Bio Ilana Sachar
Ilana is a BA (UNISA) graduate, with majors in Communication and Industrial Psychology. She has 10 years of experience as a FAMAC accredited family mediator and an ADR Group (UK) accredited commercial and civil mediator. In addition, she has more than 20 years of experience as a communication specialist.
Ilana believes in empowering people and few things are as empowering as knowledge and the ability to communicate our needs and aspirations clearly.
Her professional experience includes:
Communication specialist at Caltex (later Chevron) South Africa, where her roles and responsibilities encompassed facilitating change management in respect of redistribution of roles and responsibilities due to restructuring, the creation of new working teams, and the amalgamation of different departments. She participated in creating effective training material, including personal development programmes to enable people to better handle change, and understanding management styles and how they affect one another.
Able to comfortably interact with staff across the board, Ilana’s experience has taught her that if people can be assisted to communicate with each other, almost all disputes can be resolved before they grow into conflicts. An important element of this is understanding people, their issues, and how conflict develops.
Corporate social responsibility as part of the Chevron communication specialist portfolio. Whilst based at the refinery, Ilana was part of the team that addressed neighbouring communities’ concerns relating to the refinery operation and associated conflict management. She was also involved in the company’s outreach and upliftment programmes.
Alternate dispute resolution (ADR) post-Caltex
Since turning her attention to mediation, Ilana has focussed on creating a mediation practice, and training. Her forte is dispute resolution with a specific orientation towards understanding the psychology of interpersonal dynamics and conflicting positions.
She has a special interest in transformative mediation, which is typically used to assist parties to improve or transform relationships. It embraces a range of communication skills in a very flexible process so parties can work productively towards improving an eroded relationship and thus can continue to interact with each other.