Conflict Resolution Training

Few managers have been taught techniques of effective conflict management. In today’s high-pressure workplaces, managers who possess these essential skills are more valuable than ever. It’s a misconception that managing conflicts is purely intuitive. Proven, research-based conflict management techniques exist, and conflict resolution training courses can teach them. CME’s Managing Conflict and Disagreement teaches them powerfully and rapidly, using our exclusive Management of Differences Inventory™ to help employees understand their own tendencies, select the right technique for each situation, and skillfully adjust if their first approach doesn’t work.

The Managing Conflict and Disagreement Program introduces a complete framework for constructively managing conflict in the workplace and gives your managers hands-on experience for applying it.
Conflict resolution training participants first learn four core principles for successful conflict management: principles that will guide their experience together and ground their day-to-day work when they return home.

Based on what they learn about themselves through a realistic conflict management simulation, participants discuss the most common obstacles to constructive disagreement: inflexibility, too much flexibility, overinvolvement, or conversely, too much impersonal distance.

Using CME’s exclusive Management of Differences Inventory™, managers explore nine conflict resolution strategies — learning how to widen their repertoires beyond their own comfort zones, when to choose each technique, when to recognize that a strategy isn’t working and try something else, and how to use all nine strategies more successfully.

Building on this, they turn to the conflict management lifecycle, learning to manage all four of its phases: exploration, preparation, implementation, and follow-up. For each, they discover questions that can lead to more effective conflict resolution. Finally, participants practice the techniques they’ve learned, and build an actionable plan for workplace conflict resolution in their own organizations.

Participants Will:

• Understand their own typical responses to conflict in the workplace
• Discover 9 powerful techniques for successfully resolving conflicts and disagreements
• Learn how to choose the right strategy for each situation, and change course if it doesn’t work
• Understand diverse conflict styles and manage difficult people more successfully
• Practice strategies for responding at all 4 steps of a conflict’s lifecycle
• Build an actionable plan for their own workplaces

A Closer Look at the Program

In four hours of focused conflict resolution training, participants gain deeper insight into the nature and causes of workplace conflict, discover practical techniques for addressing it productively, learn to choose and apply these techniques throughout any conflict, and practice conflict management hands-on to deepen mastery of essential skills.

Part I: Guiding Principles

Participants explore four core principles underlying all effective conflict management:

• Respect the other person, even when your views differ
• Listen with empathy to what is being said — and not said
• Find common ground without forcing change
• Honor diversity, including your own perspective

Part II: Simulation: Personal Business at Work

Participants organize into teams, confront a common conflict in the workplace, and assess advantages and disadvantages of each potential solution.

Part III: Management of Differences Inventory™ (MODI)

Participants discover CME’s exclusive practical model for managing conflicts, explore common obstacles to constructive disagreement, and consider the implications through a practical exercise.

Part IV: Nine Approaches to Managing Disagreement Constructively

Participants walk through MODI’s nine conflict management techniques, discuss the strengths and limitations of each, and learn which types of conflicts can best be addressed by each.

Part V: Four-Phase Process for Managing Disagreement

To move efficiently towards a positive resolution, participants learn how to respond and what questions to ask throughout each phase of the conflict management lifecycle:

• Explore
• Prepare
• Implement
• Follow-up

Next, they practice developing questions for a conflict they’ve experienced in their own workplaces.

Part VI: Skill Building Practice

Working as teams, participants practice everything they’ve learned.

Part VII: Summary and Action Plan

Participants review key conflict resolution training takeaways, and build an actionable plan for addressing conflicts at their own companies.

What You’ll Get

You’ll get all you need to successfully lead this course and help managers at all levels master conflict management.

Conflict Management Trainer’s Guide

Your scripted Conflict Management Trainer’s Guide gives novice and seasoned trainers tools for facilitating the entire program from start to finish:

• A program overview
• Preparation steps and techniques
• Script with clear instructions
• Pre-tested questions and observations to jumpstart and enrich discussions

Management of Differences Inventory™

The most comprehensive conflict management instrument available, MODI assesses how an individual handles disagreement using the Kindler nine-mode conflict model, enabling participants to identify habitual patterns and improve their responses. (20 copies included; more available for purchase)

Conflict Management Program Participant Workbooks

The Conflict Management Participant Workbook supports facilitators in helping learners systematically build conflict resolution skills. It offers extensive opportunities for each participant to reflect, contribute, and generate actionable plans. (20 copies included; more available for purchase)

“Trusted Employee” Conflict Management Video

A realistic scenario to quickly illuminate common forms of conflict in the workplace, and promote productive discussion.