Mediation Skills for New Team
leaders: Preparing for Your First
Mediation Role
Rita J. Bailey Nicholas MBA, Dip,
Psych, FInstLM, MABP, MCMI,
MBTI Practitioner. Rita is a
leadership development coach,
mediator and facilitator. She works
with wide range of public, charities,
and private sector organizations in the
UK and internationally. She specializes
in developing new and established
managers who want to enhance
their personal and professional
development in leadership and
communication.
Bailey_1_163512.indd 1
Rita J. Bailey Nicholas
Abstract: The modern workplace is often the environment
for disputes and conflicts. Alongside performance issues,
resolving staff conflict is a tricky task for team leaders.
Surveys have shown that new team leaders often dread
dealing with conflict in their teams. They are not confident
about resolving conflict that can lead to grievances and dis-
ciplinaries, despite understanding how negative it can be
on staff morale, performance, and well-being. Mediation
skills in a team leaders toolbox will help provide them with
a positive, confident approach to dealing with conflict while
remaining impartial. It is vital that team leaders under-
stand conflict, what it is, what causes it, and how best to
minimize its negative impact through mediation. Equipped
with the right knowledge, skills, and tools team leaders can
resolve team conflict effectively and help their staff move
forward becoming productive and cohesive again.
Key Words: conflict, disputes, teams, leader, disagreements,
performance, communications, change, resolution, costs
Introduction
The modern workplace is often the setting forteam d isputes
and conflict, however large or small. With the additional
pressures for increased productivity, efficiencies, and
meeting more complex demands, diverse teams in terms
of talent, strengths, weaknesses, and competencies create a
melting pot of ideas, good, bad, ugly, and different.
Most savvy team leaders would say that their teams are
in flux. They are either having to expand or contract their
size or activities. Refocusing on different priorities and even
changing products and services have become the norm.
No team stays the same in the context of change that
includes internal and external organizational changes
to stay competitive (Lencioni, 2002). These additional
pressures include the following:
Consumer pressures and new demands in the markets;
Government legislation and policy initiatives;
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 Mediation Skills for New Team leaders: Preparing for Your First Mediation Role
Changes in company strategy and
direction;
Challenging operating conditions for
business growth and technological
changes;
Organization and teams having to
develop new skills to increase capability
and competencies in new areas to match
the new demands.
In this context, team leaders are striving
to getall their team members committed to
working cohesively together. Being respon-
sive and high performing while change is
taking place at increasing speed is business
as usual. Team leaders are also working in
new organizational structures to get bet-
ter results, to be more competitive. There
are more matrix teams, project teams,
and even virtual teamsteams collaborat-
ing across boundaries and different time
zones. These new structures create more
flexibility and an expectation to respond
to change quickly (Chartered Institute of
Personnel& Development, CIPD, 2007).
However, in practice these can cause
other larger and new challenges for the
new team leaderand the team to commu-
nicate and work with each other effectively
and maintain expected standards.
Team leaders are observing the impact
of these changes as more frequent causes
of conflicts with implications for team
effectiveness and performance.
Using reliable conflict resolution tools
like mediation to nip the conflict in the
bud as an early intervention (CIPD, 2007)
before it escalates or worse has to be the
focus of any team leader who wants to
make a difference to morale, cohesion,
team productivity, staff turnover, and
absenteeism.
Whether you are a newly promoted
team leader from within the team, taking
over an established team or youre seeking
to transition into a new team leader role,
this expert guide is for you. It will enable
you to understand the negative impact of
conflict and prepare yourself to adopt a
mediators role to minimize the impact of
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conflict on your team. This guide can also
act as a refresher for well-established team
leaders and project managers seeking to
enhance their conflict resolution skills with
a well-structured approach for mediation.
The Cost of Team Conflict
Have you noticed how the cost of staff dis-
putes never turns up in budgets, profit and
loss accounts, or even in the annual report?
