Imagine a senior leadership team that views conflict as a positive force for change rather than an impediment to progress. When conflict arises, the team embraces different perspectives as essential to making the best decisions to meet their objectives. They analyze important information, debate key issues and use their differences as assets rather than detractors. They recognize that, in organizations, conflict signals something wanting to change. Because companies rely on their teams to execute strategy, innovate new ideas and implement initiatives, recognizing this signal is essential to managing conflict strategically.
Yet often even the most talented teams are derailed or less effective due to nonproductive or unresolved conflict. Talented team members often focus on their own department or agenda, creating a team siloes that fight for resources, try to win at all costs or engage in destructive politics. These teams lose sight of their mission, their goals and the results they need to achieve. After a time, these teams either gridlock in conflict or engage in artificial harmony by sweeping conflict "under the rug".
Fortunately, teams can learn to not only resolve conflict, but to use it as a springboard into clear communication, the generation of new ideas and solutions and strategic decision making. Managing team conflict is the art of fostering trust, debating conflicts productively as they arise and facilitating clear, honest communication. It involves a high degree of respect, close listening and curiosity about different viewpoints. Highly functioning teams can debate challenging topics, work through tensions and hold each other accountable for results.
It's not uncommon for individual leaders on a team to be uncomfortable with conflict, avoiding it or escalating it into a confrontation. In order to shift these patterns of behavior, teams often need "slow to speed up" by stepping back to understand how they handle conflict now, how they want to manage it and how to bridge that gap. Strategic conflict resolution includes asking and answering questions such: What is each conflict signaling? What's the benefit of this conflict? What can we learn? What skills do we each need to bring to be our best selves in the conversation? What role does our organizational culture play, if any?
During this webinar, participants will learn what causes team conflict, how teams members have habitual, often patterned responses to conflict that drive their discussions and decision making and what behaviors they need to adopt to make conflict a strategic asset.