by
Allan J. Stitt
Mediator and Arbitrator
President of ADR Chambers and Stitt Feld Handy Group
I suspect that this article is not about what you think. It is becoming common for people to refer to a mediation that doesn’t result in settlement as a “failed mediation”. I would like to suggest that the term “failed” is not the appropriate term for a mediation that does not settle. A mediation that does not result in settlement is a mediation that does not result in settlement. But in the vast majority of cases, that mediation is far from a “failure”.
Similarly, success in mediation should not be defined by whether the case settles. When I am asked about my success rate in mediation, my answer is that 100% of my mediations are successful; they just do not all settle.
A mediation can fail. If the parties leave a mediation in a worse position than when they arrived, that would be a failure. If the mediation process is not structured so as to allow people to get the information that they need to make an informed decision about whether to settle, that would be a failure. But whether the parties reach a settlement should not determine success or failure.
I think we need to start by re-examining the mediator’s role. I tell parties as part of my opening remarks at mediation that my role as a mediator is not to try to get a settlement. My role is to facilitate the negotiation that parties are having to allow them to make an informed decision about whether they choose to settle on terms that are offered by the other side. I mention that I am not impacted by whether they settle (and, in fact, I do not keep settlement statistics for my mediations for that reason) and I do not have either a desire for parties to settle or a desire for them not to settle. I am indifferent about settlement. I just want them to make the best decision that they can.
I have mediated numerous cases where I have told the parties that I agreed with their decision that settling the case was a bad idea. For example, a builder in a dispute with his contractor could be involved in multiple projects and may want to get a precedent in the case that I am mediating, to help the builder in the other cases. I would explore with the builder whether the facts of the case I am mediating are the facts that the builder wants before a judge, and if they are, I will support the builder’s decision not to accept a settlement offer from the contractor. For that builder, a settlement would be a failure and success was moving forward with the case.
I have mediated other cases where one party (Party A) is not prepared to make an offer to the other party (Party B), within the zone of what I think a court could reasonably conclude. In that type of situation, I would not disagree with Party B that they would be better off going to court than agreeing to a bad settlement (though sometimes, even in those types of cases, parties prefer to settle because of the non-monetary benefits of putting the litigation behind them.
So why is it, then, that parties to a mediation so often think that the mediator is pushing for a settlement rather than helping everyone make the best, informed decision they can? To be fair, one reason may be that not all mediators approach mediation the way that I do and some mediators do push for settlement because they believe that a mediation is only a success if it results in a settlement.
But it is not just a phenomenon in other mediations. Many people in cases that I mediate believe that I am pushing for settlement. And in a lot of cases, they are correct in their perception that I think they should settle. But not because I think mediation is a success if the case settles; I think they should settle when I think a settlement is a better result for them than going before a judge (or an arbitrator) and getting a result that they cannot predict. If that is the case, I tell them so.
In my experience, the vast majority of disputants over-value the likelihood that they will succeed in court because they deeply believe that they are correct, and that fairness and justice is on their side. Their brain convinces them that any reasonable judge (or arbitrator) will recognize the folly of the other side’s arguments, and will see the strength of their case. They believe that they will be believed (because they “know” that they are telling the truth) and the other side will not be believed (because they “know” the other side is lying).
Because I did not live the case the way they did, I can look at it differently and, frankly, more objectively. I am never focused on who is right and who is wrong, but rather on the risks and arbitrariness of a trial or arbitration. I know that a good liar is more successful in court (or arbitration) than a bad truth-teller. And I also know that both parties usually believe deeply that they are telling the truth. I know that a judge can make mistakes. And I often can see strong arguments on both sides (though I admit some often strike me as stronger than others).
I therefore encourage the parties to settle when I think that is the best decision for them, and I discuss with them why I think their best decision is to settle.
So how can a mediation be a success if the case does not settle? There are a number of ways: first, people may leave the mediation with more information than when they arrived. They may better understand the case that the other side is arguing and will often have a better sense of what the other side is prepared to offer in order to settle.
