Leadership: Conflict to Collaboration

Explore how to change work relationships and interactions from conflict ridden, to collaborative.  You will explore deep listening, as it is the foundational skill for leadership. More than nodding in agreement, it requires a sustained effort to remain in the present moment and suspend judgement. Next, you will learn about the conflict episode, which begins you when become aware that something you care about is threatened. Once this occurs, there is a predictable path that every conflict episode follows. Understanding the episode flow can help you anticipate what is going to happen and take action that will avoid escalation and increase the possibility of resolution. There are three sources of conflicts and their distinctive solution paths. You will continue to learn about how to open up to search for the integrative space, utilizing your deep listening skills practices in the first workshop. Finally, you will learn how to go beyond hierarchical structured decision making, since it is ill-suited for complexity, responsiveness, engagement, and creativity. This new method emphasizes command and control as virtue and practice, and you will learn about examples of cutting-edge organizations that have evolved new models of decision-making. By the end of this program, you will: have multiple ways in which deep listening can create and implement new solutions that were previously beyond your reach; know the possibility and steps to create a third way of conflict management – the search for the integrative space; be able to apply methods to conflict stories to uncover opportunities that may have remained hidden to you; know how dialogical decision-making, advice-based decision-making, and the Solution Driven Method of Interaction (SDMI) are practiced and be able to articulate how these methods might be adapted to your own organization to become more responsive, engaged, and creative.