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: consultant, mediator, facilitator, advocate, coach, trainer, speaker. My first priority is helping local small businesses and nonprofits where I live.
Challenges I’ve helped address; include:
- Interpersonal skills development; communications, collaboration, conflict management, x-cultural, virtual
- Dispute resolution
- Destructive behaviours
- Team dynamics
- Respectful workplace issues
- Organizational conflict
- Labour-management conflict
- Building consensus across stakeholder groups
- Negotiations support
- Education and training
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. When I can, I promote Your Conflict Advantage.
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.
A BIT ABOUT 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 workplace consultant, I undertake communications and conflict management assignments and workshops, locally and internationally (as a volunteer advisor with Catalyste+, a Canadian NGO, in Asia, Africa and South America).
For six years, with IdeaConnection, I led global virtual teams of diverse problem-solvers working on innovation challenges. Typically, I facilitated a team of five, with participants, each with a unique expertise, from around the world.
I’m certified by the Workplace Fairness Institute, and certified in the Conflict Dynamics Profile®.
From 2019-2024, I was also led a regional advocacy program serving low-income seniors throughout the Greater Victoria Region. This successful program operated out of a terrific local nonprofit, Quadra Village Community Centre, with whom I was employed on a part-time basis.
As a volunteer, I have facilitated support groups for Family Caregivers of BC (including starting up BC’s first men’s support group), and served on a variety of local boards and committees; including: seniors advocacy, restorative justice, neighbourhood associations, health reform.
In earlier times, I spent many years in the IT and construction fields.
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,