Conference: diversity management in mediation

Partners Hungary Foundation's March 2015 mediation conference was about effective cooperation between heterogeneous groups.

• Tibor Kertész, former trainer and mediator of Partners Hungary was our guest at our mediation workshop on 17 April 2015. He is an external mediator and former trainer of the Partners Hungary Foundation, a mentor of mediators at the Office of Justice and a lecturer at the University of Miskolc for several years.
• Tibor now lives and works in Vienna as a mediator for an international company. He has shared his experience of more than 100 training sessions and more than 2500 mediation sessions on the topic of multicultural work environments in the form of an interactive presentation and a forum theatre exercise.
• He presented case studies of corporate conflicts in which the intercultural line played a major role: the actors in the conflicts had different nationalities, religio-cultural, gender and age characteristics, which could not be overlooked in mediation, as they potentially entailed a conflict of values.

Tibor Kertész drew attention to the fact that when working with intercultural conflict, it is very important for the mediator to be aware of and consciously address the different backgrounds of the parties (ethnicity, wider socio-cultural context, age, gender, sexuality, education), the related prejudices and stereotypes, including the mediator's own prejudices. In Austria, for example, to address intercultural differences, specific Diversity Management training is also linked, which is compulsory for mediators. The mediator's sensitivity is key to moving the parties towards a solution to the conflict.

In this context, the issue of parties from different cultural backgrounds arriving with different values has been raised again. Can the conflict of values be mediated? There are several possible answers.

• The case studies have shown that in some cases the dispute may appear to be a conflict of values, but when unravelled, it may not be the result of the different backgrounds of the parties. The mediator has to deal with the different backgrounds of the parties when they affect their approach to the conflict and its resolution.
• In terms of real value conflicts, mediation can be successful if the conflict is redefined in terms of a common problem, including possible solutions. Accepting the other's point of view does not mean agreeing with it, but we can agree to disagree on certain issues, but we can still find a solution to our common issues if there is mutual respect between the parties.