How can you help executive coachees build relationships and manage conflict?

Um Führungskr?ften beim Aufbau von Beziehungen und der Bew?ltigung von Konflikten zu helfen, ist es entscheidend, ihre F?higkeiten im Gesichtslesen und in der K?rpersprache zu sch?rfen. Diese Fertigkeiten erm?glichen es ihnen, nonverbale Signale wie Interesse oder Unbehagen zu erkennen und angemessen darauf zu reagieren. Durch aktives Zuh?ren und einfühlsame Kommunikation k?nnen Führungskr?fte Vertrauen aufbauen und eine offene, unterstützende Umgebung schaffen. Sie sollten Konflikte proaktiv angehen, indem sie die Perspektiven aller Beteiligten verstehen und gemeinsame L?sungen suchen. Coaching und Schulungen in Konfliktmanagement helfen Führungskr?ften, ihre F?higkeiten zur Konfliktl?sung zu verbessern und positive Beziehungen zu f?rdern.

Even before we assess the situation, perhaps it's best we assess our mindset, our ego and our expectations from the situation. Conflict often arises from mismatched expectations, so let's get clear on who we are and where we stand first. Drop our ego and our personal agenda, look at it objectively and through the human lens, without judgment or emotion.

What is the nature of the culture? Is it high feedback? Low? Is there any degree of vulnerability on your team? Do you model vulnerability for the team? What is the makeup of your team in experience, generation, primary language, gender, expertise? These complex factors play deeply in how you and your team relate and move through conflict. In working with a conflicted intl team I noticed both cultural and linguistic barriers to effective teaming. Naming them gave the team a way to practice higher inclusion and accelerated their project completion. How we embrace difference and complexity has direct impact on the quality of our teaming. These are skills rooted in emotional agility and an ability to synthesize difference into gifts.

To start, make sure to do a self awareness check. Why am I getting wound up ? Could the conflict be about how I react to what the other person is dealing with ? If so, am I on autopilot reacting to my own fears? Two useful strategies to assess the situation: 1. Ask a question (don't use Why): this obliges the other party to rephrase and slow down. This will often make them realise there is no fundamental conflict, only a question of assumption, judgment, and communication deficit. 2. Play the "Yes, and..." game. Every opinion is 10% right (and if not, pretend it is). Instead of rejecting an idea or proposal, say "Yes [what I like about what you say is...], and [we could also look at this...]. This enables creative problem solving!

Help them understand "why" the conflict might be arising in the first place. First it will help you get a richer/deeper context and then you can help them better navigate the issues.

While not the most obvious area of focus for most coaches, developing their own and their coachee's EI is critical for long-term success. As a coach you can Help your coachee develop self-awareness by providing feedback, asking reflective questions, and encouraging practices like mindfulness. You can also use tools like the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal to assess and improve their EI in areas like empathy, communication, and social awareness.

Emotional Intelligence in my view is having mental fitness. Does the client understand that what they think dictates how they feel? And if so, do they have the fitness to change their mind so they can change their emotions. Emotions are exceptionally important signals of information, so understanding the root cause of the emotion is critical in the process of becoming emotionally intelligent and being able to regulate your emotions by changing your thoughts.

In my experience many executives don't like conflict and haven't learned to be straightforward. This is an EI element that they can develop. For me it means being direct and respectful. As I work with clients to develop this skill they realise the energy they have spent avoiding conversations, which generally hasn't really helped. When executives aren't straightforward they tend to waffle and the other person doesn't really understand what the problem is or how to fix it. Setting the intention to understand the other person's perspective and to get clear on your perspective can help. I love to remind my clients that on the other side of conflict, when it is well done, is better understanding and better relationships.

Part of emotional intelligence is recognizing where you are being emotional vs logical. Our feelings can be misunderstood as logical reactions. But they are not... that is why they are called feelings and not logics. Separate emotion from fact, perception from perspective. Once you get a handle on your feelings from a situation, you can step back and evaluate the experience logically.

Leadership begins on the inside. Developing your EQ is essential in expanding your leadership range. Self-awareness is required to understand your preferences, working style, mental models, assumptions and beliefs. It helps generate clarity on your triggers and the contexts in which you lose presence and shift from being responsive to being reactive. This awareness, in addition to working with a great coach, helps you see in the mirror, and reveals how you are complicit in creating and maintaining the patterns that play out with others. With this awareness developing, self-management is the practice of noticing what is happening for you, in the moment of it happening, and through good strategy, intentionally managing your inner state.

I am a fan of practical sessions, be it 1-2-1 or in small group for learning and practicing new tools for communication. It is one thing to read or watch videos on communication styles and exercises but something completely different to put into practice those exercises in a safe environment and get immediate feedback from the individuals or group you are working with. As a simple structure I would introduce 3 communication principles, with 3 practical exercises or role play to practice them and feedback from their partners after each exercise, before repeating the exercise again to immediately adapt based on the feedback received.

Kommunikationsf?higkeiten sind essentiell im Umfang mit Konflikten. Ich ermutige Führungskr?fte, verst?rkt Ich-Botschaften einzusetzen. Das st?rkt zum einen das eigene Emotionsempfinden und zum anderen das sich damit auseinandersetzen und formulieren. Gleichzeitig werden dadurch Missverst?ndnisse vermieden, die einen Konflikt versch?rfen k?nnen.

