5/7/11

Conflict Resolution For Your Business

By Maria Rivera


Conflict Resolution should be implemented as soon as possible whenever issues arise in your business. It's very common for businesses nowadays to operate in teams. Whether they be leader-driven groups or self-directed teams; the hope is that productivity, creativity, and outcomes will be greater in a team atmosphere. While this is a proven approach, whenever you assemble people from differing backgrounds and experiences, it is inevitable that conflict will occur. Many people and businesses look at conflict as a negative, something to be avoided. Yet conflict, differences, or disagreements are a natural result of people working together. Also, without conflict, teams can become complacent and not function at the best possible levels. The challenge then will become, how must the team be ready for this phase of their existence, and how must the team leader facilitate through it?

Experts suggest developing conflict resolution skills that help you prepare to move beyond personalities and decide on cooperation over adversarial responses. Conflict resolution capabilities are based upon the efficient communication and are helpful in de-escalating and managing workplace conflict. They also suggest that you choose from those which work best in your situation, such as creative reactions, empathy, suitable assertiveness, dealing with emotions, negotiation and mediation. Managing your reaction to workplace conflict with the development of conflict resolution abilities allows you to identify and efficiently employ the appropriate resolution strategy.

The first step in conflict administration is learning ways to avoid or reduce conflict. A team leader has a number of ways to accomplish this. Here are just some: At the beginning of each project, or every meeting, rules must be developed. These should include procedures or actions which the group enables or prohibit. Guidelines can be useful because as conflict arises, the head can refer the team to them for advice. These tend to be good objective recommendations that take away the head from the role of enforcer.

Another technique is to develop a group agreement on how the team will take care of conflict if it does take place. This gets them to focus on good resolution behaviors, and conditions the team with a process that is available if required.Training in conflict resolution or communicating skills would be priceless to a team. It will be preferable if the group could attend this training as a group. Lastly, you should give attention to the objectives of the team at the start of the task. Quite often conflict comes from goal imbalance, and if this is revealed and solved early, it could minimize problems later. If new members are combined with the team, then it would be good to re-visit this workout again.

Conflict Resolution must be done right away. One technique for resolving workplace conflict involves understanding the conflict response styles of all concerned and designing a method based on that knowledge. I recommend using the different conflict response styles of the employees to spot a strategy or a combination of strategies for your particular office conflict situation. Understanding the different conflict response styles likewise helps you to identify what has not worked in the past will help you to select a more effective strategy.




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