Second, the parties may have started discussions that may lead to settlement at a later date, and that settlement is likely to occur earlier than it otherwise would have if mediation had not taken place.
Third, the parties may have developed a rapport and a way to communicate that may help them both to resolve the current dispute and, in cases like a construction project where the relationship may be ongoing after the dispute is resolved, to work together to resolve issues in the future.
And fourth, they will now know that they have made their best effort to try to settle the case, with the help of an expert mediator, and can move forward knowing that they have tried.
So, the bottom line is that we cannot judge a mediation by whether the dispute settled. That is not the definition of success. A mediation is not a failure if the case does not settle, and the decision not to settle may be the right decision by the parties, as long as it is well thought-out and informed.
To learn conflict resolution skills that you can use at work and in your personal life, please visit our Alternative Dispute Resolution Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
To improve your negotiation skills and get the results you want while negotiating, please visit our Become a Powerful Negotiator Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
To gain skills to handle difficult conversations and difficult people with confidence, please visit our Dealing With Difficult People Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
Learning effective negotiation skills can serve you well throughout your career, as they are used on a daily basis in a variety of situations: at the workplace or in business, when purchasing anything, or with interpersonal relationships.
In terms of business negotiations, the following tactics can prove to be helpful. At Stitt Feld Handy Group, we also offer exclusive negotiation skills training courses and workshops throughout the year that can further help to develop your skills:
Be confident
As an expert in your field, you have the experience and understanding of what you are selling, to the point where you should demonstrate that confidence in your voice, body language and general comfort.
Even if you are just starting out in your career, practicing your negotiations before the real deal can help with this, along with taking any supplementary training courses and researching your customers well.
Determining what you can do without the other side, your Plan B, in advance of your negotiation, and being willing to go to your Plan B, will help to increase your confidence negotiations with the other side.
Stay professional
It may seem obvious, but being difficult during business negotiations will hinder the process and affect your future relationships with the party. Remember professionalism throughout your meeting; forgetting it happens more often than you might think when negotiations become challenging.
Don’t acquiesce to every demand
The optimal negotiation doesn’t involve you yielding everything to a potential client and acquiescing to every demand, no matter how great they seem.
Although it may win you a few extra customers when negotiations otherwise would fail, it can cost you in the long run by resulting in deals that are far from optimal.
Be ready to walk away
Compromise will only get you so far; if you have a particular price for your product or service and the market data to back it up, be prepared to walk away if needed.
Pay attention to the time
Time will be the enemy of every deal; you need to follow up at specific intervals to ensure that your deal falls through. You also need to be efficient with your meetings and make sure that you are accomplishing specific tasks to close the deal.
The timeframe to close a deal will vary from one industry to another, but you should be very familiar with your industry’s process and stay cognizant of time throughout each step.
Provide the first version of the agreement
It can be worth it in many cases to pay your attorneys to draft the first version of any agreement; although the agreement may be negotiable, it can help you to frame the fundamental structure of the contract.
You can implement every term that you want, and agreements are often minimally changed simply because of the time and effort involved, allowing you to structure what can be close to a perfect deal.
The Stitt Feld Handy Group offers leading negotiation skills training courses to train business and sales professionals with developing their persuasive abilities and getting much more out of their negotiations. Contact Stitt Feld Handy Group today at 1-416-307-0000 to learn more.
To learn conflict resolution skills that you can use at work and in your personal life, please visit our Alternative Dispute Resolution Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
To improve your negotiation skills and get the results you want while negotiating, please visit our Become a Powerful Negotiator Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
To gain skills to handle difficult conversations and difficult people with confidence, please visit our Dealing With Difficult People Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
In nearly every industry, companies are at the mercy of their customers and must accommodate their needs to the best of their ability with quality service. Unfortunately, many businesses fall short in this crucial area.
Professional customer service training courses are well worth it for most organizations, as they can help representatives learn some of the most effective methods of dealing with inevitable difficult situations and maintain your company’s reputation.
Below are five practical techniques to improve customer service and build relationships for future growth and development.
