Grace, Forgiveness and the Limits of Workplace Mediation
- Shiv Martin
- 52 minutes ago
- 7 min read
What happens when mediation can create a way forward, but cannot resolve the truth, produce an apology or ask someone to forgive?
Where Mediation Ends and Grace Begins
There is a mediation I conducted some time ago that has stayed with me. I won't share the details, for obvious reasons, but the heart of the conflict was surprisingly simple.
Two people had been alone together. One alleged that the other had made an incredibly inappropriate comment about a third person in their workplace. If the comment had been made, it was potentially very serious misconduct. The other person said it simply did not happen.
There were no witnesses, no recording and no contemporaneous evidence capable of resolving the question. Just two people with completely different accounts of the same interaction. What followed was, perhaps inevitably, a bit of a muddle. Middle management became involved. Senior management became involved. HR became involved. Decisions were made, revisited and questioned between these levels. And I don't particularly blame any of them.
These are extraordinarily difficult situations for organisations to manage, you have a choice between a number of bad options.
Do something and you risk treating an unsubstantiated allegation as fact.
Do nothing and you risk leaving someone feeling that a serious concern has been ignored.
Investigate, and you simply arrive at the same place with more paperwork, a huge bill for external investigation and staff that are even more upset with the likely outcome: there is insufficient evidence to substantiate what happened.
That does not necessarily mean the allegation was false. It does not necessarily mean the person accused was innocent. It means we just don't know.
And sometimes, despite our increasing desire for workplace processes to give us an answer, we simply cannot know.
Then the matter came to mediation
In this case my role wasn't to reinvestigate what happened. It wasn't to decide who was telling the truth. It was to see whether these two people could find some way to work forward. In these cases, I honestly feel that if any process is going to help, it's mediation.
So I did what I train mediators to do. I listened - explored - reality tested. I looked for interests beneath positions. I explored boundaries, communication and what each person might need to coexist professionally.
Most importantly, I respected their self-determination.
But there was a gap I couldn't bridge. And I've thought about that gap many times since.
Because I think there were two things that might have existed on the other side of it, which I simply could not get to.
The benefit of the doubt.
And something much harder: grace and forgiveness.
The benefit of the doubt
The benefit of the doubt is perhaps the easier of the two. Not easy. But easier. And here I'm going to take a self reflection lens on this, because I am in no way judging those that I support in mediations, before I hold the same mirror to myself.
Now giving others the benefit of the doubt doesn't require me to abandon my own recollection or decide that the other person is right. It asks me to tolerate uncertainty and perhaps come to the following realisation:
I believe this happened. But I accept that I cannot know with absolute certainty.
I remember it differently. But perhaps there is something I have misunderstood.
I cannot reconcile our two accounts. But I am willing to leave room for uncertainty.
Uncertainty and doubt can be extraordinarily difficult in conflict because certainty feels safe. Once we have decided what happened, who was wrong and what their behaviour tells us about their character, there is something solid to hold onto. The benefit of the doubt asks us to loosen our grip on that certainty, just a little.
But what if you are certain? What if you know what happened? What if you feel like being told your recollection could be wrong feels like gaslighting?
That's where I think something much more difficult is needed.
Grace and forgiveness in workplace mediation
Unless someone's memory had failed them spectacularly, one of the narratives in that mediation was wrong. Either one person had said something deeply inappropriate and was now denying it.
Or the other had attributed something deeply inappropriate to a colleague who had never said it. Imagine being either person.
If you knew you had been falsely accused of something that could seriously damage your career, how easily would you forgive?
If you knew someone had said something deeply offensive and was now looking you in the eye and denying it, how readily would you extend them grace?
Especially if they never acknowledged it or apologised. That, to me, is the extraordinary thing about grace. It doesn't necessarily require the other person to earn it.
There is a reason the phrase “amazing grace” has endured so powerfully in spiritual traditions. There is something almost superhuman about forgiveness that is not conditional on an apology, an acknowledgement or even agreement about what happened.
It is relatively easy to forgive someone who comes to us and says:
I was wrong. I hurt you. I am sorry.
It is something else entirely to find forgiveness when those words never come. And I don't know that I could. Perhaps that is why this mediation has stayed with me and this same issue presents itself again an again in so many of the mediations that don't feel resolved.
