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Important Topics on Harnessing the Power of Conflict

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Four Myths That Perpetuate Abrasive Behavior At Work

When we join a company, partnership or team, our expectation is that everyone involved will exhibit professional behavior toward us and each other. Instead, it’s highly possible that we may become one of the more than 60 million adults in the United States who are affected in some way by bullying behavior at work.

What kind of behaviors are we talking about? Our definition is any interpersonal behavior that causes emotional distress in others sufficient enough to impede their productivity or disrupt organizational functioning. It isn’t just a personality conflict — it’s a chronic pattern of disrespectful behavior.

When your business team starts spiraling down

A healthy business team is one with strong relationships and vibrant engagement. It’s a beautiful place to be, where people feel heard and creative ideas bump against each other in an open, constructive way. We call it the Creative Tension Zone and it’s the dream (or should be) of any organization with an aim toward consistent growth.

Teams fall out of this place for various reasons, and the spiral downward can devolve into destructive conflict. It is critical to know where you and your team are on the Conflict Curve in order to make good decisions in “real time” so you can recognize what’s happening and pull your team back from the Conflict Spiral abyss.

The Difference Between HR and Organizational Ombuds Functions

On average an ombuds will see 3-5% of an organization’s members in the course of a year. Our work as organizational ombuds has increased steadily over the last couple of years, where we’re initially called in because someone in leadership is being dogged by a “small” conflict that won’t go away but keeps festering and growing until they can’t sweep it under the rug any longer. (From there, we typically enter a contractual arrangement with clients where we serve as their ongoing go-to ombuds, mediator, and conflict adviser.)

10 Ways an Ombudsman Can Increase Your Workplace Productivity

He could have been sitting in the corner of the conference room where I was convening as Organizational Ombuds for a team that was stuck - there was (emotional) clutter, plenty of discord, and a really difficult situation. Tension was high, people were venting. At any moment (my experience told me) someone could explode with frustration. It was like a freight train approaching the room, about to crash!

Creative Tension in the Workplace: Who needs it? You do!

Creative Tension Zone is where huge ideas emerge, innovation thrives, and empires are built! The most successful workplace teams know how to manage constructive conflict to encourage creative tension. What every leader needs to know about leveraging the power of conflict in a team.

Workplace Conflict: How to Deal with Hot Buttons

Have you ever said: “That person just presses my buttons”? We call these 'conflict hooks', because your reaction to the button-pusher has the potential to feed conflict. Understanding what conflict hooks are can help you and your team make better response choices.

9 Early Warning Signs of Workplace Conflict

Conflict doesn't just appear out of nowhere. There are always signs warning that a conflict is developing. Managers who know what these signs are can be more effective leaders by confronting the problem before it rages out of hand. By resolving conflict in the early stages, the company will run much more smoothly and the overall productivity level will be increased considerably. What are these subtle signs of conflict to look for?...

July 14, 2016

The Most Effective Innovation Generator You've Probably Never Heard of

July 14, 2016/ Mark Batson Baril

Many businesses rely on innovation for success. There is a lot of literature on how to encourage the creative thinking that inspires innovation, but you won’t often hear this tip: Welcome conflict into your teams! Yet this is exactly what I’m enthusiastically promoting. It sounds counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Most leaders are busy looking for ways to avoid fights and disputes, not invite them.

Conflict is a natural part of human behavior and...

June 09, 2016

3 Steps to Building Trust Within Your Team

June 09, 2016/ Mark Batson Baril

We explored in the earlier article "How Trust is Essential to a productive Workplace," what can happen when trust is missing, and how trust is a cornerstone to employee engagement, productivity, and more. As Dr. David Ballard, the head of APA's Center for Organizational Excellence, says: “...Lack of trust should serve as a wake-up call for employers...Trust plays an important role in the workplace and affects employees’ well-being and job performance."

May 12, 2016

How Trust is Essential to a Productive Workplace

May 12, 2016/ Mark Batson Baril

Trust is both a cause and an effect of organization culture. Most experts would agree that trust is perhaps the most vital element of a productive, harmonious, and synergistic work environment. One Harvard University study showed that the level of trust in the work environment greatly influenced the productivity as well as the happiness of employees. According to Dr. Nancy Etcoff, the lead researcher on the study, work environments that foster positivity, interpersonal trust, respect, open communication and quality personal relationships build the most committed and productive workforce.

What does building trust mean to your workplace?

April 14, 2016

9 Things You May Not Know About Mediation

April 14, 2016/ Mark Batson Baril

Many people think mediation is simply an alternative to a legal suit, but it can be much more. It can create a more empowered and productive workplace environment. The best time to learn mediation techniques and have a mediation plan is before you actually need it!...

