If you have a team and no one has definitive authority, one useful strategy is to obtain consensus.

I love obtaining consensus. It requires skill.

The trick is to make sure that everyone has an equal chance to voice their opinions and ideas. Everyone should walk away knowing that they had a chance to be heard regardless of whether they got what they wanted from the meeting.

They should also walk away with an understanding of why they couldn’t get their way or why another method or policy was adopted. This is called future pacing.

Later on, they will think about it. If they understand the reasons why things went the way they did, they are far less likely to make a big deal out of the same issues in the future.

In order to pull this off, you have to have the respect of the players involved. At the very least, they should not have the option to undermine what you are trying to do.

If you are challenged you’ll be forced to put things to a vote, in order to overrule the dissenter.

If you have treated everyone with courtesy and respect and have done your best to allow everyone to air their concerns and have their say, then you should have no problem gaining the help of the other team members during a vote.

Through adept mediation skills you can remove deadlocks and get everyone moving forward in a positive direction again.

At some level, everyone understands that they can’t always get what they want. The key is in understanding why they can’t have it.

If you are able to help everyone understand, you have done your job.

You don’t get everyone to understand by doing all the talking. In fact, if you are doing the mediation job well, you do very little talking.

Instead you redirect questions to the best person or people on the team to express their (expert in that area) points of view.

Mediation is a skill that you can develop and sharpen.

If you play this role well, you can be proud of all you will accomplish -which will be a very significant amount.

You can find several articles on team building and negotiation in our article directory

Human nature, being what it is, insures that their will often be work for a skillful mediator .

Happy mediating.

Tags: mediation, mediator, team dynamics, group dynamics, negotiation, negotiator