Nearly every workplace experiences conflict, but some places interact so closely with individuals and groups in crisis that mediation is a skill used daily. Even if your workplace is generally pleasant, your best bet for maintaining calm at work is to feel fully equipped to handle conflict that occurs.
A great way to do this is to seek mediation training, such as the courses offered at Portland Community College. Mediation comes down to very careful communication skills that help all present parties feel heard and addressed, but other distinct skills are under the broader umbrella.
Top Skills to Gain: The Benefits of Mediation Training
You'd be surprised how many high-level managers have delayed, ignored, or botched conversations about conflict when they could dive deeper, learn a bit, and handle the situations more confidently. Here are a few ways that mediation training can help anyone build their mediation muscles.
Helping Convey Both Negative Feelings Clearly and The Facts of Situations
When a conflict first arises, it can be challenging to sort out what parts of the communication situation are feelings and which are facts. However, each person's feelings matter and should not be dismissed. It is equally important to get clear on the facts of the situation since in the chaotic threads of what happened or is happening are details that lead to compromise. When you practice and learn about mediation, you'll get better at asking for the story of what happened from all parties and filtering through what happened. By acknowledging and drawing attention to how events impacted feelings, you can start moving people toward recognizing good intentions and failed execution in many cases.
Disarming Defensiveness During Criticism
One of the challenges that can create conflict is when people must experience criticism (or when they need to experience it!). We are naturally quite defensive even when criticism comes from a good place with constructive phrasing. One of the valuable ways to move forward is to practice experiencing criticism and getting curious about it: where is it coming from? What could have caused the situation that didn't go as expected? Curiosity is an excellent antidote to defensiveness. Your mediation trainer can also offer you additional tools to disarm defensiveness when you or others need to receive or give critique.
Brainstorming Truly Equitable Solutions
When two or more parties conflict, there is often a temptation to see the resolution needed as "choosing sides," where one party wins, the other loses, or one is correct, and the other is wrong. Mediation training can show you how to frame the plan for moving forward in a way that benefits everyone or at least addresses their deepest-felt needs. Even if it is primarily a solution proposed by one party, it should be modified as much as possible to address the challenge or concerns of other parties, creating a potential path for all parties to feel heard, understood, and supported.
Creating an Environment That Fosters Meaningful Conflict Resolution Discussions to Mediation Training Oregon Needs
Beyond individual crises, mediation training offers you valuable insights into how to create an environment where clear, open communication can occur so early that it needn't erupt in conflict. While some dispute inevitably arises in most human communication, creating an environment where management spends lots of time checking in with employees, managing workloads, and transparently sharing why any changes occur helps to undo employee dissatisfaction. For client-facing conflicts, your training can make the workplace calmer as you de-escalate even highly agitated customers and help them see their options moving forward.
Learning Through Practice: The Portland Community College Approach
Mediation training doesn't come solely from theoretical knowledge - you can't just hear that a strategy works and immediately put it into perfect practice. So the mediation training offered at Portland Community College offers you many opportunities to analyze scenarios, test your strategy, and get comfortable implementing all you've learned. By making the class very practice-oriented, our experienced instructors ensure that you'll be well-versed before you need to be a mediator in the workplace or any other area of your life.
Who Can Use the Benefits of Mediation Training?
Portland Community College courses work for so many people. Mediation training can be beneficial in scenarios like managing employees, working in the sales sector, or in the medical field, where you see many different patients and offer them potentially challenging news. Many other areas of your life may benefit from a mediation course, and feeling like you can handle a conflict if you have to can help keep work a calm and pleasant place. Sign up today and learn more!
