The Conflict Resolution Workshop™

Conflict Resolution Is A Vital Skill In Today's Business World. 

With growing frequency and intensity, conflict affects everyone, every day.  As our daily interactions become more discordant and aggressive, the ability to resolve conflict is increasingly vital to personal and professional success.

Skilled conflict managers can certainly influence a dispute's outcome.  Just as importantly, they can also shape how participants feel about the problem, the organization, and each other in the conflict's aftermath. Well-managed conflict can actually strengthen relationships, build teamwork, encourage open communication and cooperative problem-solving, and increase productivity.

The True Cost of Unmanaged Conflict

Conflict is the stuff of life. Conflict occurs whenever the differing needs, wants, goals, or values of two or more people are in opposition. Sometimes, conflicts are approached dispassionately and worked out coolly and professionally. More often, they devolve into bickering, blaming and fault-finding. And when bitterness, anger, frustration, anxiety, and fear help fan the flames, the result can be a firestorm of damage.

Unmanaged conflict devastates companies and friendships, disrupts work and relationships, shatters morale, breaks deals, and wrecks marriages.  The intangible costs of uncontrolled conflict, in energy, emotion, time, and attention, can cripple even the strongest individuals and organizations. Ignoring a conflict seldom resolves it, and frequently makes it worse.  A problem which is manageable today may be much more difficult to settle tomorrow. Unresolved conflict saps attention and energy, creates enemies and hard feelings, and wastes time, money and resources.  In the current economic climate, no organization can afford to waste precious resources in mismanaged conflicts.

Lawyers and Litigation: A Tempting But Ruinous Solution

The widespread lack of conflict resolution skills means that we often fail, or don't even try, to settle things informally. Instead, armed with lawyers, we turn to our legal system to determine a winner and a loser. At the start of a lawsuit, few disputants have any idea of the stunning physical, emotional, and financial costs of the battle ahead. While our legal system promises resolution, the far more likely outcome is that, after years of debilitating strife, the matter will either have been decided in a manner unsatisfactory to all, or it will remain unresolved.  Everyone involved (except the lawyers) will be significantly worse off than before.

How Our Conflict Resolution Workshop is Different.

Throughout recorded human history, scholars have studied the causes, methods, and results of conflict. But only in the last few decades have experts focused on the process of resolving conflict. In The Conflict Resolution Workshop, Common Ground International pairs its acclaimed negotiation and conflict-management expertise with the latest research. The result is a program that has helped thousands identify, manage, and settle conflicts, sensibly, fairly, and efficiently, in all aspects of their lives. This is a whole new approach. 

The Conflict Resolution Workshop provides an easy-to-use, easy-to-remember eight-step system to reliably prevent, manage, and resolve personal and professional conflicts. Our expert instructors use straight talk and real world examples, not clinical jargon and trendy mumbo-jumbo, to give attendees dozens of proven, practical tips and techniques for successfully resolving conflicts. It is an intense, "hands-on" program with lots of interaction and personal attention. Graduates quickly find themselves applying the eight-step system to settle disagreements at work, home, school, and elsewhere.

Who Should Attend The Conflict Resolution Workshop?

The Conflict Resolution Workshop is a must for anyone who seeks a reliable, creative, dignified procedure for resolving life's conflicts. Negotiate to WIN® is not a prerequisite.

Methodology

The Conflict Resolution Workshop uses an intense, "high-immersion" training environment for maximum participation and learning.  Instructional methods include multimedia, lecture, group discussion, diagnostic tests and evaluations, simulations, and other interactive techniques.  During the program, students are regularly challenged to demonstrate what they've learned through generic and customized case study simulations.

Session Length

The Conflict Resolution Workshop is typically a two-day program.  However, program length can be adjusted to fit your requirements, from under one hour to two or more days.

Our Instructors

The Conflict Resolution Workshop is conducted by recognized experts. All instructors have comprehensive experience in mediation, arbitration, and other forms of informal and formal dispute resolution. They hold advanced degrees in fields related to conflict resolution, have researched and taught conflict resolution at the university level, and have published books and/or research-based conflict resolution articles. All are exceptional teachers with considerable training experience and first-rate platform skills. Please click here for information on our instructors.

Tailoring

Many firms promise tailored programs but deliver the same tired old materials.  Common Ground is different.  When we say tailored, we mean it.  We work with you to ensure that The Conflict Resolution Workshop thoroughly and specifically addresses your organization's priorities and concerns.  We interview your people and (confidentially, of course) we learn your business, who you are, what you do, how you do it, where your industry stands and where you stand in your industry, what your short- and long-term objectives are, what circumstances your negotiators face, and who your target audience will be. With this information in hand, we prepare unique training materials for you.

Tailored case studies, lifelike scenarios that students can instantly relate to, are the best way to clarify, validate and reinforce classroom concepts, and make them immediately transferable to the workplace.  Common Ground is unsurpassed when it comes to the creation of unique, client-specific exercises.  At no additional charge, we work in partnership with you to develop convincingly realistic scenarios that will excite and inform your attendees. The Conflict Resolution Workshop is flexibly designed to complement and reinforce your organization's current training.

Highlights 

• Determining your conflict management style

• Adapting your style to the situation

• Accepting conflict as healthy

• The win/win approach to conflict resolution

• Transforming problems into creative opportunities

• Looking forward (to opportunities) not backward (by blaming)

• Moving from justification to resolution

• Attacking the problem, not the person; making things impersonal

• Developing your communication tools

• Maintaining the self-esteem of all parties

• Understanding and taking charge of your own feelings and behaviors

• Expressing your emotions intelligently

• Handling emotional outbursts and threats

• Defining the issues; limiting the discussion to those issues

• Identifying common needs and concerns

• Developing creative options and solutions

• Looking at the problem in a broader context

• Agreeing on specific follow-up actions

Confidentiality

In all aspects of their work with Common Ground, clients are assured of complete confidentiality. Our commitment to discretion and privacy encourages clients to give us access to the information we need to customize The Conflict Resolution Workshop for maximum participation and learning. Upon request, Common Ground will be pleased to formalize this promise with a Nondisclosure Agreement.

Participant Materials

Participants receive a variety of valuable in-class and take-home handouts and tools, including checklists, case studies, samples, guides, pocket reference cards, a personal action planner, and The Conflict Resolution Workshop's outstanding Manual (designed as a practical, desktop reference for continued use long after the session).

On-Site Requirements

We ask that you provide the training facility, an LCD projector, a screen, a flip chart and markers, and above all, enthusiastic attendees who sincerely want to improve their conflict resolution skills! Optional items such as sign-in sheets, evaluation forms, writing materials, name cards and badges, and diplomas are supplied by clients.

Our Guarantee

Our guarantee is very straightforward. We think it says a lot about the effectiveness of Common Ground training. We guarantee that within two weeks after The Conflict Resolution Workshop, you'll recover the price of the session through better conflict management.  If not, we'll refund your money. 

 

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