The Professional Mediator
This book is written with the professional mediator in mind, regardless of your background prior to mediating. By professional mediator, I mean those of you who wish to make or have already made ADR the majority of your professional work.
You will notice notice that I don’t use “attorney-mediator” and “non-attorney-mediator” terminology in the book. Each is a problematic phrase and contributes to public confusion that only further hobbles the development of the field. I invite you to stop using these terms, too.
The term “attorney-mediator” suggests that the two professional roles are performed simultaneously or that one is necessarily an adjunct of the other. Either interpretation risks a conclusion by an ill-informed public that the two go hand in hand. While a few attorneys may well wish this to be true, such a suggestion fails to honor the historical roots of this field and the significant numbers of excellent mediators who hail from myriad other professional backgrounds.
Adopting “attorney-mediator” language necessitates other hybrids in order to be inclusive and fairly acknowledge the rich diversity of backgrounds: therapist-mediator, educator-mediator, social worker-mediator, physician-mediator. The list would become exhausting before it could become exhaustive, and would drift into the ridiculous: horse-trainer-mediator, massage-therapist-mediator and so on.
The term “non-attorney mediator” is at best confusing and at worst, insulting. It defines mediators who have degrees other than a J.D. by the absence of our attorney-ness. It is the equivalent of referring to African-Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and others who are not Caucasian by the term “non-white.”
No one should be defined by what we are not, but by what we are. “Non-attorney mediator” is a marginalizing term and accordingly, has no place in our field.
Instead, I have chosen to use the term “professional mediator,” which is not without its own deficiencies. It intends to be inclusive of all mediators who wish to make mediation their day job, regardless of prior profession, academic degree, and preparatory history. Because “professional mediator” has its own weaknesses, I welcome your suggestions of other terms that paint a simple and holistic picture without marginalizing.
Making Mediation Your Day Job
You have, no doubt, already noted my choice of the terms “mediator” and “mediation” throughout the book and in the working title. For some of you, this may seem inconsistent with the case made in prior sections of this very chapter, most notably Going Beyond Neutrality and It Is About Better Marketing.
Instead of “ADR practitioner” or “ADR professional,” I chose variations on mediate for these reasons:
- “Making Mediation Your Day Job” is more alliterative and concise than the alternatives.
- Using the alternative terms repeatedly will, to my thinking, begin to sound stilted and formal, neither of which is the tone I wish for your coming reading.
- I’m drawn to a definition of mediator that is both more traditional and to some, more radical than its normative use in current professional circles.
Mediation as a term is used in the literature to refer to a specific dispute resolution process that carries certain elements distinguishing it from other processes, such as arbitration, facilitation, negotiation, neutral evaluation and the like. In my classroom, I would call this (with a generous nod to Jennifer Beer and Eileen Stief of the Friends Conflict Resolution Programs for the idea) big “M” mediation.
For this book, I have chosen “mediation” for its small “m” connotation, intending it to encompass the myriad distinguishable formal processes that bring a mediating influence on conflict. When I walk into a room as a mediator in the way I’m defining it here, I walk in ready to be a mediating influence. In some instances, that help will look like Mediation. In others it will look like coaching. In yet others it will look like facilitation or training or consulting. My clients do not draw definable lines between processes in the way that we do and our myriad terms for these processes sometimes confuse matters.
I aim for simplicity here. ADR, whether intended to mean Alternative Dispute Resolution or Appropriate Dispute Resolution, isn’t sufficient. Some people don’t have a dispute to resolve, they have a state of conflict to sort through or manage. When someone calls me, they rarely understand the specific differences between terms, if they use any term at all. They are as likely to ask “for some help with a difficult situation at work” as they are to request a “facilitator for a probate matter.”
As you read and work through the coming exercises, I invite you to substitute for my term “mediation” any or all of those conflict intervention processes that are nearest and dearest to your heart. Work with whatever term resonates for you and your market.
And speaking of nearest and dearest to your heart, that is where we will turn next, in Part 2.
Copyright © 2006 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.
Nicely put. You make it very clear as to what you are talking about when you use the “m” word.
This is a really nice discussion of the choices you have made. While I think the beginning is perhaps over-long, I also don’t know how many people out there cling to these hyphenated monsters, so I probably shouldn’t comment. As I work more with people who come through the community justice center, I am becoming very aware of language and of how it needs to be pitched to the people you are trying to connect with. Your understanding of how the clients view mediation (which is definitely not as an alphabet soup, “ADR,” kind of thing), but a much more murky understanding of it, keeps us honest in a way. That is, if we don’t fall back on jargon and we do recognize the complexity of what we offer in small “m” mediation, we will communicate much better with those who come to us for help. I personally think “keep it simple” is something we should be saying into the mirror every morning…