Employers value ex-service people’s skills and experience as a core. On paper what’s missing are the soft skills. However wrong this perception might be in relation to modern service people’s training, there’s a need for them to prove breadth of skills and suitability for managing and working outside of a hierarchy and ‘command and control’ model: with freewheeling civilian employees and their conflicting agendas, perspectives and temperaments.

The approach has become familiar for many service people. In the Army, for example, mediation was introduced by Brigadier Mark Abraham, in 2010.

“The Army had experience of the use of mediation in a particular high-profile legal case where the approach had been very successful. We’d been in to see large-scale public and private sector employers and how they dealt with disputes and the value they’d gained from mediation services.”

Working with CMP Resolutions, the Ministry of Defence trained over 600 mediators, more than 100 of them are Army service personnel who work within its well-established mediation service, promoted for use by staff and managers. The numbers of staff requesting mediation training now exceeds the training places available.

“It’s popular because the training leads to a formally recognised qualification, and involves such fundamental skills for modern managers,” said Brigadier Abraham. “A shift to mediation has had a substantial effect on the people culture: there’s been an almost 90% success rate in terms of mediation leading to resolutions. The average time taken to resolve an issue has been around two to three days, by comparison with around six months for the formal process. The use of an impartial mediator and the confidentiality involved has meant people being able to be more open than they would have been with a line manager directly involved with their career, and discussions have got to the real heart of issues.”

The Professional Workplace Mediator programme is the most widely used, nationally accredited training programme for mediators. It was designed to be generic, and capable of tailoring for different contexts and settings. For 20 years CMP has trained mediators who are now reducing the stress of conflict and resolving disputes in a wide range of settings. It is invaluable to anyone seeking to develop confidence in handling difficult situations, and help their organisations reduce behavioural risk around interpersonal differences. Participants take away a bag of skills which will be helpful at home or work.

As a senior officer due to be leaving the Army for civilian life, Brigadier Abraham sees the benefits of having undertaken the mediation training for his own future career: “I was very impressed by the work by CMP. In my mind I’d thought I’d be able to cover off mediation in a day – but soon realised that every element of the week-long programme was important. CMP’s expertise delivered the necessary quality and depth for mediating at a professional level, a role that I’m still refining and learning about after eight years.

“For me, the most important lesson was around listening, not asking a question and making a decision but really listening. It’s given me a whole new set of leadership skills in terms of helping me understand people working at all levels, their behaviours, and how to provide support. Ex-service people will benefit from mediation training as a foundation of their people skills – in being able to deal with everyone from junior staff to board level, to have empathy, to manage difficult conversations and situations, and to be an important part of managing partnerships and collaborations across and between organisations.”

www.cmpresolutions.co.uk

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