Mediator Skill Set | The Manager's Guide to Mediating Conflict

Questioning styles and techniques

By adopting skillful questioning techniques and styles a mediator can encourage parties to do the following things:

Challenge assumptions that they have made, in particular about the other person's intentions. This is very common in practice; we are all guilty of making assumptions about others, but we can never really know what their intention is. Examples of assumptions that I come across are that one party is deliberately trying to cause harm to the other, that one party is being manipulative, that they dislike the other person, that they do not believe in the other's capability to carry out the role, and so on. In many cases, these assumptions prove to be wrong and if not, it is still important to get the issues really out there and on the table for discussion.
Think "outside the box" by opening up the parties to different ways of thinking about the issues, the other person's motives, or how things might be resolved. This is similar to challenging assumptions...

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