Helping Others Resolve Conflict
- Improving your conflict competence will help you resolve issues more effectively. Helping others improve their ability to deal with conflict expands these benefits. You can help others deal with conflict by mentoring them, coaching them, or facilitating conversations of others who are having difficulty solving their own problems. As you enhance your ability to manage emotions and use constructive behaviors to address conflict, you can help others do the same. By sharing your understanding, you can spread the benefits that come from conflict competence.
The first way to do this is by mentoring others. Mentoring involves sharing your own skills with others. You can do this by demonstrating those skills when you're actually in conflict. You can also show or tell others about the skills, and help them try to use them in their own contexts. Coaching is a second way to help others. In coaching, the emphasis is on helping the other person discover new approaches on their own. You can ask the person questions to help them think through how they want to handle a conflict.
You can inquire about the likely outcomes of different approaches to help them reflect on their options. You can also role-play with the other person to let them try out ways of talking out a conflict in a safe environment. A third way of helping others involves facilitating discussions between people who are having difficulty resolving conflict on their own. This approach can be particularly effective for managers who facilitate or mediate discussions among their employees who are having conflicts that cause business problems.
In this approach, it's important for the employees to be responsible for solving their problem. You can help facilitate the discussion, but are not the one who makes the decision. Your main job is to keep them talking long enough for a solution to emerge. While you improve your own conflict competence, leverage your new skills to help others deal with conflict more effectively. I'll share some resources in the exercise files that can help you expand your ability to assist others.
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