March 17, 2016

Google Re-Breaks the Code on Team Dynamics

March 17, 2016/ Mark Batson Baril

A recent article by Charles Duhigg in the NY Times, revealed and confirmed some of the most interesting findings I have ever seen around team dynamics and high performance. If you read nothing else about team dynamics this year, I highly recommend finishing my short synopsis in this post, and, popping over to the full article What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. It will be worth every minute, I promise.

Over the past five years Google engaged in a special project (Project Aristotle) that was tasked with breaking the code on how to build a perfect team. They have a huge workforce, a great number of teams, and methodologies to measure and analyze results that are second to none. They originally set out to see if they could predict what types of personality types and experience could be matched together to build a high performing team. The results of all that work…

February 11, 2016

9 Early Warning Signs of Workplace Conflict

February 11, 2016/ Mark Batson Baril

January 04, 2016

The Special Sauce For A Productive Workplace

January 04, 2016/ Mark Batson Baril

A quick search online will show how much workplace productivity is being talked about these days, with myriad solutions being offered, many of them basically short-term tips. At the end of the day what we’re really talking about is building a workplace culture that keeps employees not just at their desks doing work, but actively engaged, inspired and committed to organizational goals.

In this highly complex and swiftly-changing environment, it may not be surprising that only about 25% of business leaders have an employee engagement strategy in place, even though 90% feel that such a strategy has a positive impact on business success...

December 11, 2015

The Leader's Guide: The Key to Boosting Employee Engagement in Your Workplace - It’s Not What You Think

December 11, 2015/ Mark Batson Baril

Employee engagement is a hot topic in business these days, and for good reason. To put the issue into stark perspective, here are two statistics for you: 70% of U.S. workers have been found to be either not engaged or actively disengaged at work (Source: Gallup “State of the American Workplace” 2014 report); and increasing employee engagement investments by 10% can increase profits by $2,400 per employee, per year (Source: Workplace Research Foundation).

What is the key to increased employee engagement? Higher compensation, company outings and better food in the cafeteria help, but achieving sustainable success goes much deeper than this. For us, conflict advisors who work with individuals, leaders and teams on-site in all kinds of organizations, what consistently rises to the top is this factor:

November 30, 2015

Save Your Company through Mediation Only?

November 30, 2015/ Mark Batson Baril

“If this thing fails, I’m not sure what I’m going to do,” Lance tells me as we finish our first call.. “And under no circumstances can our investors find out what’s going on.”

Par for the course for a mediator to hear, and quite understandable. I give him the assurances of confidentiality and a look at the powerful toolbox we as an experienced mediation team will be drawing from. And this reality check: “I guarantee that at the end of this process there will be change; and I guarantee that not everyone is going to like it.” That’s often how the “team performance sessions” begin when we get called in to support a team in crisis.

He and his cofounders are about to entrust us with some of the most important things in the world to them – their startup dreams and their identities. Sugar coating what they are about to enter into won’t help anyone.

Can a mediator singlehandedly save a company? I submit – yes, we can! (Superhero cape not included.)

November 02, 2015

Interview with an Ombudsman: Mark Batson Baril

November 02, 2015/ Mark Batson Baril

Resologics’ Founder and Senior Practitioner Mark Batson Baril is an Ombudsman (conflict advisor) who, along with his team, provides a variety of ombuds, mediation and conflict management services to organizations not only to help them resolve disputes, but to optimize team dynamics, increase productivity and reduce costs. Resologics believes in harnessing the power of conflict.

How did you come to the profession of conflict engagement and resolution?

Before I discovered conflict resolution work, I was in a completely different field....

October 19, 2015

Top 10 FAQs about an Ombudsman

October 19, 2015/ Mark Batson Baril

If you’ve been in business for years and have never heard the term ‘Ombudsman,’ don’t worry, you’re not alone. This weird-sounding word (it’s Swedish for “representative” coined in the 13th century) represents a vital service to organizations in just about every sector of society.

A company finding itself in the midst of a conflict management crisis that is sapping resources, creating a deep rift in the workplace culture and heading toward a legal nightmare, finds out fast how valuable an Ombudsman’s services can be in resolving the conflict and restoring peace and productivity to the organization.

October 19, 2015

3 Reasons You Should be Talking about Conflict in the Workplace

October 19, 2015/ Mark Batson Baril

Is conflict helping or hurting your workplace? Does this even seem like a plausible question to you? I understand if it doesn’t – the term “conflict” generally has a negative connotation, something to be avoided or resolved immediately before it finds itself in a courtroom and costing a business millions.

The truth is that you DO have conflict in your workplace at one time or another. Conflict naturally occurs when two or more people have divergent ideas, needs, and wants. It’s normal, inevitable and every organization experiences it. This is why you should be talking about conflict in your workplace – because unaddressed or poorly managed conflict could cost your business in more ways than you might think.

September 29, 2015

How Conflict in the Workplace isn’t as Bad as You Think (and What to Do About it)

September 29, 2015/ Mark Batson Baril

An HR director I know who works for a 500+ person company, described their technique for working with conflict this way: “We don’t work with conflict proactively. We sweep it under the rug until at some point we’re tripping over the bump in the rug. That’s when we deal with it.”