1.) Utilize Active Listening
Active listening is a technique that incorporates a reiterating of what a customer just said so they know they were heard. Further, sharing similar interests and adding in casual asides can help humanize the staff members as actual people and not solely representatives.
These techniques can enhance customer communication without falling into inauthentic sales strategies that often make representatives seem robotic.
2.) Expand Availability
Customers want the companies they do business with to be reasonably available, which may require some outside-the-box thinking if a company is hoping to avoid mounting employment costs.
3.) Focus on Engagement Over Performance Metrics
Performance metrics and benchmarking can be a vital part of strengthening customer service in your organization, but it can easily become burdensome and lose sight of the original purpose – to provide the best overall customer experience possible.
Some company leaders integrate unnecessarily aggressive benchmarking and goal setting strategies to propel team members towards higher productivity while overlooking their role in providing training and development.
For example, when representatives are falling short in terms of their customer service feedback scores, managers may assume it’s because of a flaw in the representative’s approach rather than a training related issue.
Strategies that are too focused on performance metrics can constrict staff members or create goals that are too lofty to be realistically achievable.
Performance metrics and goal setting certainly have a role in improving the customer experience. However, focusing more on collaboration, training and engagement can prove to be more efficient.
4.) Know Your Most Valuable Customers
Influential or long-established customers can be invaluable assets for a business or the source of their downfall.
It’s crucial for organizations to know their most valuable customers, and there is nothing wrong with prioritizing them to ensure that they have a successful experience.
They have higher expectations than most other customers. Focus on engaging their needs, without pandering, to support stronger customer interaction.
5.) Ongoing Customer Service Training
It’s important for managers to guard against that natural inclination to rely on just one round of initial training and neglecting ongoing development for their representatives.
Customer service training courses through firms such as Stitt Feld Handy Group, can change the dynamics of your business communication significantly for the better.
Through these courses, there is an experienced outside entity providing your team with new tools and ideas and pushing for better results.
Customers are the lifeblood of any company, and in an increasingly competitive world your customer service program needs to be outstanding.
Therefore, it’s wise to invest in the latest customer service training courses to build your representatives’ skills so that they consistently exceed your customers’ expectations.
To learn more about this type of training to benefit your organization, please contact us at contact@adr.ca.
To learn conflict resolution skills that you can use at work and in your personal life, please visit our Alternative Dispute Resolution Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
To improve your negotiation skills and get the results you want while negotiating, please visit our Become a Powerful Negotiator Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
To gain skills to handle difficult conversations and difficult people with confidence, please visit our Dealing With Difficult People Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
In our day-to-day life, disputes come up regularly. They may come up at work, at home, with family, friends, bosses, co-workers or even people on the street. Having effective tools to deal with these disputes can be critical in effectively managing these situations. One way to build these skills is through online conflict resolution training. In virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training workshops, participants are able to build their skills by gaining practical skills that will benefit them in all facets of life.
One concept that is talked about in the virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training is the importance of listening. While it may seem obvious that listening is important, there are many times in day-to-day life where we are passively listening in the background instead of actively listening. This leads to us missing many things that are being said, including some of the important details that are often conveyed more subtly. In the online conflict resolution training, we talk about how to listen effectively and use those skills. We give examples of issues that people run into with listening both in person and on video calls.
A second way in which the virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training can be helpful is the discussion about how to get what you want out of a dispute. Often times in high stress situations we lose track of what is important to us and sometimes act in a way that does not align with our goals. This may be exemplified by us only worrying about making others happy, trying to hurt others, willing to do anything to deescalate the situation, or a number of other things. In online conflict resolution training we will discuss the importance of figuring out what is important to you before entering the situation and give some ideas for how to keep that in mind as you navigate through a potentially difficult situation.
A third way that virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training can help is the time spent of how to resolve disputes effectively. The workshops will help participants deal with situations when they are one of the parties in the conflict and when they are a third party trying to help resolve the conflict. By dealing with both of those types of situations, participants are able to step into the shoes of the “other side” and get a better idea of how others might be thinking in a conflict. This allows the group doing the online conflict resolution training to explore many possible ways to work towards resolving a conflict that might work for different types of people in different situations.
