Course overview
Leaders are often asked to resolve disputes between colleagues, teams, suppliers or stakeholders while remaining accountable for performance, relationships and fair process. Informal intervention can fail when managers move too quickly to solutions, take sides, confuse mediation with discipline, or avoid difficult conversations until positions harden. This course equips leaders to manage workplace conflict constructively before it damages delivery, retention, safety or customer outcomes.
Participants learn a structured mediation process for preparing, opening, diagnosing issues, conducting private meetings, facilitating joint discussion and recording workable agreements. They practise separating positions from interests, questioning without cross-examining, reframing inflammatory language, managing power differences and testing proposed solutions against operational needs. The course also addresses the leader's dual role: when to mediate, when to manage directly, and when to refer matters involving misconduct, grievance, safeguarding, discrimination or formal investigation.
Teaching combines concise instructor briefings with realistic mediation cases, paired skills practice, group analysis and facilitated simulations. Cases reflect situations such as delivery disputes between business units, conflict after a restructuring, performance tensions between a manager and specialist, and disagreements involving external partners. Participants receive feedback against clear behavioural criteria and build a practical mediation toolkit. They leave with a prepared mediation process plan, question sets, agreement templates and an escalation decision guide for use in their own workplace.
The course suits managers and leaders who regularly address disagreement but are not employed as full-time workplace mediators. It is particularly useful for people leaders, project and programme managers, operational managers, HR business partners and senior technical professionals leading cross-functional work.
