In the first part of this series, I described the cooling effects on an overheating conversation of taking responsibility for one’s role in verbal escalations. Here are some other powerful methods of preventing conversational fires to add to your repertoire. Social...
In an interview on the Ashridge Executive Education blog, the relational coaching expert Professor Ernesto Spinelli describes how relational coaching means understanding that neither the coach nor the coached exists in isolation. According to Professor Spinelli, they...
I’d like to proceed with itemising Adrian Lock’s remedies for the stress-saturated work-life that today’s business leaders so often find themselves drowning in. If you rarely take the opportunity to slow down, maybe one of these is driving you! If quarterly reports...
Last time, we summarised the three major sources of team conflict identified by leadership expert Annie McKee (insecurity, desire for power and habitual victimhood). I’d like to explore what can be done to prevent these patterns from undermining and sabotaging the...
Where does team conflict come from? One of the answers, of course, seems obvious once you name it: emotion. Aggressive emotion to be precise. Emotion can overheat – it’s volatile stuff – and it makes much better sense to learn to become aware of its influence, both in...
MIT professor Edgar Schein suggests the open inquiry approach I concluded with last time is one of three modes of inquiry; he calls it ‘pure inquiry’). We move on from pure inquiry to what Schein calls ‘diagnostic inquiry’ - focusing in closely on specific elements of...