Shiv's Blog

Strong performance management starts long before the formal review. Five foundations leaders can build from recruitment onwards so performance conversations feel fair rather than fraught.

Caring about your team and holding them to account are not opposites. A practical look at Kim Scott's Radical Candor, a strengths-based lens, and what a mediator would add.

A practical guide for HR managers and senior executives in Australia. How to conduct exit interviews well, the questions to ask, who should run them, and what to expect if you engage an independent provider.

As a mediator and trainer, I spend much of my working life on the outside of other people’s workplaces, often seeing teams when things have already become difficult. That perspective has taught me a lot about what builds psychological safety and what can quietly destroy it. In this article, I share six lessons about change, autonomy, culture, leadership and conflict that I wish I had understood better when I was a manager inside my own workplace.

Workplace conflict is rarely solved by a single process. This article explains how HR professionals and leaders can choose between mediation, investigation, legal advice and coaching to achieve safer, more effective outcomes.

Artificial intelligence is now part of everyday complaints and dispute resolution practice. From AI-drafted submissions to automated triage, the opportunities are real, but so are the risks. This article explores how regulators, tribunals, and complaints teams can respond with clearer guidance, stronger safeguards, and more visible human judgement.

Deciding whether to quit a job is rarely straightforward. Drawing on workplace mediation and conflict resolution, this guide explains when it’s time to leave and how to quit well, with clarity, dignity, and respect for future relationships.

True change management is as much about navigating human behaviour as it is about rolling out systems. While it may be easy to change back and forth between technology systems, team culture is much harder to bring back once lost, and nothing threatens a team’s cohesiveness like organisational change.

Advocates play a critical role in mediation and conciliation, but navigating conflict isn’t easy. This article explores essential conflict management skills for advocates, including active listening, negotiation strategies, managing difficult clients, and applying the CURE framework. Build confidence, improve client outcomes, and protect your wellbeing.

A very common question I am asked by those new to dispute resolution processes is what the difference between a mediator and conciliator is, and which process is suited to their needs. In this article, I step out some of the key differences between these two processes.

AI is changing how disputes unfold and how much practitioners carry. A mediator on psychosocial safety, what Australian law now requires, and where AI becomes a hazard.

A 360 review is not simply a survey, it is an organisational intervention. The benefits, the conflict risks, when to avoid one, and a case study of a process that went wrong.