Conflict Facilitation as a Leadership Skill: A Systems Approach for Leaders & Coaches

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Whether hot and messy or cold and hidden, conflict surrounds us as leaders. There are two common choices: become the arbitrator who breaks the tie, or throw up our hands in exasperation, deciding it’s the (self-organized) team’s problem. A third, more powerful approach is to become a skilled conflict facilitator. This hands-on workshop provides four interrelated systems intelligence tools and mindsets to help you prevent destructive conflict and encourage the creative kind: positive/negative ratio, deep democracy, the Conflict Dynamics model, and conflict protocols.

The relationship systems approach, from CRRGlobal, will be discussed and facilitated by two experienced agile + relationship systems coaches in this session. First laying a foundation with the team’s positive/negative behavioral ratio, to create a positive emotional bank account that helps people “assume positive intent” and strengthen resiliency. We then add an attitude for the leader called Deep Democracy, a systems approach to hearing all voices in a system. The heart of the approach is familiarity with the common constructive and destructive behaviors exhibited by people in conflict from the Conflict Dynamics model, a framework to think about how we get into conflict as a team. Do we take each other’s perspective? Or, do we try to win the argument at all costs? There are a total 15 such behaviors, based on research into how people and teams really get into conflict. If I know these, I can talk to my team about them, have a discussion of what our “favorite” behaviors, then agree to work on eliminating or minimizing the destructive ones, whether passive or active. Finally, we add a behavioral structure — Conflict Protocols — to prepare teams for the heat of conflict. You will get practice with the Conflict Dynamics model and with Conflict Protocols in this session.