Case study 2

A secondary school

(Details have been changed in this account to preserve confidentiality.)

By the time the school asked Mediation at Work for help, the rift between the head teacher and his deputy was seriously hindering the performance of the school’s senior management team.

Their long-standing dispute had been inflamed by a formal grievance procedure, which had failed to improve the situation and had exacerbated the breakdown of trust and communication.

Three meetings were arranged. An initial individual session with mediators would explore the perspective of each party, while a subsequent joint meeting, with mediators present, would look at both the difficulties in the past and how a better working relationship could be built for the future. It was essential that the mediators used the first two sessions to build sufficient trust in the process and themselves to enable both parties to talk openly at the later joint meeting.

At the joint session, both the head and his deputy had the opportunity to express how they felt about the situation directly to the other party, and to begin to understand how their own behaviour had affected the other person. Having been excluded from a number of key meetings, for example, the deputy head was feeling de-skilled and undervalued; he provided specific examples on how the head’s management style contributed to him feeling ‘no good at his job’. For his part, the head explained how the deputy had on several occasions ‘blanked him’ in meetings, leaving him feeling very uncomfortable and undermined.

The discussion led to a number of concrete outcomes aimed at building a better working relationship:

• The deputy agreed to halt the grievance procedure.
• The head agreed to review the way meetings were set up, and how attendance was determined.
• They both agreed to meet informally on a fortnightly basis to aid ongoing communication.
• They both agreed on the importance of bringing any issues of concern to that meeting in order for them to be addressed as they arise.

Once both had had a chance to understand how each had (mis)interpreted the other’s actions, they were able to begin working together to set down some agreed behaviour for the future.