Charles is a coach and assessor on the Conflict Dynamics mediators skills training course. He is a Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution accredited commercial mediator Charles is an attorney and an ADR specialist. After several years of legal practice, most notably at the Legal Resources Centre, a public interest law firm, where he served under Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson, he was appointed executive director of the Independent Mediation Service of South Africa (IMSSA) in 1987.

From 1987 to 1995 he steered IMSSA’s growth into a national organisation and conducted several hundred mediations and arbitrations across all sectors of the South African economy. In the early 1990s, during a time of heightened political conflict, he chaired the Soweto Peace Committee. In 1994 he was appointed as a commissioner of the Independent Electoral Commission which oversaw South Africa’s first national democratic elections. In 1995/6, under the auspices of the ILO, he assisted in the establishment of the Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), South Africa’s first national public dispute settlement agency, and then served as the CCMA’s first executive director.

From 1998 to 2008 he directed technical cooperation projects in Africa for the ILO. He has facilitated labour law reform projects and the establishment of several national dispute settlement agencies in Southern African countries. This work required him to establish relationships with government, business and unions at a senior level in South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. In addition, he has undertaken work with the tripartite partners in Angola, Nigeria and Tanzania.

Since 2008 he has been consulting in the field of employee relations and has been involved in high-level interventions to resolve commercial disputes, labour disputes, and to address dysfunctional relationships and systems in corporate settings and in professional service firms. He has also managed major multi-stakeholder negotiations in both the public and private sectors. In 2009 he received Tokiso’s Mediator of the Year award. He is the executive chairman of Stratalign (Pty) Ltd, a company consulting in HRD, employee relations, and organizational coherence strategy. and he has served as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Cape Town. He serves on the board of Resource Africa an NGO committed to promoting sustainable resource management to benefit rural communities in Southern Africa

Charles is available to train in English.