We mediators need to market our wares, just like the fruiterer at my local Sunday Farmers’ Market when he calls out prices from behind his stall.
Increasingly some mediators are choosing to do this by the numbers – advertising how many mediations they have completed and what level of success they have achieved.
For instance, this note appeared at the end of a published mediation article recently describing the author as having ;
“… mediated over 500 disputes of all descriptions… involving more than 2,500 hours of mediation, achieving a documented 93 per cent settlement rate”
Mediator websites are also rife with claims like this one…
And this type of online promotion is common place;
“He has been involved as a mediator in more than 1,900 mediations, with over 15,000 participants”
“Unmatched experience in the field of mediation… Successfully mediated over 1,600 cases in over 18 years as a full-time mediator”
One mediator even goes further and provides detail of each and every mediation conducted;
Do these claims help end users make informed decisions about the mediators they wish to work with? How can they be verified – is that even important? What is success anyway? Is this how we mediators want to be measured?
Signed; Confused of Wellington, NZ
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