How To Define Conflict Management Skills In Leadership Online Training
Sometimes, the office can feel like an extension of high school, with all the same cliques. You might continue the role you played in high school, or you may have re-invented yourself. The darker side of this situation is that colleagues often squabble, just like kids on the playground. And it’s up to, good, managers to resolve these crises. As well as ensure that everyone plays fair and stays productive in the workplace. If possible, these ‘differences in opinion’ can even be harnessed for everyone’s benefit. Can you entrench these conflict management skills via leadership online training?
6 Insider Tips to Build Leadership Conflict Management Skills In Online Training
1. Gather Feedback From Your Team Leaders
Horizontal organizations are becoming increasingly popular, and they can be an effective corporate system. Having a series of line managers offers better oversight because the process is transparent. Mentorship is more hands-on and because the managerial pool is wider, there are increased opportunities for career progression. Leaders interact with their charges at closer levels, so they have a clearer idea of conflict sources. It could be a personality clash or a minor infraction that built up over time. As you develop the course, gain insight from team leads. They can suggest the topics they’d like to be covered, and any conflict management skills they want to put into practice in leadership online training.
2. Create Contextual Simulations In Leadership Online Training
We always assume workplace conflict is client-driven. This type of training, therefore, focuses on customer care. Its emphasis is on clichéd placation like ‘We apologize for the inconvenience’ and ‘Here’s your ticket number.’ Conflicts between colleagues are more common than customer-facing drama. It can be a challenge to disagree with a peer while maintaining cordial relations. Practice helps though, so give your staff simulations of various uncomfortable contexts. Cultural influence can come into play. For example, they can simulate uneasy discussions about gender, class, race, and so on. Then practice applying those skills to other situations.
3. Teach Non-Verbal Communication
Everyone can recognize ‘the look’ their parent sometimes gives them. They’ve probably adapted a version of it for their own kids. It’s the perfect example of clear non-verbal interaction. Use online videos and simulations to train your team on body language and unspoken cues they may find in the workplace. In intimate relationships, fights can start with a single raised eyebrow, a miss-timed blink, or a dismissive shrug. Colleagues often apply the same standards to each other, except they don’t vocalize it. So, it may simmer and lead to long-term resentments that boil over if you don't impart effective leadership conflict management skills. Teach your staff to recognize body language and respond accordingly. It could diffuse tension before it begins, and lead to constructive engagement rather than office shouting matches. Non-verbal communication is especially helpful in calming irate customers. Train your team to read a customer’s stance and pre-empt trouble.
4. Positive Engagement
In corporate settings, our trained response is to avoid emotion. The sentiment is frowned upon, and anger is often interpreted as aggression. However, positive emotional engagement can be a good thing, because it builds empathy and connection. Relating to each other at the human level involves feelings. Conflict resolution, therefore, isn’t the absence of feelings. Instead, train your team to engage in a respectful, positive manner, applying emotional intelligence. Online training activities should involve de-escalation and redirection. It’s not about stopping the fight or preventing disagreements. It’s about learning to disagree amicably and reaching a middle ground. After all, divergent perspectives can be openly shared and compromised on, leading to better products, services, and working environment in general.
5. Produce Demo Videos For Leadership Online Training
It’s much easier to identify other people’s mistakes than it is to spot our own. This is true even when our behavior is mirrored back to us. Apply this principle with leadership online training videos. Show them a model of poor conflict management skills, directing them to pinpoint how and where things went wrong. Ask them what they would have done differently. Then offer them a video with more effective conflict resolution tactics. Get them to identify the difference between the two videos. This will entrench the right and wrong ways to deal with issues when they escalate. They can acquire specific tactics for conflict resolution. Summarize the video with an infographic template of actions or phrases they can apply in given scenarios.
6. Make It Relatable With Personal Anecdotes
Stories and anecdotes help team leaders apply their newfound skills in real world settings. They can see how their fellow managers and supervisors handled similar situations and resolved on-the-job conflicts. You can incorporate anecdotes in a variety of ways. From hosting ‘open mic’ live events wherein everyone has the chance to share to launching a social media group or blog that allows your team leaders to post personal experiences. Of course, you can also include them in your course design or liven them up with video clips and characters. For example, transform the story into an engaging animation that showcases leadership conflict management skills in action. The key is to encourage team leaders to connect and facilitate practical application.
Conclusion
Resolving conflicts is a childhood skill, especially if you’re in the center of the birth chronology, aka middle child syndrome. And even as an adult, resolving office fights can feel like regressing to the schoolyard. Fortunately, you can use online courses to practice this skill and apply it in a mature way. Ask team leaders to escalate any problems they’ve observed in their teams. They can tell you what areas they need help with. Use their feedback to develop contextual simulations. Include sessions on body language and positive disagreements. Finally, shoot videos showing your employees what, not, to do in conflict situations.
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