About

Ben ZieglerWelcome!

I’m Ben Ziegler, a collaboration & conflict management specialist based in  Victoria, BC, Canada.

This website has served as my personal blog, since 2009. On it you’ll find 400+ posts, primarily focused on my communications, collaboration, and conflict management interests.

HOW I CAN HELP

As an independent consultant, I help individuals and small organizations realize constructive responses to their working together challenges. I’ve done this work through a variety of channels; including: individual and team coaching, negotiation support, mediation, workplace assessments, training and education workshops. My current priority is serving nonprofits and smaller organizations.

Challenges I’ve helped address:

  • Interpersonal skills: communications, collaboration, conflict management, x-cultural
  • Self-empowerment and advocacy
  • Destructive behaviours
  • Team dynamics
  • Respectful workplace
  • Organization conflict
  • Labour-management conflict
  • Building consensus across stakeholder groups
  • Public speaking

While conflict is inevitable, I also see it as a growth opportunity, for the individual and/or the organization. For the organization, effective responses to conflict can improve staff engagement and loyalty, workforce performance, customer service, and employee recruitment.

My core belief is that good things can happen when diverse people can come together, feel safe in the process, and have constructive conversations about things that are important to them.

Read more information about my services.

MY  EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS

I”ve resolved 600+ business, workplace and community disputes, served as a mediator and mentor (12 years) in the BC Court Mediation Program, and contracted as an online mediator with eBay and Consumer Protection BC. I also served as a system design consultant to multiple BC Government online dispute resolution initiatives.

As a consultant, I undertake communications and conflict management assignments and workshops, locally and internationally (as a volunteer advisor with Catalyste+, a Canadian NGO). For six years, with IdeaConnection, I led global virtual teams of problem-solvers working on innovation challenges.

I’m certified by the Workplace Fairness Institute, and certified in the Conflict Dynamics Profile®.

From 2019-2024, I also coordinated a regional advocacy program serving low-income seniors throughout the Greater Victoria Region. The program operated out of Quadra Village Community Centre.   

As a volunteer, I facilitated support groups for Family Caregivers of BC (including starting up BC’s first men’s support group), and have served on a variety of local boards and committees; seniors advocacy, restorative justice, community land-use, health reform.

In earlier times, I spent fifteen years as an IT business analyst and project manager.

All along, I’ve been driven by a desire to help people “get on the same page”, to discover their common interests, and to build positive outcomes from shared interests. I try do that in ways that are respectful and fair, for all parties involved.

LET’S CONNECT

You can send a note to me through my contact form, or call me at 1-250-516-3936.

Thanks for being here,

Ben