When You Need to Bear Bad News
There are better and worse ways to do it. The Muse’s article on delivering bad news to your boss has lessons for talking to clients and colleagues too.
There are better and worse ways to do it. The Muse’s article on delivering bad news to your boss has lessons for talking to clients and colleagues too.
Join us in Chicago for an international forum to exchange ideas among experienced mediators and advocates practicing in all areas of mediation including family, commercial, tort, community, employment and international mediation.
I have had a series of mediations in which I have wondered who was actually in authority? The attorney or the client? As we have all learned somewhere along the line, when it comes to attorneys representing clients….
“In ‘litigation as usual,’ settlement often comes only after adversarial posturing, the original conflict escalates, the relationships deteriorate, the process takes too long and costs too much, and nobody is really happy with the resolution
I would say all of those cases were ripe for mediation at the time I was asked to mediate them. How can that be? Simple. In each case, the attorneys/parties had the right information, and a strong enough desire to settle, in order to make good decisions. Could those cases, which were further into the judicial process, have been resolved sooner? Possibly. But in retrospect, I don’t think they were ready until we mediated them.
Under the common law approach used in the United States, there is generally no duty to negotiate in good faith, and negotiators can exercise their BATNA power unless they decide to assume the good faith duty.
The full course will include pragmatic steps to help delegates towards being a practising mediator, with a carefully blended programme of theory and role playing to develop and apply all the relevant skills needed to be a successful mediator. CPD will be open to all with the additional development of the “CPD Club”, which provides member mediators with a variety of events tailored to achieve CMC CPD points to allow them to continue to practice under the CMC banner.
OFOI Tim Hedeen described the following class exercise about the nature of negotiation, which can easily be adapted in many ways. (If you want to give students even more of a run for their money, you might assign students to read the short piece on the definition of negotiation that Andrea Schneider, Noam Ebner, David Matz, and I wrote).
“Joint sessions are a waste of time,” said the judge conducting a mediation in which I was representing one of the parties. In that mediation I was asking for a joint session, but the judge still blocked us from doing one because the other side would not agree….
Forgiveness can help people restore themselves as morally acceptable members of society as seen by themselves and others.