Critical work groups

Unaddressed conflict within a workgroup or team degrades performance and productivity. It diverts energy from vital tasks, devalues a collaborative culture and can cause lasting damage to individual reputations and relationships.

Further, the modern business environment presents fresh challenges for the team leader.  As well as building up their own cultural diversity, workgroups are increasingly dealing with diverse supplier and customer bases in the global marketplace; the prevalence of e-mail communications inhibits the development of informal personal networking and increases the risk of misunderstandings and confusion;  and with the emergence of issues such as work-life balance and the modern risks of stress and burn-out, individual employees have higher expectations for their work life which, if unmet, can create fresh potential for conflict.

CEDR works with managers and individual team members to improve conflict management performance, whether the need is to respond to specific difficulties that have been identified or as a precursor to planned change:

• CEDR’s ‘Conflict audit’ programme identifies the key pressure points, causes and consequences of conflict, and staff attitudes and responses thereto; and formulates a customised action plan for managers.
• CEDR’s ‘Conflict management toolkit’ programme involves a six step approach combining diagnosis, consultancy and training inputs and dispute systems design to make effective conflict management a core competency within a team.
• Modules within the Conflict audit and Conflict management toolkit programmes are available to deal with specific challenges such as:
• Team culture and diversity
• Team design
• Work-life balance
• Readiness to change
• Working in the 21^st Century (distributed workgroups/remote communications)
• Communication issues (culture and skills)

• CEDR’s ‘Personal development’ solutions can provide the necessary skills and long-term support to teams or individuals to overcome a specific challenge. 

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