SERVICES - ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Let one of our organizational development consultants work with you to make changes to your organization that help you better deal with conflict and prevent disputes.

How organizations deal with conflict is fundamental to their health and vitality. To be healthy, organizations must find a balance between the extreme of a sterile environment devoid of all apparent debate and conflict, and the morass of allowing conflict to foment or spiral into unconstructive and costly disputes.

Conflict, in the sense of a clash of ideas and points of view, is vital to the health of an organization. Seek to avoid or stifle all conflict, and if you are successful, creativity will be destroyed, people will give in and give up rather than advance or seek the best solutions, positive change will become difficult, stagnation and mediocrity will rule, resentment will flourish, and failure, if indeed it is measured properly, will ultimately result. No important change, flexibility, creativity or progress, the things that allow organizations to adapt, survive, excel and flourish, can happen without a healthy measure of conflict. Conflict is an inevitable and necessary feature of human interaction within organizations. It is, in a word, "normal". It is not conflict that is bad. It is how organizations prepare for and deal with conflict that can be bad.

Rather than anticipate conflicts, prepare for them and structure themselves so that conflicts are dealt with constructively and effectively, some organizations naively hope for an absence of conflict. When conflict inevitably arises they do not see it as an opportunity to deal with underlying issues and to leverage change. They instead force it below the surface by trying to stifle it or they propel it into destructive and costly disputes.

It is a challenging art and science to structure and prepare an organization for conflict, to help it initiate healthy and constructive conflict, and to have it deal with and resolve conflict effectively and constructively. In all circumstances the goal should be to leverage conflict into positive change, to minimise the time and cost invested in dealing with conflict, to preserve important relationships, and to ensure that problems and issues are resolved in the best, most durable, creative and productive way possible.

We can help your organization leverage conflict, avoid having it spiral into disputes and ensure that any disputes that do occur are resolved promptly, durably and constructively.

Please contact us for more information.

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