Lead Conflict Styles Training

This post is for people who want to help a team or group improve their patterns of dealing with conflict. With the materials here, you can do this without outside assistance, even if you’ve never led a conflict styles workshop before, so long as you're comfortable leading a group discussion.

The resources below are for use with Style Matters Online, which harnesses digital power to do interpretation that required an expert in the past. The Style Matters algorithm combs a user’s scores for insights and presents them in a detailed, eight page report that can be easily understood without additional input.

With this score report, anyone with ordinary group facilitation skills can lead an effective learning experience, drawing on the free resources below.

Conversation to Assist Learning

A feature we’ve added to recent upgrades is suggestions for partners. Many conflict style assessments (eg: the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument) address the user only as an individual. "Here’s your scores, here’s how you compare to others, here's what your numbers mean, etc."

That's like clapping with one hand. Conflict happens in relationships and learning about dealing with it happens best in the context of relationships. We can start on our own, but in conversation with others is where the real payoffs take place.

So a section of the Style Matters score report is for conversation with partners or colleagues of the user, and offers a list of suggestions based on the user's score report for when things are dicey. The goal is for people in long-term partnerships to review these together, and proactively negotiate patterns of communication that work well in times of difficulty.

Resources For Trainers

Here's what you need to design and implement an effective learning experience with Style Matters Online:

Download Trainers Big Guide to Successful Conflict Styles Training. This free 45 page guide to conflict styles training explains the five styles of conflict, the concepts of Calm and Storm, how to work with the cross-cultural aspects of Style Matters, and provides step-by-step guidance through a workshop. In addition you need...
Download Trainers Small Guide to Style Matters Online. This free 10 page supplement builds on concepts in the big guide above and applies them to training with the online version. If you’re just facilitating a conversation, you can get by with just this supplement to design your discussion. If you’re feeling ambitious and expecting to give inputs as an active trainer role, you should have both.
View Intro to Conflict Styles slide show, available in either traditional Powerpoint format or dynamic Prezi format. This short slide show, free for online viewing and available for purchase offline, introduces core concepts of the five styles of conflict and serves as a great prelude to discussion of score reports.
Videos. There are several short videos to help users interpret their scores on our site. You might want to encourage your users to review one or several of them before a workshop. You'll find them useful to you as a trainer as well, for their present key concepts concisely.
Handouts. If you like to work from handouts, download these. They’re not required for training with the online version. But if you have time for them, they’re a solid addition to a workshop.
Tutorial. The tutorial on our website packs a lot of info about conflict styles into a few pages, on topics like the cross-cultural feature of Style Matters, the Storm shift, interpreting scores, anger management, and more.
Assignments. If you have students writing papers, see this blog post by Ron Kraybill with several ideas for assignments you could give.
Followup. Conflict responses are habit-based. Learning new patterns requires repetition. You can expand the impact of conflict styles learning by spreading it across time, with followup activities and/or homework. See this blog on followup activities for ideas. You can multiply the impact of the whole experience by encouraging people to engage in conversation with those they live or work with. See this essay for ideas for discussion between individuals.