Conflict Responses Exercise

In Conflict Responses, reflect on previous conflicts as a team and collectively create a set of guidelines to use in the future. Resolving issues effectively is a massive part of team collaboration, and by including all team members in this process you can get more meaningful results too.

It’s important to remember that every team is made up of individuals and sometimes, conflicts or disagreements can arise. While its regular working practice to disagree, our responses to conflict and how we deal with them when they arise are in our control and can be improved.

You can hold a workshop for a team to reflect on past conflicts and use them to generate guidelines for effective conflict management. Use it to open up a discussion around conflict with a team.

Ask participants to think about team conflicts that they’ve experienced. They should do this individually, identifying as many significant conflicts as possible, going back a few years if they need to. Writing them in their notepads.

Taking the historical conflicts that they’ve written down, ask them as individuals to rank each one from 1 to 3.

1 = Conflict I handled well
2 = Conflict I handled so-so
3 = Conflict I handled poorly

Ask them to reflect individually, then discuss their reflections in pairs or threes on the following questions:

• Which responses were exhibited during the conflicts I identified?
• What behaviours and actions were effective at resolving the conflicts?
• What behaviours and actions were not effective at resolving the conflicts?

Moment of Reflection

Based on the reflections in the small groups, ask each person come up with 2-3 guidelines for effective conflict handling that they think the group should follow from now on.

Ask everyone to share their guidelines with the whole group and agree on a set that everyone is happy to follow. Write the guidelines up and share them digitally.

The topics of this publication: reflection, self, integration, interactions, critical thinking, trust, honesty, empathy, feedback, foster relationships