For example, in 2012 the Confederation
of Business Industry (CBI) in the United
Kingdom estimates it costs businesses
33 billion per year. There is a potential
loss of 370,000,000 working days, and it
takes up to 20 percent of leadership time. In
2012--2013 there were 191,541 employment
tribunal claims in the United Kingdom
In a global report of 2008 by CPP Inc.,
publishers of the Myers Briggs assess-
ment, they found the United States had
similar challenges. American employees
spend 2.8 hours per week handling con-
flict. This totaled a staggering amount of
$359 billion in paid hours or 385 million
working days.
With such figures, unsurprisingly,
conflict is costly. It is a staggering resource
drain of huge proportion on team leaders
management time, human resources,
senior management, and often legal advice
time and fees (Advisory, Conciliation and
Arbitration Service, (ACAS),Trade Union
Congress (TUC),2010). The direct and hid-
den costs such as stress, absenteeism, staff
turnover, and damage to company reputa-
tion cannot be ignored (ACAS, 2008) and
obviously, most team leaders will want to
avoid such costs, not to mention the energy
spent on handling conflicts, the impact on
morale, and the loss of productivity.
Why Team Leaders May Struggle
withConflict
Do you feel confident in dealing with
conflict?
Do you know how to help your team
members resolve conflict effectively if
they ask you to?
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 Mediation Skills for New Team leaders: Preparing for Your First Mediation Role
Are you always seen as fair, objective,
and impartial when you offer to help
them?
Are you confident about initiating that
potential difficult conversation?
In our consultancy client surveys, team
leaders often admit they feel nervous and
dont know what to do or where to start
when conflict arises. Others said they side-
step the issue completely or ignore it, hop-
ing it will go away or even resolve itself.
Some say they approach it only when it
becomes unavoidable. Yet by then its esca-
lated to the point where the individuals
seem so entrenched, feel wronged, diffi-
cult, or the issue/situation seems impos-
sible to resolve.
Clearly, it is important that team lead-
ers are confident and able to support staff
to resolve conflict as effective leaders.
Mediation skills are not just for external
professional mediators, although complex,
tricky cases may warrant that level of
expertise. This guide aims to provide tools
that any team leader will find useful as a
fresh approach to settling low-level d
isputes
between team members well before the
point of no return.
In-house business surveys have shown
that team leaders who invest in the neces-
sary skills of mediation find it worthwhile
and a pragmatic addition to their leadership
toolbox. In fact, many team leaders have
become more confident about and com-
fortable using mediation techniques to cre-
ate cohesive, productive, and collaborative
teams in the workplace.
What Is Workplace Conflict?
Conflict is a normal part of any work-
place life and can often be expected as
part of solving customer problems, meet-
ing market demands and regulations,
service-improvement tasks or processes,
and organizational change and develop-
ment (CIPD, 2015). To understand when to
use mediation skills to intervene and to even
consider the situation for mediation, as team
leader you will need to be clear that even a
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seemingly simple team conflict can cover
complex issues that need to be addressed.
This makes team disagreements time con-
suming and challenging, and often not as
simple as they seem. Here are some of the
reasons for this:
A disagreement that has continued and
stays prolonged, creating an atmosphere
in the team;
Actual or perceived differences by team
members that create barriers to good
working relationships;
Clash in personalitiesevery interac-
tion becomes a struggle between these
members;
Differences in opinion in ways of work-
ing: a team memberseen as working too
slow by other team members who per-
ceive themselves as working quickly and
doing more work;
Different approaches to handling a par-
ticular task or following a process, for
example, resolving an issue with a client
account;
Differences in the understanding of
the expectation that is to be met by two
members who are dependent on each
other for a joint delivery of a piece of
work;
Different needs perceived as not hav-
ing been met at all (being valued,
acknowledged, respected) and behavior
that can actually be perceived as rude, dis-
respectful, threatening, and upsetting for
one or both team members.
So here are several points to take on
board:
Conflict between two or more team mem-
bers is always underlined with significant
levels of misunderstanding of commu-
nications that can distort the perceived
understanding greatly. Poor communi-
cations, lack of it, or even misinforma-
tion can lead to conflict (Gibbons, 2007).
So team leaders need to be ready to help
the team members understand the real
disagreement or areas of disagreement
so that the real issue can be resolved to
everyones satisfaction.
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