Conflict Management When You’re a Good Mutual Friend

The thing with how social structures develop and spawn is that during their formative stages one never thinks about the worst case scenario, let alone plan for it. You don’t start friendships thinking about what would happen should a major fight break out from which all parties involved cannot recover and reconcile their differences, the worst of which scenario is perhaps how you might be a mutual friend of both parties involved and you find yourself stuck in the middle of it all.

While it’s easy to shy away from such a situation and perhaps decide that it’s better not to have to deal with it at all, the complex nature of our relationships as they exist in this day and age simply requires us to develop our soft skills and EQ so that we’re better equipped to deal with such. I cannot begin to imagine how it must be for example watching two former lovebirds which you might have even brought together in romance, fight like they hated each other from each of their previous lives.

There are some basics to the type of conflict management required to deal with such situations though and you can only do your best, something which both parties involved in the conflict will just have to come to terms with.

Explain your precarious position to both parties

Make no mistake about it – you’re going to have to dig deep to find the kind of composure a professional such as a Scottsdale divorce lawyer seems to naturally have in order to deal with the situation that will inevitably ensue between two conflicting parties in something like a split up of your mutual friends, but then again that’s all you can do. Don’t lose your cool.

One thing you should not do is try to be a mediator in the very moment when the argument gets heated. So make is clear that you’re not going to be sucked into those “remember what he or she did” arguments. Instead, pull each of these friends of yours aside and have a one-on-one conversation with them, explaining to them that they naturally each believe they’re right but they should understand the position you’re in as a friend to both of them.

Work towards solutions, not proving who’s wrong and who’s right

That should be the order of the day – working towards a resolution and not working towards proving who is wrong and who is right. As the mutual friend, you’ll have to be the one to call the meeting in which you’re going to be mediating, which means it’s on your terms. You’re the director of the flow of the representations and if things start getting heated again, pull things back to where they were originally meant to be – a place of calm and logical discussion.

As far as the solutions go, it’s a matter of how best to walk away from this situation without trying to make one or the other feel bad, even though there would naturally be one party which perhaps deserves to take more of the blame.