Individual & team coaching and organisational development. My work helps you do yours better.
Over recent weeks, I have discussed several techniques for leading a team through the process of change. For example, we have looked at areas such as Gestalt psychology and Appreciative Inquiry, which help you foster trust, acceptance and participation in the change process and so reduce the need for conflict management. While all of these […]
Over recent weeks, I have been talking at length about the different personalities and dynamics that we come across in any working environment and today I’m going to broaden that out to look at managing conflict. The fact is that everyone is different, and has their own values, attitudes and ways of expressing themselves. Another […]
The fear of crossing the bridge means you may never get to the other side – unless you can use emotional intelligence to build your way across. The way may not even be that difficult but when you run into an unfamiliar obstacle or a difficult challenge that has troubled you before it is normal […]
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 scientist Joseph Grenny perceptively notes that people lose control when they feel threatened. If […]
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 us and in our colleagues or bosses. Leadership […]
Let’s walk through Professor Brian Uzzi’s “3Rs” of converting rivals into allies. A young business school graduate has been appointed to a managerial position in a huge multinational company. He’s talented, intelligent, and exudes the kind of emotional, intellectual and behavioural alignments that excellent business leaders need. However, he has a problem: he has managerial […]
There is a peculiar fact about positive thinking: it tends to evoke a “shadow” of “negative” thoughts and feelings. If I am reminiscing about a lost loved one, I may find myself bathed in feelings of warmth and affection; however, sadness over the loss and even anger at being abandoned are never far away. What […]
Organisational Development (OD) aims at healthy organisational change through harnessing a common value base and collaborative inquiry. In reality, however, organisational life, and change, turns out to be a lot messier and a lot more unpredictable. A traditional model would see the process of OD like this: an OD consultant meets and gains entry to […]
When politics is all over UK television and a topic of discussion in every pub, it would be odd if people didn’t talk about it at work. Even if the company itself is scrupulously neutral, individual employees will still have opinions and sometimes those opinions can lead to conflict. How can you manage office politics […]
Last week, I argued that diagnosing the “temperature” of a workplace conflict accurately was crucial to conflict resolution. With conflicts that have become too hot, where one or more of the protagonists has become physically aggressive or threatening, or is using incendiary language and seems on the point of exploding, expecting them to sit down […]