Mediation
How Transformative Mediation Works in Complaints of Workplace Harassment
Transformative mediation has two main objectives (Bush and Folger (2005) The Promise of Mediation):
1. Empowerment – enabling the parties to define their own issues and to seek solutions on their own
2. Recognition- enabling the parties to see and understand the other person’s point of view
This approach:
- is a progressive rather than a prescriptive one
- centred on process rather than outcomes
- by which the mediator responds to what the participants are saying moment to moment
- by highlighting and amplifying opportunities as they arise
- to help both parties strengthen their capacity to make informed decisions (Empowerment)
- while at the same time encouraging them to take into account the other party’s point of view (Recognition)
- Valuing not just one but both of these objectives is essential
- just fostering Empowerment could lead to abusing power
- just encouraging Recognition could lead to abdicating power
- While reinforcing one aspect, the other aspect cannot be neglected
- Approached in synergy, each aspect tends to reinforce the other.
- This approach situates contested events
- not as isolated problems to be solved one by one
- but as part of a broader context
- about which the parties will gain a deeper understanding
- through their exchange of views in mediation.
- Thanks to this broadened understanding of the situation
- gained through acknowledgements, insights and new interpretations,
- the parties can make and consider proposals and undertakings
- which reflect their free will and informed consent.
- Paradoxically, the less the mediator pushes the parties towards settlement
- the more an agreement is likely to emerge when the time is ripe
- from the transformation of the quality of the parties’ interaction
- both in mediation and in their future relations.
Exerpted from Mediating Complaints of Workplace Harassment: a Transformative Approach © John Peter Weldon 2009.