Member Event: Conflict As A Path To Collaboration

This introductory half-day program for leaders and teams doesn’t require any experience with horses…at all! After a brief course overview, we’ll set our individual and group intentions for the day, then explore how conflict reflects patterns in our workplaces, while in the presence of the herd. We’ll explore what is behind conflict and how using it can lead to better collaboration through practical examples. The program offers tools to start understanding and using conflict to get teams and groups moving to achieve better outcomes. We end with a conversation about what we learned and practices to experiment with, and finish by checking back in with our intentions.   

Program purpose: This program’s purpose is to recognize how reduce conflict avoidance, which leads to impasses, gets in the way of executing on strategy, and causes disengagement and morale slump. We’ll explore a process for loosening up where our teams are stuck, and increase your ability to understand how diving into conflict can be much less painful than ignoring it and much more productive than trying to “make nice”.  This short program offers a taste of starting to work with this key leadership skill. 
 
Objectives: 

• Increase your awareness of the forces that lead to conflict and how communication and team culture can exaggerate or minimize it.
• Become more skilled at recognizing your own contribution to and engagement in conflict and how to use this information to downshift the degree of conflict.
• Familiarize yourself with the diversity and value of yours and others’ strengths and values for better group outcomes.
• Have fun with horses and with each other!