Managing Conflict — Facilitated Team Workshops

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• Managing Conflict in the Workplace
• Facilitated Team Workshop

Being effective at conflict management means reading the situation, being able to make choices about how to behave, expressing yourself appropriately and being aware of your feelings. The only behaviour any one of us has control over is our own, but through our behaviours we can influence other people and turn around difficult situations.

Ripasso workshops are hands-on sessions where teams can practice and reflect on skills which enable them to retain greater positive influence over situations where difficult team dynamics, difficult customers, conflict or aggression are factors to be dealt with. Each workshop is individually designed as the types of conflict issues a team may be experiencing are many and varied.  These examples show the types of workshops Ripasso has held recently:

Example 1

A technical services team was not getting on and this was spilling out to the wider workplace, damaging the reputation of the team and creating distress for individual team members. 

Ripasso created a team workshop which explored the issues and assisted the team to develop strategies to move forward.  The exercises were fun, non-threatening and engaging.  The team identified that a continuing source of conflict was the different attitudes to working cooperatively during peak workloads and the need for a more consistent approach to asking for and providing help.

Example 2

A support services team was in conflict with a significant number of its internal customers.  The customers felt the team was not responsive to their needs and difficult to deal with.  The team felt it was not appreciated and reduced to tasks which did not utilise its skills effectively.  An engagement survey confirmed that these issues were front and centre for both individual team members, management and internal customers. 

A series of workshops was held using the metrics of the engagement survey as a starting point to address the issues.  The team developed strategies during the workshops which focused on taking responsibility for the quality of the relationships it had with its customers.

Example 3

A group of professionals was falling apart as individual members routinely complained about each other within the team.  Management was experiencing difficulty recruiting internally as other employees did not want to apply for a role in a team that was labelled as toxic. 

Ripasso designed a workshop around the Thomas-Kilmann conflict modes model, which identified that the majority of team members preferred to avoid conflict rather than address it in a timely way.  By working through options for dealing with different conflict situations as a team, a way out of the conflict-ridden environment was created.

Example 4

An organisation was experiencing issues when dealing with customer complaints.  These often required individuals across different departments to work cooperatively to resolve customer complaints but there were different attitudes towards complaining customers. 

The Ripasso workshop put those individuals in the room together to develop a single coherent model for dealing with difficult and aggressive customers.  Two key outcomes were a shared understanding as to when a customer’s behaviour crossed the line from acceptable to unacceptable and the preferred way to hand a customer over from one area to another.