I am a fan of practical sessions, be it 1-2-1 or in small group for learning and practicing new tools for communication. It is one thing to read or watch videos on communication styles and exercises but something completely different to put into practice those exercises in a safe environment and get immediate feedback from the individuals or group you are working with. As a simple structure I would introduce 3 communication principles, with 3 practical exercises or roleplay's to practice them and feedback from their partners after each exercise, before repeating the exercise again to immediately adapt based on the feedback received.

There's a long list of communication skills that can drawn from. Where to begin is best informed by context. If the priority is building relationships (building trust and intimacy) I'd look at some of the coach-like skills... - powerful questions - listening - articulating what's going on ...from a place of deep of curiosity about the other person (not their job or responsibilities - the human being). If the priority is managing conflict, and assuming some basics are already in place, I'd look to the work of non-violent communication. Seek for alignment in preference to agreement, and go from there.

Any sort of leadership position requires control of communication. For many new executives, it is tough to stop shying away from talking about things they seem sensitive. There are two simple things that can help you move forward and make your first steps. First, make providing feedback easy, make room for it. Schedule regular 1:1s with your people. That means they'll expect feedback, and if you're already sitting there having a meeting you might as well say *something*. Second, work on how you present your thoughts. A great resource for this is the Crucial Conversations book.

Very little in our educational upbringing emphasizes or rewards collaboration. Individual contribution and playing conflict-free together gets far more bandwidth as we matriculate. Fact is, the way to great collaboration is THROUGH conflict, not by playing nicer. Embracing difference as an operational asset and engaging in conflict over ideas is the fastest way to innovative solutions. There is a prerequisite: we must be able to sit with discomfort long enough for solutions to emerge. Discomfort looks like dissonance, passionate discourse and divergent to convergent discussion. You master it by doing it. It takes practice and failure—sitting in the fire of collaboration long enough to craft something that serves the desired outcome.

Successful collaboration is what you expect from high performance teams. In order to do this the team needs to experience a high degree of psychological safety. It's a real thing, and it can be measured and tracked. Everyone can play a role in building that safety, especially and primarily the leader. Here's the kicker though, and it's still a commonly held myth. Psychological Safety is about high performance. It is not about creating "happy" workers. At it's heart is the idea of facing up to the difficult conversations, rather than avoiding them. If you have built a diverse team, and they feel safe enough to give voice to their best thinking, then differences of opinion are commonplace. Collaboration asks for everyone to stay present.

To cultivate a collaborative mindset, stress the importance of active listening and empathy in understanding diverse perspectives. Encourage coachees to genuinely value and consider all viewpoints, fostering an environment where every team member feels heard and respected. This approach not only strengthens collaboration but also builds a solid base of trust, crucial for effective conflict resolution and relationship building. Practicing these skills in varied, real-world interactions can significantly improve their application in genuine team settings.

More than a collaborative mindset, I would adopt a growth mindset, one that explicitly uses conflict for the benefit to grow, this way a conflict, though may be uncomfortable, can be quite useful, and necessary to deal with in order for the client to grow. If you can help the executive the gift in the conflict, you are helping them train their mind to see the good in everything, and that is critical to leadership. And by the way, the control control a leader will have is in their ability to look at a situation versus the situation itself.

I recommend using Adizes systemic coaching methodology. Its PAEI framework quickly shows coachees the power of a collaborative mindset. In reality, nobody is perfect, and we have strengths and have struggles in performing one or more of the primary organizational roles. The solution to this is team management, and a central idea behind the Adizes method is that the right combination of different people with different styles - producer, administrator, entrepreneur, and integrator - will produce good management. But this is only achieved through a complementary team, because again, no one single person can provide all the roles.

You know that high-performing teams are diverse teams, in many dimensions. You'd expect appreciation and recognition to be characteristics of the team culture. You'd expect to see the values of trust, respect and belonging revealed through team behaviours. These are all characteristics of Psychological Safety within an intact team. If you have a diverse team, and you truly want to leverage their innate high performance, then you must first of all build psychological safety. If the level of safety experienced within the team is not sufficiently high (and it can be measured), it's highly unlikely the team will be able access high performance. Building this safety is the primary work of a leader.

Building a culture of belonging helps increase the psychological safety of employees, which in turn leads to more trusting workplace relationships. When coaching executive clients, you might encourage them to gather honest feedback about the organizational culture, or if some of that work has been done already, to examine those findings carefully and take action. Changing culture isn't a one-person undertaking, but leaders catalyze that change by making it a priority and taking action to improve the culture. A coach can help this process by bringing an outside perspective, working with the client to identify gaps in the organizational strategy, and being a sounding board for new ideas.

For any conflict to be productive, it will require trust. A leader can have phenomenal mental fitness, emotional intelligence and an excellent growth mindset and still chose to avoid a conflict because the culture does not provide the safety and the trust to point things out that might cause a conflict. Build trust, then making conflicts useful will be easy, not comfortable, but easy.

There is such a deep need for the skills of process design and holding space. It’s not enough to build a diverse team—that becomes ornamental without the right frameworks and interpersonal skills to bring out everyone’s divergent ideas. Divergence breeds discomfort as it feels like we’re getting further away from a solution, but it’s only when we exhaust our current solutions that we begin to set the stage for new, emergent thinking. It looks like frustration and feels like wanting to leave the room or quit altogether. Staying in the fire is key. This is the skill of collaboration that isn’t taught enough—where emotional regulation, experience and creativity merge to converge around a new idea that’s been harvested from rich process.

Most coaches forget the importance of conflict management throughout the process. It's important to teach your coachee negotiation and mediation techniques to find win-win solutions. You should also try and equip them with tools that help them de-escalate situations and communicate effectively. You should also help them identify personal triggers and practice emotional regulation strategies.