Navigating Conflict and Crucial Conversations

Overview

Whether dealing with interpersonal conflict, engaging in conversation, or negotiating your interests, this workshop explores your preferred conflict-handling mode and enhances your ability to use the mode that best fits the situation through the “Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument” or “Dealing with Conflict Instrument”, group discussions and select activities.

Multiple people on a team means many perspectives, opinions, communication styles, interpersonal wanted and expressed needs, personality preferences, and more. Now ask those teams to solve a problem, often with limited resources, and there’s bound to be conflict. Conflict is completely natural and inevitable.

Though everyone is different, there is a pattern to how most people handle conflict. The assessments call these patterns conflict-handling modes or conflict-handling styles. Understanding all the conflict modes helps you add to your bag of tools and choose which tool, or tools, will be most effective (although not necessarily the most comfortable to use) in different situations.

The Five Conflict-Handling Modes involve different levels of assertiveness (the degree to which you try to satisfy your own concerns) and cooperativeness (the degree to which you try to satisfy the concerns of another person):

• Competing is assertive and uncooperative, and typically the goal is to “win” (my direction is the right direction).

• Accommodating is unassertive and cooperative—the opposite of competing—and the goal is to “yield” (okay, we will do it your way).

• Avoiding is unassertive and uncooperative, and the goal is to “delay” (it will go away, or it is not worth my time, or I will deal with it tomorrow).

• Collaborating is both assertive and cooperative—the opposite of avoiding—and the goal is to “find a win-win solution” (how can we both come out ahead?).

• Compromising is moderately assertive and moderately cooperative, and the goal is to “find middle ground” (you get half and I get half).