Conflict resolution training for managers and professional people

The London based Skills with People course teaches a set of skills and insights that will not only help you avoid conflict when it’s avoidable but also enable you to resolve it when it happens.  The course is therefore highly relevant as conflict resolution training.

Working relationships are vulnerable.  A small misunderstanding can easily spiral downwards into damaging conflict.  The downward spiral involves three aspects of the relationship:

• the way people communicate with each other,
• the way they think together,
• the way they feel towards each other - the emotional atmosphere.

A problem in any of these three aspects of the relationship will affect the other two.  It might start with a miscommunication.  This will lead to confused thinking, which in turn leads to hostility or frustration.  This further damages the quality of communication, which inevitably leads to even more muddled thinking.  Consequently the emotional atmosphere deteriorates… and so on until the relationship totally breaks down.  

How can the downward spiral be reversed and conflict resolved?  You can’t force people into a meeting of minds.  The answer is not by knocking their heads together and telling them to snap out of it.  Premature peace negotiations are doomed to failure.  (Also see handling difficult people)

This conflict resolution training assumes it’s possible for the parties in the conflict to find a common goal.  Where there’s no common goal there can be no conflict resolution.  Where there is a common goal, if you take it carefully step by step you can be optimistic about resolving the conflict.

See also the "Skills with People" course contents