The Conflicts We Cannot See

As I complete my Workplace Mediation Certification through Eckerd College’s Mediation Training Institute, one idea keeps returning to me.

When a conflict finally reaches HR as a formal complaint, it feels like the beginning of the case. It is written down, signed, and placed on the record. It often arrives with the suggestion that the problem “came out of nowhere.”

Usually, it did not.

By the time a conflict becomes formal, it may have been developing for months. You could see it in the meeting where two people stopped really listening to each other. In the project redesigned to avoid a difficult relationship rather than repair it. In the resignation everyone later called sudden and that, looking back, was anything but.

The complaint file is rarely where the conflict begins. It is where an informal problem has become impossible to ignore.

That is the thought I cannot put down: if the conflicts we record are the ones that have already escalated, what are we doing about the ones we cannot see?