Conflict Resolution

Too often, conflict takes place away from the spotlight or is buried until an eruption undermines a team’s ability to work together on common goals. In these situations, investing in a comprehensive conflict resolution and collaboration strategy, although time-consuming, is necessary for moving forward again. I develop customized facilitation services around this general plan:

Stage 1: Intervention, based on initial identification of conflict sources and severity. This may include interviews, surveys, leadership meetings and/or team sessions
Stage 2: Rebuilding collaboration capacity. This may include forming an internal team, gathering data on progress in rebuilding trust, and/or training sessions on collaboration skills that also focus on existing organizational goals
Stage 3: Building ongoing capacity. In facilitated sessions, leaders and the internal team create sustainable mechanisms for ensuring new employees and team members learn the processes, collaboration skills, and other team effectiveness strategies that are now part of the organization’s culture.

Pricing

As with many skills-based services, the most straight-forward way to talk about price is with that hated phrase, “it depends.”

Conflict resolution varies greatly in scope, depending on the causes, depth and breadth of the ongoing tensions. Services may include stakeholder interviews, surveys, mediation, development of an inside team for sustainable change, team sessions, and individual coaching.

Please contact me for a complimentary, confidential discussion of your needs. I’ll make a recommendation regarding the scope of services necessary to restore your team or organization to healthy relationships and we’ll explore how to work within your resources.

Workshop versions

Unleashing the Positive Power of Differences
All too often, initiatives collapse or solutions simply generate new problems because leaders fail to learn from the concerns of other stakeholders. Through hands-on learning, reflection, and case studies you’ll learn to use polarity thinking—a powerful approach to bridging differences—to shift conversations from conflict to collaboration. Readers will find:

Ways to recognize polarities, map the positive and negative aspects, and channel energy wasted on disagreement toward a greater common purpose
Tools for introducing and working with polarities
Polarity mapping to help leaders improve processes for leading change and creating buy-in

Leadership Coaching for Collaboration
Collaboration is not a natural human skill, but we can learn to work more effectively with others by developing a deep understanding of our different but equally valuable approaches to work and life. The framework of Jungian personality type describes such differences in how we are energized, take in information, make decisions and approach work—all key factors in collaboration. In this workshop, leaders will first improve their own collaboration skills and then learn to use type tools to improve collaboration skills in their organizations. Contact me to learn about business and education versions of this workshop.

Books about conflict resolution

Unleashing the Positive Power of Differences: Polarity Thinking For Our Schools This book customizes the rich research and tools of polarity thinking for K-12 educators. Included are clear explanations of why we keep seeing pendulum swings for issues such as the Math Wars, the Common Core, teacher evaluation and others–and how we might better move forward. And, it’s filled with tools for leaders and teachers to use to improve initiative implementation, reduce resistance, and foster higher-level thinking in students. Purchase Unleashing the Positive Power of Differences

Work It Out: Using Personality Type to Improve Team Performance Sandra Hirsh and I wrote this book to assist business leaders, managers, and consultants in simplifying the complex interactions between people at work. Each chapter explains a different method for looking at normal differences in human behavior and how type theory impacts leadership and management styles. Case studies and techniques to try make resolving personality conflicts and improving organization performance simple. Purchase Work It Out

Using the MBTI ® Tool in Organizations This binder combines the tools that Sandra and I have developed over the years for team building, leadership development, change management, communication and more. Complete with facilitation directions, notes and reproducible masters, it’s a resource you’ll return to again and again. Purchase Using the MBTI Tool in OrganizationS