There are limits to what mediation can do
I've been a mediator for a long time, and I believe deeply in the work. I have seen people find ways through conflicts that, at the beginning of the day, seemed utterly intractable.
People can agree on boundaries. They can change how they communicate. They can understand something about the other person's experience that they had never understood before. They can decide how they will work together on Monday morning.
Sometimes relationships genuinely heal.
But there is a point at which my professional tools run out. I can invite someone to consider uncertainty. I can reality test certainty. I can ask questions that might open the door to another interpretation.
But I cannot require someone to give another person the benefit of the doubt.
And I certainly cannot ask someone to forgive.
In fact, pushing someone towards forgiveness may undermine the very self-determination that mediation is supposed to protect. So there is a boundary here that I have learned to respect.
But that doesn't mean I don't notice what sits on the other side of it. And it troubles me...
I wonder whether we are getting worse at this
This is something I've been thinking about more lately. We live in a culture that gives us enormous opportunities to have our existing interpretation reinforced.
Tell a story online and people quickly tell us we were right.
Tell an AI tool about a conflict and, depending on how we frame the story, it can very convincingly explain why our interpretation makes perfect sense.
We can find communities of people who have experienced something similar and who will validate what we believe happened.
Some of that is enormously helpful. People need to be heard. People need validation.
People who have experienced genuine mistreatment should not be encouraged to simply “let it go” because that is more convenient for everybody else. But I wonder.... perhaps we are losing some of our tolerance for uncertainty.
For the possibility that we misunderstood.
For the possibility that someone behaved badly without being a bad person.
And perhaps even for the possibility that we can let go of something with grace.
Forgiveness is not the same as saying it was OK
Forgiveness can sound like capitulation or excusing behaviour. And in workplace conflict, it can become particularly dangerous if “forgiveness” is really organisational shorthand for please stop making this difficult for us.
That isn't what I mean. You can maintain a boundary and forgive. You can believe someone's behaviour was unacceptable and forgive.
Perhaps forgiveness is sometimes simply the decision that the other person's acknowledgement is no longer a prerequisite for your own peace. An internal decision that they don't have to say sorry before you are allowed to put something down.
That is a very different thing from saying it didn't matter. While I am writing this article about Grace, Forgiveness and Workplace Mediation I don't want to reduce for a moment the absolutely and primary importance of accountability too. But that's for another edition!
Maybe there are some things no process can give us
We spend a lot of time improving workplace conflict processes and I'm often called on to do this work. Better investigations. Better complaints systems. Better mediation.
And all of that matters. But no workplace process can eliminate ambiguity from human relationships. And no HR process can order one human being to forgive another.
I still think about those two people and I don't know who was telling the truth, and ultimately it doesn't matter.
I really hope they found peace with what happened. But they taught me something important about the limits of my own profession.
Sometimes moving forward might begin with something as small as the benefit of the doubt. And sometimes, moving forward asks something much greater:
I may never receive the acknowledgement I deserve. I may never receive an apology. But I don't want to carry this forever.
That is grace. And increasingly, I wonder whether it might be one of the hardest and most important human skills of all - and if you can muster it, it truly is amazing!
What do you think?
Have we become less comfortable with doubt? And have we lost something of our capacity to forgive when forgiveness is not preceded by an apology?
And Finally a Gift for you
How to raise the issues that are too small to escalate and too important to ignore, using the CURE framework and real workplace examples.
Shiv Martin Consulting helps organisations resolve conflict, build trust and strengthen teams through training, mediation, facilitated conversations, coaching and dispute resolution consulting. Calm, practical support for complex conflict.
Hi, I'm Shiv Martin. I'm a nationally accredited mediator, lawyer, conciliator, and conflict management specialist with over a decade of experience working across government, business, and community settings. I support teams to navigate complex and emotionally charged situations through mediation and conciliation, conflict skills training, facilitation, and practical advice on policies and processes. My approach is grounded in law, psychology, and real-world dispute resolution, with a strong focus on clarity, fairness, and workable outcomes.
If you'd like to talk about how I can help you or your organisation, you can get in touch here: 👉 Contact us
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