Conflict avoidance is one natural way for humans to get through difficult conversations at home. In some cases, it can help keep the peace and may be a good way to roll. Avoidance also happens in a work environment, especially in teams that have not built the mutual trust needed to have difficult conversations on a regular basis.

September 22, 2015

The Psychology of Conflict in the Workplace

September 22, 2015/ Wendy Wood, PhD

Many of us spend at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week in the company of this group of people known as our workplace. To understand how conflict shows up in the workplace, consider this: Each of us is shaped by experiences as far back as our early childhood, and (often subconsciously) we bring those experiences into our daily lives, and in the workplace, every day.

One can only imagine what each of us is bringing to the collective table that we can’t possibly know or understand in the other, let alone in ourselves! Is it any wonder conflict happens?

September 03, 2015

Mergers and Acquisitions: 3 Powerful Ways to Prepare Your Team for Change

September 03, 2015/ Mark Batson Baril

In my blog about Mergers and Acquisitions and the Transitions that Can Cause Conflict I talked about the challenges that management typically faces in the post-merger implementation process – which, in fact, applies to any change management effort big or small.

What we know is that the ‘human factor’ is a key to successful change. And that conflict is the underpinning of any type of change. As much as we try to avoid conflict or brush it under the rug…it happens, especially in response to the unsettling nature of change. We at Resologics have found that conflict can help or hurt your team, that unaddressed conflict can actually cost you in real dollars (find out how here).

August 27, 2015

The Best Ways to Utilize Mediation in the Workplace

August 27, 2015/ Mark Batson Baril

When do you know you need mediation in your workplace?

The first thing to know is what mediation is (and isn’t) so that you’re equipped to recognize the need if and when conflict at work arises.

The second thing to know is that when your company has a built-in system to proactively manage conflict, then you will never have to face the question of needing mediation. But I’m getting ahead of myself, because here’s the reality: Few organizations have such a system, and we’re most often called in to provide mediation services when the client workplace situation has reached the crisis point – and spiraling out of control fast.

August 13, 2015

Mergers and Acquisitions and the Transitions that Can Cause Conflict

August 13, 2015/ Mark Batson Baril

There’s at least a 34% chance that an investment in an organization will be adversely affected by destructive conflict within the team. The statistics – and stakes – can go even higher when the investment is in the form of a merger or acquisition.

The human aspects of post-merger implementation of M&A deals have been studied thoroughly in recent years, and what they find in a large number of cases is that the merger, a good match on paper, fails in the transition process. Many companies focus on the financial and business systems transition, but don’t pay attention to the human factors until it’s too late. Cultures clash, employees leave, production declines, shareholders are unhappy, things fall apart. This has even been dubbed a “merger syndrome.” A study by KPMG found that “83% of all mergers and acquisitions (M&As) failed to produce any benefit for the shareholders.” The overwhelming cause for failure that was reported?

June 30, 2015

Bullet Proof Your Team Dynamic - Measure It!

June 30, 2015/ Mark Batson Baril

So, who in the world wants to really see what their team dynamic looks like by holding up a big mirror? Fast paced, mission driven teams who know that even with the best idea in the world, without a great team dynamic, they’ve got nothing. That’s who… We searched for an ideal tool to help teams and team leaders look objectively at themselves in a non-threatening way. We landed on one that is both proven and ideal for small to mid-size teams (2-40 people). We’ve found that when we match this diagnostic tool together with our conflict focused services, the teams improve dramatically as do their results.

May 14, 2015

Making an Impact with Feedback

May 14, 2015/ Heather Meeker Green

Ever watch one of the talent, dance or voice reality shows? As a guilty pleasure, I’ve seen them all at one point and after every performance a panel of celebrity judges gives the performer feedback. Each judge has their own style and some have become infamous (think Simon Cowell and his no-mince opinions and harsh tones). From my perspective, some judges are better than others at structuring and expressing their feedback. The objective should be for the performer to understand what they did well or not so well, what they could do better, and take the advice given. Likewise, there are key guidelines for the person giving feedback to do so effectively.

April 16, 2015

Trauma Informed Mediation - Guidance for Mediators and Ombuds Working In Traumatized Communities

April 16, 2015/ Wendy Wood, PhD

For mediators and ombuds working in traumatized communities, it is critical to have an approach that is trauma sensitive and trauma informed. Trauma is extremely complex and multi-layered. For our purposes we will address only a few essential aspects. These include:

Basic understanding of the nature and effects of trauma
Basic understanding of vicarious or secondary trauma
Basic practices for self care

Resoblog

resoblog

Important Topics on Harnessing the Power of Conflict

Featured Blog Posts(scroll down or search for all posts)

Featured Blog Posts
(scroll down or search for all posts)