3 The work of a mediator
In this section you will use two key concepts from functional grammar – the interpersonal and ideational metafunctions – to explore language use in the work of professional mediator Katherine Graham.
Katherine is the Chief Executive of CMP Resolutions, a company based in Hertfordshire in the UK. She has worked for twenty-five years as a professional mediator, and CMP works with a wide range of clients, including large and small companies, local authorities and charitable organisations. Katherine also provides and validates professional training for mediators. Before you turn to the first activity, briefly reflect on what you think is important in the language use of a mediator: is there anything they should say – or avoid saying in their role? Do you think a mediator might try to regulate the language their clients use in mediation sessions? And if so, in what ways might they do this?
Activity 1 The importance of choosing words carefully in mediation
Listen to the audio clip of Katherine Graham and make notes on what you learn about:
- the importance of language in the profession of mediation
- how Katherine describes the language that mediators themselves try to use in mediation sessions with clients
- how she describes the language that mediators try to get their clients to use in mediation sessions (note clients are often referred to as ‘the parties’).
Transcript
JACKIE:
Hello, I’m Jackie Tuck from The Open University. With me is Katherine Graham, Managing Director of CMP Resolutions, a company based in Hertfordshire, and I’ll be talking to her about the language used in mediation and conflict resolution. Katherine, could I ask you how important it is for a mediator to be aware of the language they’re using?
KATHERINE
It’s really important because it’s one of the only tools they’ve got available to them, and it can be a very explosive matter if you get it wrong. So even a single word like ‘respect’ or ‘professional’ can ignite the conflict that you’ve come to resolve. So, being mindful of the words that you’re using, when you’re using them, which part of the process you’re in, who you’re addressing – all of those different choices make up the personality of the mediation because you’re setting the tone, you’re setting the feeling of the mediation with the language that you use.
JACKIE
Would you be able to give me some examples of the types of language which are usually a good idea for a mediator to employ?
KATHERINE
The types of language that we’d really want mediators to use would be descriptive words, descriptive language. You want to avoid anything that’s analytical or logical or evaluative. So if somebody’s rocking on their chair and looking out of the window, you would say ‘I noticed you’re rocking on the chair and looking out of the window and I’m wondering what’s going on for you’, rather than saying ‘You seem distracted’, which would be a judgement and an evaluative comment.
So you’re constantly looking at ways of reflecting back what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, what you’re wondering, using language which is as open and tentative as possible. So mediators will typically use a lot of those fluffy bits at the beginning and the end of sentences, like ‘I’m wondering if …’, or ‘It sounds like …’, or ‘Am I right in …’, because you want them to feel that they can correct you. You want them to give you the steer and for them to end up saying what it is that they’re feeling or believing.
So you’d also use the party’s language a lot as well, but reframe it. So if they say ‘He’s an absolute bully and if he moves the papers on my desk one more time I’m gonna make a complaint,’ you would never as a mediator say ‘So you think Barry’s a bully?’, because that is almost solidifying their experience and it’s giving it some legitimacy. So you use their language but you reframe it. So you might say something like ‘It sounds as though your desk is a very private space for you and you have a really strong reaction when Barry touches things on your desk and for you, you feel that that’s bullying.’ You might offer it back but with some softenings, some descriptive language.
When you’re mediating you will try and influence the way the parties are speaking, sometimes in very explicit ways. You might ask them to say something positive about each other. So you’re trying to rebalance perhaps some of the negative versus positive stuff in the room. You might quite explicitly tell them to use ‘I’ statements, not ‘you’ statements, because parties are very, very happy to say ‘you’re lazy’, ‘you’re intolerable’, ‘I can’t bear you’, which isn’t what you’re after, they need to really use an ‘I’ statement.
So there’s quite a lot of coaching going on. And you would say ‘Well can you tell me what you feel?’ And the party will say ‘Yes I feel you’re being unreasonable.’ And you’ll have to go back and say ‘Actually that’s a thought. You think they’re being unreasonable. Can you tell me how you feel?’ And they’ll say ‘I feel he's bullying me.’ And that’s another projected, labelling evaluative statement. So you have to say ‘No. How do you feel?’ And eventually they might say ‘I feel overwhelmed’.
You’ll also find that sometimes you need to be more robust, as a mediator. It’s not all pink and fluffy and ‘How do you feel?’. Sometimes you need to stop people who are raising their voice or going off track. And so mediators will also be quite clear and precise. So you’re changing the language according to how much control you should be exerting over the interaction. So when you need to be more authoritative, you’ll shift your tone, you’ll shift your pace, you’ll start using their names, and you’ll be much, much more descriptive about what you want them to do.
