Facilitating courageous conversations and achieving sustainable outcomes
About
Felicity Steadman
I have been a mediator and facilitator for most of my professional life. I have a busy mediation practice based in Oxford UK, working throughout the UK and internationally.
My strength and experience is in employment and workplace dispute resolution, and as a member of CEDR Chambers panel of mediators I mediate a wide range of contractual disputes. I enjoy designing and facilitating relationship building processes with teams that are struggling to work together effectively.
My career started out in the turbulent apartheid years in South Africa where I honed my dispute resolution skills and my capacity to work with diverse groups of people. It was a privilege to play a small
part in the transition to democracy in the field of industrial relations and with the National Peace Accord. This is where my passion began for working with people and the problems they encounter at work and in their communities and business relationships.
About
Felicity Steadman
I have been a mediator and facilitator for most of my professional life. I have a busy mediation practice based in Oxford UK, working throughout the UK and internationally.
My strength and experience is in employment and workplace dispute resolution, and as a member CEDR Chambers and the Court of Appeal panel of mediators I mediate a wide range of contractual disputes. I enjoy designing and facilitating relationship building processes with teams that are struggling to work together effectively.
Countries
Years Mediating
Cases
Mediation
My first experience of mediation was in 1986 as a young negotiator on the management negotiation team of a large company.
Talks had stalled and we agreed that a mediator be brought in to assist. He worked in separate rooms with our team and with the other team, shuttling back and forth and helping us move beyond our positions and the grandstanding to what was really important to us both. We achieved a settlement in a day. That’s when I knew I wanted to be a mediator.
Since then I have trained and been accredited as a mediator in South Africa, the US and the UK. I have worked as a mediator in many different settings with a diversity of people and problems. I train mediators in the UK and South Africa, and internationally too.
facilitation
As my experience grew as a mediator, I saw opportunities to apply my skills in situations where teams face performance and relationship problems.
For example, unions and management face difficulties trusting one another following protracted industrial action or redundancies. In other situations, relationships in teams become strained as a result of changing circumstances such as the need to co-operate in times of COVID-19.
As a facilitator, I design a process in consultation with the parties and then manage the process such that everybody has an opportunity to participate firstly in problem analysis and then in option generation and a search for solutions.
