For HR professionals and legal counsel, this has practical implications for how conflict gets handled. When employees have thin or no relationship with each other, disputes tend to arrive at HR's door already hardened. The instinct is often to treat this as a straightforward policy or personnel issue and resolve it quickly through formal channels.
But moving directly to a disciplinary action may miss the point and can leave the underlying narrative untouched, which means the same dynamic often resurfaces with someone else.
Building in an early, informal opportunity for the parties to actually talk before positions harden and before it becomes a formal complaint tends to produce more durable resolutions, and it also creates a better record for counsel: it shows the organization took reasonable, proactive steps to address concerns early, rather than waiting for a complaint to escalate.
If your workplace has a conflict that's calcified into a story nobody's tested lately, that's exactly where I come in.
Want more tips on investigations and workplace conflict? Subscribe to my newsletter or get in touch at sasha@mediationmaven.com.
