Resolving Conflict

A business culture characterised by ongoing conflict creates a damaging working environment and inevitably leads to inefficiency and poor performance. Or, at least that was the conclusion of a leading Irish company who identified it as a business challenge they needed to address.

The root cause of conflict were traced to three interconnected factors:

• At an organisational level roles were not adequately defined and and staff expectations were unrealistic
• This was re-enforced by a culture of vague and inefficient communications between department heads, and
• Staff had not had the opportunity to acquire the skills needed to address these problems in a proactive and consistent way

The college was asked to map out a way of dealing with these challenges. After a detailed consultation process it developed a solution that combined a need-specific, custom training programme with elements of mentoring and business-process consulting.

At the heart of the solution was a customised conflict management, mediation and creative problem programme for departmental management teams. This looked at conflict as an interpersonal, departmental and inter-departmental challenge and explored ways in which mediation could be used to address it. The use of creative problem solving as a conflict resolution tool was also explored.

Expert-led workshops were used to provide a real-world context for the training. These gave people the opportunity to:

• Tease out why and how various types of conflict were occurring within the organisation
• Collectively develop a shared understanding of each other’s role, responsibilities and work pressures
• Set up better communication processes between business units
• Understand how dialogue, collaboration and communication work, in practical terms, as conflict resolution tools for individuals and the business