Mediate.com University

Phase 1: Assessment.

The morning will be spent understanding why conflict starts and escalates. What are the psychological triggers? Can we identify the exacerbating behaviors? Are their systemic company concerns? Is the corporate culture typically to Underreact or Overreact to conflict? Based on this information, what are the simple steps to resolving your office’s particular conflicts. These steps are based on 25 years of experience resolving workplace conflict, 7 years of studying how to resolve workplace conflict effectively for dissertation research, and a best-selling book on office conflict. Dr. Fowler’s trainings and techniques have been adopted by Google, Sirius, Harvard, and hundreds of other offices. These techniques will be explained in an approachable way, that can be easily presented to employees. The purpose is to make your employees feel empowered to resolve conflicts, not overwhelmed by distant theory and data.

Phase 2: Action.

The 2nd phase will focus on preventing future conflicts. The goal of this phase is to empower you to quickly diagnose and triage conflicts that are brought to your desk. Your job, after all, is not to solve everyone’s problem; Your job is to foster an engaged and motivated team. This session will focus more on your particular office culture. What preventative strategies would be embraced by your team? What does the timeline and roll-out look like? Phase 1 will focus on building grassroots acceptance. Phase 2 will focus on support by management, to ensure management is modeling the practices taught to their employees. Dr. Fowler and fellow experts will also focus on how to recognize and handle abuse, create a trauma-informed office, and create a resolution plan with unions and general counsel. As part of the training, you will get a copy of Dr. Fowler’s book (Rising Above Office Conflict), access to the video recording of the training for 12 months, and access to all of the resources of the conference site. You will also be placed into a cohort that you may debrief with or brainstorm difficult problems.