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Conflict Resolution Consulting: Using Mediation to Improve Organizational Communications, Team Building, Leadership, Change, and Systems Design

Faculty: Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith

Every workplace generates chronic conflicts, yet few organizations have rethought the way they work, or used conflict resolution skills and ideas to prevent and transform the sources of chronic conflict, or examined their organizational communications and "conflict cultures" to discover how their conflicts are generated and reduce their reoccurrence.

Fewer still have integrated conflict resolution and coaching, trained leaders as mediators, used conflict-resolution principles to inform their change processes, conducted "conflict audits" to reveal where these streams of conflict originate, or designed complex, multilayered, self-correcting systems to improve their capacity for conflict prevention, resolution, and transformation.

This workshop will provide a framework for mediators who would like to enter the emerging field of conflict resolution consulting, and learn how to integrate mediation with organizational communication, team building, leadership development, change management, and systems design. These skills can help organizations rethink the way they work and use systems-design principles to construct more collaborative, democratic, self-managing organizations and institutions.

The workshop will identify new skills in organizational dialogue, leadership, teamwork, and collaborative processes. It will identify theories and techniques that will help participants: shape an organizational context of values, ethics, and integrity; form living, evolving webs of association; develop ubiquitous, linking leadership; build innovative self-managing teams; implement streamlined, open, collaborative processes; create complex self-correcting systems; integrate strategically; and change the way we change.

Participants will also explore: the social, economic, and political sources of chronic conflict; obstacles to individual, interpersonal, and organizational change; diverse methods for overcoming resistance to change; and ways of redesigning workplace cultures, systems, structures, processes, and relationships to encourage conflict resolution. The workshop will be based on Resolving Conflicts at Work: 10 Strategies for Everyone on the Job (third edition); The Art of Waking People Up: Cultivating Awareness and Authenticity at Work; and The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy, by Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith; as well as Mediating Dangerously: The Frontiers of Conflict Resolution; and Conflict Revolution: Mediating Evil, War, Injustice, and Terrorism, by Kenneth Cloke.

 

What you will learn:

  • Analyze the chronic, systemic sources of workplace and organizational conflicts
  • Identify complex workplace and organizational dynamics
  • Understand the roles and skills of conflict consultants
  • Recognize the structures, systems, relationships, processes, and "conflict cultures" that contribute to workplace and organizational conflicts
  • Discover how to conduct "conflict audits"
  • Learn techniques to become more skillful in conflict coaching
  • Design multilayered, complex, self-correcting organizational systems that improve the capacity for conflict prevention, management and resolution  
  • Understand and develop the competencies as "conflict leaders"
  • Improve their ability to mediate workplace and organizational conflict in public- and private-sector organizations, work teams, and family businesses
  • Learn to redesign workplaces and organizations and identify transformational opportunities in conflict
  • Discover how to use conflicts as opportunities for personal growth, organization learning, strategic change, emotional healing, forgiveness, and transformation.

Kenneth Cloke, JD, LLM, PhD, is director of the Center for Dispute Resolution in Santa Monica, California, and a mediator, arbitrator, coach, consultant, and trainer and has mediated hundreds of workplace and organizational disputes. He is the author of Mediating Dangerously: The Frontiers of Conflict Resolution; The Crossroads of Conflict: A Journey into the Heart of Conflict; and Conflict Revolution: Mediating Evil, War, Injustice, and Terrorism. He is also coauthor with Joan Goldsmith of Thank God It's Monday! 14 Values We Need to Humanize the Way We Work; Resolving Personal and Organizational Conflict: Stories of Transformation and Forgiveness; The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy; The Art of Waking People Up: Cultivating Awareness and Authenticity at Work; and Resolving Conflicts at Work: 10 Strategies for Everyone on the Job (third edition).

Joan Goldsmith, MA, HLD, has been a coach, mediator, and organizational consultant with public- and corporate-sector organizations specializing in leadership development, organizational change, team building, strategic planning, and conflict resolution for the past 40 years. She was a faculty member at Harvard University, founder of Cambridge College, and is currently an adjunct professor in the master's degree program in conflict resolution at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She coauthored a best-selling book on leadership, Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader (fourth edition) with Warren Bennis, and is coauthor with Kenneth Cloke of Thank God It's Monday! 14 Values We Need to Humanize the Way We Work; Resolving Personal and Organizational Conflict: Stories of Transformation and Forgiveness; The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy; The Art of Waking People Up: Cultivating Awareness and Authenticity at Work; and Resolving Conflicts at Work: 10 Strategies for Everyone on the Job (third edition).