This collection is for managers and supervisors interested in improving how they navigate conflict among staff. An attentive, empowered, and skilled supervisor can increase staff’s conflict management skills, increase a group’s effectiveness, and strengthen a team’s feelings of respect, trust, and belonging.
Every organization will experience some degree of conflict; in fact, conflict is fundamental for all social beings. One of conflict’s gifts is that successfully navigating through it can increase your organization’s resilience by stress testing your structures, systems, and practices to result in an organization that is more transparent, consistent, and responsive in how it navigates internal challenges.
Healthy conflict management requires discernment, tact, confidentiality, respectful withholding of judgment or premature promises for a resolution, and consistent communication with the parties involved. The supervisor therefore plays a powerful role in fostering a healthy culture and supporting consistent organizational practices related to conflict.
Resources in this Collection
Navigating Conflict: A Guide for Managers and Supervisors
This guide is for managers and supervisors interested in improving how they navigate conflict among staff.
Navigating Conflict On Your Team
Learn some key principles that can help you assess the sources of a conflict, illuminate possible pathways for resolvability, and begin to chart a course of action. We’ll explore the pathways and tools at your disposal for supporting individuals and influencing group dynamics so that your team can focus on their vital work advancing healthier environments for our communities.
Diagnosing Conflict: A Worksheet for Managers and Supervisors
This worksheet is designed for managers addressing staff conflicts related to productivity, conduct, and communication. This tool is designed to address emergent conflicts when they can still be dealt with through skilled management before the issue escalates into a complaint or grievance.
Developing a Conflict Management Policy
A Conflict Management Policy can help your organization support productive experiences of conflict by offering clear and explicit expectations, standards, practices, and pathways for action. This resource provides guidance for what you may choose to include in your own Conflict Management Policy as well as some considerations for possible practices you may want to foster for your organization.
Basic Steps for Mediating Interpersonal Conflict
Though there are many forms of mediation, this tool is for mediating entrenched but relatively low-level conflicts between individuals. Those are conflicts rooted in misunderstanding, miscommunication, personality differences, or active disagreement. This process is best used after other efforts such as direct feedback, supportive coaching, and courageous conversations have been unsuccessful.
Developing Conflict Resilience: Reorienting our relationship with conflict to unlock its gifts and explore the impact of identity
This webinar will provide frameworks for not only de-stigmatizing conflict but harnessing its gifts, offer perspectives on generative versus harmful conflict, explore how positional power and identity impact our experiences of conflict, and review equity-based considerations for healthier individual and organizational practices.