The Agile Business Innovation‘s Podcast

Conflict Resolution: The Ladder to a new self

We're talking about conflicts and more specifically conflict resolution. I did an appeal to look at the emotion underneath and the meaning underneath the conflict for you, as a way of opening the door to opportunity. More specifically, I want to invite you to look at the hidden meaning of conflict. I want to talk about the ladder for finding the meaning of a conflict. If you go up that ladder, it's much easier to resolve conflicts.

There's a conflict resolution ladder that starts at the top with, what are the material issues involved?

What is visible?

Conflict Resolution: Listen to the tides not the waves

We're talking about conflicts and conflict resolution. More specifically, we talked about the ladder of dealing with conflicts in our last blog. This time I want to give some general pointers that I use when I'm dealing with conflict resolution. One of the things that really helps is listening.

That's an open door.

There are not a lot of people who can listen well. A lot of people are listening for content, instead of for the meaning underneath. My general pointer when you're dealing with conflict is to listen with your heart. Listening is a creative force.

Work Interrupted: How to Deal With Crisis

In TA we define crisis in organizations in a quite precise way...

Leadership in Crisis: Change Leadership Style

I've learned over time is how to deal with crisis. Of course this is more relevant than ever today. In the previous blog we talked about what happens to an organization in crisis. An organizational crisis occurs when the dynamics are stronger than the cohesion so that the boundaries get breached.

When a boundary gets breached you have to establish a different leadership style. In Holland for instance, we have a more or less a democratic leadership style where everyone thinks they have something to say and to decide. In crisis however you need to re-centralize and re-establish the major external boundary. First you need to reset the leadership, then the membership, and then deal with the environment. That's the order of play in crisis.

To be able to do that...

Leadership in Crisis: Reconfirm Structure

In this series of Leadership in Crisis videos we're learning that the type of leadership you need during crisis is directive leadership. The next thing you need to do is re-establish and reconfirm the structure. How do you do that and what structure are we talking about?

Within businesses and within teams, we talk about a structure of boundaries, a structure of hierarchy and an authority structure. We're also talking about a relational structure and a cultural structure, which we might talk about later.

Boundaries First...

Leadership in Crisis: Preserving the Group

I know what it is to deal with crisis. And as I've said in previous blogs, what you need to do is establish a clear leadership, re-establish your boundaries and re-establish your structure. You also need to create more cohesion. You have to give everyone within the organization a sense of belonging.

The difficulty is during times of crisis, we often have dynamics which are pressing on the boundaries, which creates breaches in the boundaries and breaches in boundaries create less cohesion. Imagine if you have a balloon and the air in the balloon is the cohesion. As soon as you have a hole, all the air goes out. So you need clear boundaries without breaches to hold that air or the cohesion in a company...

Leadership in Crisis: Create Unusual Partnerships

We’ve talked about leadership, re-establishing boundaries, creating cohesion and recreating your structure. We're now talking about the need to create unusual partnerships during crisis. Creating partnership is only possible once you've re-established yourself as an organization. Partnership is only possible when you know your own identity and structure. It's the same in a marriage. You can only create a relationship once you know yourself. If you lose yourself, it's not possible to partner. And it's the same thing in teams.

So what kind of partnerships are we talking about during crisis? Well, it's unusual partnerships in the sense that people become extremely creative during crisis. We're talking about partnerships with people who are complementary in many ways. We're not talking about businesses who do the same thing as you because then you'd create internal competition. We're talking about unusual partnerships in the sense that within the ecosystem that you have established, your partners offer a complementary service, brand or target group...

Leadership in Crisis: Re-establish Cohesion

What I'm talking about is how to deal with organizations in crisis and how to create directive leadership. We talked about what's necessary for directive leadership, how to re-establish boundaries, how to preserve a group. In this video blog, I want to talk about how to create cohesion: How do you create the need within the members in the leadership to preserve the existence of the group?

Let’s take the analogy of a marriage. When one of the partners has an affair, the boundaries of a marriage are breached. If the boundaries are breached, it’s difficult to hold on, but if they still have the idea of the marriage and they still have the feeling of belonging, they still can remember what it was like to be in love and connected and in the boundaries of the marriage then there's hope. It is very similar within teams...

Leadership Coaching: The sequence of your life

One of the levels of pattern recognition or sequence recognition is what we call the life script. A life script is an unconscious pattern of behaviour that you learned in early childhood which was confirmed by your parents or events, and ends in a well-known payoff.

Leadership Coaching: Respect rank but relate as equals

What I'd like to talk about now is the sequence of relationships and communication. Sometimes I notice that leaders are really stuck in certain relational patterns.

So for instance they find themselves top down.. Yes in position and rank you are perhaps more ‘top’ but in terms of relationship I think a good leader should be at an equal level with her people, else you don't promote initiative or leadership in your employees.