CASE STUDY 4

Enhancing Conflict Management Skills for CEOs

Client Portrait

This is the local chapter of a professional association for young CEOs of business, large nonprofit corporations, and educational institutions.

Client Challenge

This group recently faced internal conflict leading to expulsion of a group member. The tension created a desire to improve their individual conflict management skills. While some participants had training in contract negotiation methods, most did not have formal training or familiarity with mediation-based methods for conflict management and transformation.

How could these high-powered individuals meet the demands of their positions in a way that reduced conflict? Could they use these skills to improve their internal group dynamics as well as apply them to practical issues within their organizations?

Rally Point’s Solution

Rally Point provided an experiential, interactive 5-hour training to effectively identify, manage, resolve and even transform interpersonal conflict in their lives and corporate cultures through heightened awareness and skill development.

The training addressed

participants’ strengths and areas for development when resolving personal and organizational conflict,
the negative as well as positive aspects of conflict,
the primary strategies/styles for resolving conflict,
active listening skills,
how to leverage positions, needs and emotions in conflict, and
organizational conflict cultures and how leaders can influence the organizational culture of conflict.

Benefits & Impacts

This training gave members recognition of their individual and cultural operating assumptions about conflict. Participants have realized the following advantages:

heightened awareness of their individual conflict styles;
greater ability to identify win-win solutions;
overall increased skill in resolving conflict; and
increased emotional intelligence, including recognition of the impact of their actions on the culture of conflict resolution in their organizations and personal lives.

Within a month of the workshop, the group requested additional training.