How well do you manage conflict with petulant employees, disrespectful clients, belligerent colleagues or demanding bosses? When mis-managed, conflict can intensify, spread and lead to irreparable damage. It can distance, derail and destroy important relationships, both personal as well as professional. It can be ignited by disparities in power, status, class, race, gender and generational differences. Unproductive conflict makes people anxious, wastes time, lowers productivity, and impairs teamwork and morale. Managers now spend at least half of their time mired in conflict. And, post-pandemic, conflict in the workplace is on the rise as we more stridently disagree about how to solve complex problems. More generally, we have become divisive, cranky and unhappy.
While most shy away from conflict, properly handled, it can be a wonderful opportunity for progress, growth, innovation and mutual profit improvement. Knowing how to prevent unproductive and unnecessary conflict is critical to our emotional health, credibility and prosperity. Learning how to establish rapport, align with different personalities, disagree without being disagreeable, handle unreasonable requests, or deal with overly aggressive people are essential life skills. If you’re either uncomfortable with or fear conflict, are overly accepting of obnoxious behaviours or suppress your true feelings just to accommodate others, then this webinar series was designed with you in mind. It will show you how to get off the defensive and transform manipulation, intimidation, criticism, nefarious behaviors and gamesmanship into opportunities for cooperation.
This fast-paced, interactive learning experience is aimed at strengthening your ability to achieve your personal or business objectives through the use of influence, alignment and behaviour modification skills. It focuses on developing conflict intelligence – the aptitude, skills and presence of mind for anyone who regularly deals with annoying and troublesome encounters, whether these be trivial disagreements with colleagues or loved ones or deeply visceral disputes that release uncontrolled anger, despair and revenge. Learn how deal with different personalities, confront problem or pathological behaviours, develop a repertoire of coping skills and magical responses, handle prickly conversations or emotional blackmailers, disagree without being disagreeable, and prevent or de-escalate destructive and unproductive conflicts.
In this highly practical course, you will discover how to:
❏ Make conflict work for you, rather than against you;
❏ Recognize the positive potential in almost any conflict situation;
❏ Discover your predominant conflict management and social relating style;
❏ Turn conflicts into opportunities for cooperation and constructive problem solving;
❏ Deal effectively with confrontation, intimidation, criticism and emotional blackmail;
❏ Get off the defensive and prevent unproductive, time-consuming, nasty disagreements;
❏ Manage your hot and cool buttons by developing self-awareness and control under pressure;
❏ Learn the tactics for dealing with pathologically miserable, insensitive and annoying people; and
❏ Increase your personal effectiveness, credibility, assertiveness and capacity to influence others.
The webinar series addresses the above topics in the following sequence:
Part 1: The fundamentals of conflict management and confrontation
Part 2: How to deal with criticism and influence difficult behaviours
Part 3: Prevention: Stopping, avoiding and de-escalating unproductive conflict
** Includes a Pre-course Workbook and instructional manual of Supplemental Notes.