Ombuds Report: Caught in the Middle

When I was growing up, I was naturally placed in the roles of mediator and ombuds within my family. If my parents were fighting, if my siblings were fighting, if my parents were fighting with my siblings, I would be the one to listen to all involved and help resolve it. I was in my twenties when I realized I could turn this into a career. Being a person others trust with their difficult situations and conflicts is an honor, and I wouldn’t change the career I ended up with. It can also be a burden.

Are you ever placed in the middle of other people’s conflicts? Maybe it’s two of your colleagues, your supervisor and their supervisor, your children, or your mom and your partner. When that happens, the first question to ask is, “Do I need to be in the middle of these people?”

If mediating between people is part of your role and responsibility and makes sense for you, let me know if you want to learn more about mediation and some of the skills to make that go smoother. But often, we are put in the middle of other people’s conflict because of our position, our personality, our sympathetic ear, or the fact that we mediated for them last time, and it is healthier for us to draw a boundary and remove ourselves. Drawing this boundary is difficult but important for your own mental health and the longevity of the relationships.

I recently worked with someone who reports to two people. These two supervisors are from different departments, and have different priorities, goals, and skillsets. The employee, Fred, was caught in the middle of two different and sometimes contradictory sets of instructions, and being new to the university, he did not know how to respond. My advice to him was to bring everyone together and put the responsibility back on them. For example, he could schedule a meeting with both of them and say, “Jane asked me to do abc, and June asked me to do xyz. Can we all figure out together how I need to proceed?” After this conversation, the burden of figuring out what he was supposed to do was back on them, and the situation might have highlighted the unsustainability of the dual supervisor arrangement.

I love to mediate conflicts, but I also recognize that it is not on me to resolve everything for everyone in every aspect of my life. What about you? Are there areas where you are in the middle? Maybe it’s time to say, “I’m willing to support both of you as this resolves, but I am not willing to be in the middle anymore.”

I do this kind of thing with my kids all the time. If they are fighting over a toy, instead of demanding that one of them give the other a turn, I will summarize: “Zeke is playing with a toy that belongs to Havi, and now Havi wants it back. How can we resolve this?” I’m surprised how willing they are to work together and come up with a solution that I might not have imagined. Instead of taking turns with Lego Spider-Nan, for example, they took his arm off, and one played with his arm while the other played with the rest of him. That is not what I would have suggested, but it worked for them! And the burden of resolving things for them was lifted off my shoulders.