And there should be a continuum: you always start with the softest most interactive intervention and save anything that’s a reference to a ‘rule’, in inverted commas, right to the bitter end. So if you can’t persuade them and encourage them to change how they’re talking to one another, for example, then you will ask, and then if that doesn’t work you might explicitly say ‘We came here on the understanding that both of you were going to have a chance to speak to one another: Janet you’re not letting James speak. I want to check with each of you, are you still here to help each other to speak and listen?’ And then they’ll go ‘Yes, yes’.
And then you’ll say ‘Okay, in that case, Janet, it’s your turn to be quiet, James away you go.’ So you’ll be quite tough sometimes.
Another example of the type of language that you typically use as a mediator would be mutual language, so you’ll hear mediators saying ‘we’ a lot, rather than ‘I’ or ‘you’. You’ll hear them saying ‘You both seem to …’, or ‘This seems a shared experience’. So you’re using language to indicate the connection that they should have or that they’re aspiring to have.
One of the things I like to do is to make sure that I’m using really homely phrases, kind of ordinary language. I know that I’ve had it fed back to me from some co-workers that when I mediate I am obviously working in the room quite spontaneously with language that’s occurring to me at the time. So I may well say things like ‘Okay, let’s crack on, we’ve only got another hour left and we’ve got a heck of a lot to get through.’ Because you’re all in it together, and you want to allow them to see you as an ordinary person, not a special technical user of grandiose language.
When you train people, they’re always wanting a phrase book and they’re very frustrated that you’re not going to give them one, because the key skill is to be alive and creative in each conversation – in each moment of each conversation. So you’re always focusing on what's happening in the room at the time, and it can be really exhausting. And you need to pull all your language resources together, and concentrate on the moment to say the right thing in such a way that it’s going to be helpful.
And so you are always living in the moment when you’re in the mediation. And that’s why I like doing it, because you can't prepare for it. You just rock up and, you know, you always go with what the parties bring you. It’s brilliant.
Discussion
- Katherine makes clear the importance of language in mediation – as she explains, ‘it’s one of the only tools you’ve got to work with’. Mediation is a good example of a professional activity in which language is central to getting things done, rather than simply an accompaniment to other sorts of (non-verbal) action. Katherine also makes clear the potentially ‘explosive’ consequences of particular word choices, where even words such as ‘respect’ or ‘professional’, with no obvious problematic overtones, can stir up conflict between ‘the parties’ in the mediation. Given the extreme delicacy of the interpersonal relations, which usually form the background to any attempt at mediation, a finely tuned attention to the word choices being made is essential for anyone in the profession.
- Katherine describes the language she tries to use as a mediator in several ways. She refers to:
- language that is ‘descriptive’ rather than ‘analytical, logical or … evaluative’
- using language that is ‘as open and tentative as possible’
- ‘offering back’, or reformulating clients’ language, but with ‘softenings’
- her conscious choice to use, as she calls them, ‘fluffy bits at the beginnings and ends of sentences’
- using ‘ordinary language’ so as to avoid seeming ‘grandiose’
- being ‘quite tough sometimes’.
- Katherine also discusses ways in which she as a mediator might try to ‘influence the way the parties are speaking’. For example, she explicitly asks them to:
- say positive things about each other
- use ‘I’ statements not ‘you’ statements
- listen and allow each other to speak.
Clearly, Katherine is using very informal metalanguage (language about language) here – ‘pink and fluffy’ is not a linguistic term – and this is appropriate: for example, she frequently talks to trainee mediators who generally will not have a background in linguistics. And as you heard in the audio clip, she explains that she seeks to use ‘ordinary language’. However, it is also important to note here that even where Katherine is using vocabulary that more closely resembles linguistic terminology (e.g. ‘descriptive’, ‘judgment’), she is not employing these terms precisely in the same ways as they are used in many branches of linguistics. In the activities that follow, you will have an opportunity to explore what Katherine means in terms related to this module, and to explore how linguistics can explain the role of language in mediation more systematically.
A further point to note is that we don’t have an authentic mediation interaction here, just someone’s report of typical ways of talking in mediation. However, there are some useful clues as to the nature of the interactional and social roles played by the different participants. When Katherine explains that, on occasion, it’s necessary to remind the parties that, ‘We came here on the understanding that both of you were going to have a chance to speak to one another … I want to check with each of you, are you still here to help each other to speak and listen,’ we get a clear indication that there are conventionalised, unwritten ‘rules’ of interaction in a professional mediation, which everyone has more or less explicitly signed up to, and which include being willing to allow the other people in the room to speak or ‘take the floor’ in the conversation. Moreover, here we have evidence that all parties accept that it is the mediator’s role to enforce such rules of interaction and that, echoing Benjamin (1990), she’s ‘accountable … for the process of engagement’.