When Your Own Chair is Involved
This comment submitted by Bill Warters on 7/27/02.
Recently I received a query from an experienced faculty mediator who has been asked by a colleague to intervene in a dispute involving one of his departmental faculty colleagues and the chair of their department. Given the Chair's implicit power over the faculty mediator, how best should the faculty member who has been asked to intervene respond? Is he/she putting themselves at risk?
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Well, better late than never
This response submitted by Stephen R. Marsh on 2003-10-18.
- Quite frankly, having done a number of facilitation exercises (hmm, what else can you call "not-formal mediation"?) involving people with power over me as well as the other party, using neutral setting approaches can often help.
The question is whether the mediator is "intervening" or "facilitating" -- and that question goes to the approach. Is it more of "I was asked to see if I could help at all" and "there are techniques that sometimes help" vs. "you've got a problem and I'm intervening" (and yes, the language of the first framing is pretty much the language one would use, the language of the second framing is pretty much how the wrong approach can be perceived). The key is sticking very much to a true neutral, let the parties control, approach -- almost like a low key transformative mediator who is not quite so talkative as most. My thoughts.
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