Coaching Groups on How to be Teams
posted by ewright
Are your clients in desperate need of resolving workplace conflict and building stronger, cohesive teams?
Here is a quick start guide that you can provide to your clients for managing conflict more effectively within their teams.
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Quick Start Guide to Conflict Resolution
In order to handle conflict constructively, you must first understand your individual team member styles of conflict as well as your own. Then, you should identify your overall team’s style for dealing with conflict.
Each team member has a predominant conflict style, and different conflict styles are adopted because people experience conflict in different ways and have different guiding principles and values regarding conflict. Each style can contribute to an essential aspect of the team’s process:
- Advocating positions that have merit (competitor)
- Finding innovative win, win solutions (collaborator)
- Managing time costs (avoider)
- Building goodwill and cohesiveness (accommodater)
- Providing moderation and balance (compromiser)
You can deal more effectively with styles other than your own by:
- Guarding against overdoing your style with behaviors that create problems
- Using your dominant style only when it seems appropriate
- Interacting constructively with teammates who have other styles
Your team’s style provides certain strengths and challenges. It is important that your team be able to switch to other conflict-handling modes when different issues arise. Below are recommendations for any team to increase its effectiveness.
- Raise the conflict issue
- Identify team members’ underlying concerns (the thing they most care about that is stake in the issue)
- State an integrative goal (the win-win goal of finding a solution that most fully satisfies the concerns of the conflicting team members)
- Generate a range of possible solutions
- Pick the best (most integrative) of the solutions by evaluating their consequences
To be an effective team, you must reach agreements on goals, make good decisions about how to achieve those goals, and help each other accomplish activities, despite differences.
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To learn more about conflict resolution tools that can help your clients, visit www.cpp.com/tki.
Carol Brownlee
September 17th, 2009 at 9:15 am
I’m new to this blog and just trying to figure out how to navigate through it. I am looking for examples of E-I, S-N, T-F and J-P activities for an MBTI workshop. My MBTI-certified colleauges and I have been using the same ones for a long time, have changed them up recently but with mixed results, so I’d like to hear about what others are doing in their workshops.
Thanks in advance.
Carol
agammy
September 17th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Hi Carol! I’m happy to have you on the blog. We do post exercises in some of our entries, and there are a few on the website now. I would also love to get some feedback from other ICONs about what works for them. We’ll start hunting down some new exercises to post soon, but for now, here is one for S/N - http://www.cppiconsuccess.com/2008/11/sweet-sweet-learning-mms-and-mbti/ - and here’s another general exercise to use with larger groups - http://www.cppiconsuccess.com/2009/08/new-exercise-from-the-cpp-and-ama-webinar/ -