CUC Connect Webinar Library

Welcome to the CUC Connect Webinar Library. Here you will find access to the the last twelve months of live webinar recordings offering additional information for professional development across the spectrum of conflict resolution and mediation practice.

An additional webinar will be featured each month from our catalogue. Over the course of your 12-month membership, you will have the opportunity to view a total of 24 training videos.

Make sure to watch the featured webinar during the month it is available, because it will return to our catalogue at the end the month.

Have questions about the material in a recorded webinar? Send an email to [email protected] and it will be shared with our training team who will reach out with additional information and clarification as part of your CUC Connect Membership.

Featured Webinar for June, 2023

For decades we have known that interest-based negotiation is more effective and efficient than competitive negotiation. The challenge is in eliciting what is most important to parties and then anchoring the discussion around those interests. In this one hour webinar, Katherine Miller discusses how to use interests to create a ground of understanding that can truly support the end game.

It is natural to surround ourselves with like-minded people while avoiding the discomfort and tension that comes when we engage with those with beliefs and opinions contrary to ours. These days pumping gas or going to the grocery store can put us on the defensive, not to mention talking with relatives at the dinner table or co-workers around the water cooler. The problem with this avoidance is that we rob ourselves and others of increasing the richness of our lives through lost, meaningful connections.

In this webinar, we’ll explore how we can have these conversations in a constructive and meaningful way that is personally satisfying while fostering growth by deploying the principles of the Understanding-Based Model in our everyday lives. Benchmarks will help test these conversations’ value while building on our shared commitment to understanding as a way-station to intimacy.

Interest-based negotiation is at the heart of leveraging the Understanding-Based Model to help those in conflict reach a mutually beneficial outcome. However, guiding people to look beyond their positions and see what matters to them can be challenging for even the most experienced conflict resolution professional.

Being asked to go deeper and understand the root of why interests matter can be challenging to those entrenched in the emotions, history, and desired outcomes surrounding the circumstances of the conflict. To facilitate a fruitful conversation, we must help people understand their needs and motivations in a way that honors the strength of their feelings.

Join us for a stimulating and informative roundtable discussion featuring industry leader insights from three of the world’s most advanced technology firms: Intel, Roche, and SAP.

Panelists will discuss how the Understanding-Based Approach to Conflict has helped address human resource challenges while increasing Return on Investment (ROI) in people management systems through mediation programs that mediators can implement in small firms, non-profits, large corporations or other organizations.

Additional Resources:

Workplace Conflict and how Workplaces Can Harness it to Thrive (REPORT): https://img.en25.com/Web/CPP/Conflict_report.pdf

Contracting is a crucial part of the mediation process and often overlooked or poorly addressed. Inexperienced mediators worry that the parties (and their attorneys) will be so keen to rush into the content of their dispute that they will have no patience for crafting the container that will help carry them through. However, working with parties in mediation requires us to operate differently than parties usually behave in traditional approaches to conflict.

More specifically, clarifying that the parties are in charge of making decisions together to resolve their conflict shifts traditional allocation of responsibility from the professional to the parties, calls for the parties to deal directly with each other in the same room (with the help of the mediator) and opens the basis for the decisions beyond law and includes the personal dimensions of the conflict, including fairness.

One of the most challenging things that can come up in a conflict resolution process is when there are people outside the room negatively influencing the parties but not participating directly in the process. Sometimes, those influencers are the parties’ professional advisors or lawyers and that problem can often be solved by bringing them into the room. When the outside influencers are friends and family or people who can’t be brought into the room, it is a harder problem to solve. In this webinar, we address how to identify the interfering influencers outside the room and what to do about them to minimize their impact and focus on the people who matter without making anyone wrong.

Resources come in many forms, not just material possessions. In a conflict, the party with more knowledge, time, money, social capital, or something else can wield outsized control and power in the process and outcome. Join Katherine Miller and Gary Friedman to learn what we, as conflict professionals, can do to create balance, ensure active, meaningful participation in the process, and promote developments that serve both parties.

In every situation, we exist in relationship to others. The groups we all belong to – and our membership and place within them – impact interactions, expectations of each other, options, and outcomes. In a conflict resolution process, we know that awareness of social hierarchies and their impact on parties and us is critical.

Join Gary Friedman and Melanie Rowen to learn how to consider these existing social systems in creating the process and address stumbling blocks as they arise.

Every individual who walks into a conflict resolution process brings their style, quirks and ways of relating to others. In pairs or groups, unique patterns of interaction develop. How can we support a process that acknowledges the power dynamics created by these personality differences and relationship patterns and create the opportunity for parties to negotiate a sustainable agreement and possibly even change their relationship?

Join Catherine Conner and Melanie Rowen to learn about building awareness, identifying patterns, developing a process for managing internal reactions, and best practices for guiding change through personality differences and interactional patterns.

In this interactive webinar, Gary Friedman and Kim Gordon will discuss the value and benefits of starting a peer group for mediators and ADR practitioners. Drawing from decades of experience in conflict resolution and mediation, centered on the understanding-based model, Friedman and Gordon will share their process for forming peer groups and their foundational importance for developing mediation practices and guidance for creating excellent sources of support in collaborative professional support and self-reflection groups.

You’ve taken mediation and conflict resolution trainings and have begun developing the skills you need to serve clients in conflict, but how do you make that your day job? In this webinar, Catherine Conner and Melanie Rowen will discuss concrete tips for starting your own practice that includes or is focused on alternative dispute resolution, including mediation and collaborative practice.

Forgiveness can be a powerful force for restoring harmony and wholeness. A harmed person can find their freedom in practicing forgiveness. It can also empower them to move toward an amicable solution and allow the rebuilding of a fractured relationship.

An apology is a fragile beginning without accountability or a plan that acknowledges a release from guilt and responsibility for new or altered behavior that commits to better outcomes. However, many of us have a powerful instinct that a process that does not support accountability can be problematic, unhelpful, or worse. As conflict professionals, how can we create a process that supports taking responsibility and creating space for forgiveness?

Using our inner experience in the presence of conflict and unblocking ourselves from parties can open channels of communication that help parties understand their problem at a deeper level. Recognizing internal reactions that can get in the way of connecting to a client and working with that reaction to open our connection to the client can also open the way for the parties to communicate better.

Reactions to clients and their situations are essential to our relative effectiveness with them. Stories that clients bring into the room, filled with pain, frustration, anger, hope, and desire, can cause unconscious reactions that remind mediators of their own life. These reactions favor one side over another, create judgments, and lead to positive or negative bias.