You've Got to Be a Good Mediator

Even the most magical marketing strategy will not counterbalance mediocre mediation skills. Successful practices rely heavily on word of mouth referrals and only quality work will motivate prior clients to help you find new ones. In the end it’s the quality of the work you deliver that is going to keep the clients coming in.

Aside from individual struggles to build business, mediocre mediators do little to increase the public’s confidence in ADR. A few ineffective mediators bringing in work for a short period of time help make everyone’s marketing efforts a little more challenging over the long run. Our field is not alone in this, certainly. Yet we are in a developmental stage where we can’t afford too much mediocrity.

Unfortunately, mediocre mediators sometimes seem unaware of their own lack of skill. It’s always been a terrific irony to me that people finishing 28- or 40-hour mediation trainings sometimes have more confidence in themselves than my mediation graduate students after they complete 500 hours of training and education. My graduate students have become painfully aware of all they don’t yet know. Many who complete basic mediation seem blissfully naive in comparison.

I believe that the real move forward for our profession will come, in part, from development of higher practice standards. While there are a few people in the world who need little formal training to be elegant mediators, this is simply not the case for most of us.

It’s called “basic mediation” for a reason and there are few other occupations involving intervention in people’s lives and behavior where practitioners have only the equivalent of one work week’s (or less) training. We will be taken seriously when we begin to take our own development and education seriously.

Building a successful practice, then, is two-pronged: Learn how to market well, and learn how to mediate well, too.