A fourth way virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training can be beneficial is the ability to learn about the above skills from the comfort of your own home or office. Unlike in-person workshops that can require a large commitment of time for travel and planning, these workshops can be done by simply starting your computer wherever you are as long as there is a stable Internet connection and logging on. With online conflict resolution training, you are able to get all of the benefits of an interactive workshop while having the convenience of being at your desired location. The extra time saved can allow participants to build on their skills more and have some time to put towards their other obligations while the workshop is ongoing.
The Stitt Feld Handy Group conducts many types of virtual instructor-led conflict resolution training. Learn more about these programs at adr.ca.
To learn conflict resolution skills that you can use at work and in your personal life, please visit our Alternative Dispute Resolution Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
To improve your negotiation skills and get the results you want while negotiating, please visit our Become a Powerful Negotiator Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
To gain skills to handle difficult conversations and difficult people with confidence, please visit our Dealing With Difficult People Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
Leaders have an inherent responsibility to make sure their employees are heard. If individual team members cannot resolve their conflict, then conflict resolution falls to the leaders and that demands attention and a platform for resolution.
Workplace communication training can offer a versatile, detailed, and nuanced platform for businesses dealing with continued conflicts. Team members need to know that if they voice concerns, they will be heard. Leaders need to respond to their concerns in a practical and fair way.
Without this ongoing open dialogue, developing businesses may run into constant turmoil that will continue to slowly and deceptively erode their organization from the inside. How can business leaders navigate the tough and tumultuous waters of conflict resolution?
Managing Respect
The main principle of resolving conflict often comes back to respect, which is often egregiously mishandled by business leaders. Respect is not bought or obtained with force. It is a valuable key to setting a foundation of good conflict management.
As a leader, every decision you make will accumulate a level of respect that is received organically. You manage respect by seizing on opportunities to genuinely help employees and the organization as a whole.
Respect is often intricately tied to the management of conflict. If the involved parties do not respect you, there is little hope for proper closure to a conflict.
If that is the case, then the conflicting parties will continue to disagree, perhaps vehemently, largely because they have no respect for the individual mediating and resolving the conflict. They have no trust that it is going to get done.
But, if you can build respect, you will manage to avoid and minimize the onset of many conflicts.
Self-Created Obstacles to Proper Conflict Resolution
Your responsibility to identify and respond to conflict is often overshadowed by self-created obstacles. You need to get over these personal hurdles or else you’ll be trapped by your own constraints.
This happens when leaders are busy with their image, narrowly focus on avoiding a negative reputation, or diminishing conflict because it is challenging or could adversely affect their achievements.
Empathize and Know Your Employees
Leaders can get over their self-created hurdles and manage their respect through training and instructional practice. A key element of workplace communication training is empathy.
It revolves around knowing your employees. This includes knowing what they want, what they care about, how they respond to conflict, and other factors.
A company leader is served well by developing a foundational knowledge of conflict resolution that can communicate issues as they arise, open the right doors to the right parties, resolve them, and track the progress with an open line of dialogue.
He or she must know their people, and that can only be achieved by really empathizing with their needs and spending the time and energy to familiarize themselves with as many of them as possible.
Workplace communication training can enhance open communication. Employees can work comfortably, knowing they will be heard if anything does arise. Leaders will be armed with responsive and logical strategies to diffuse issues before they become toxic.
Ultimately, everyone benefits from a humanity-driven system for understanding and handling conflict. Existing conflicts will often naturally fade away because you have a system that your people trust in and they know that you empathize with them.
The Stitt Feld Handy Group has created a series of training materials for business leaders that revolve around building a strong framework of empathy and engaging with employees. For information about our training services or courses, contact our team at contact@adr.ca or call (416)-307-0000.
To learn conflict resolution skills that you can use at work and in your personal life, please visit our Alternative Dispute Resolution Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
To improve your negotiation skills and get the results you want while negotiating, please visit our Become a Powerful Negotiator Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
To gain skills to handle difficult conversations and difficult people with confidence, please visit our Dealing With Difficult People Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.
