Relationship Repair? Or Just Show Me the Money?
Mediators are trained to detect subtle opportunities for value-adding integrative outcomes: separating positions from interests, offering out-of-the-box suggestions, and looking for ways that the parties can find mutual benefit.
For me, that ended in an early-career EEOC mediation where the ADA claimant, having been offered every accommodation to her disability, refused to withdraw the claim unless she was paid $600,000 — more than twenty times her salary.
In mediation, as in life, money talks. And Dwight Golann has recently reported empirical research backing up that conclusion.
