Building Conflict Competent Teams (J-B CCL

by Craig E. Runde, Tim A. Flanagan

Understanding how to cool down, slow down, and engage the naturally occurring conflicts among team members is critical to the ultimate success of a team. With this book, your team and its members will gain a deeper understanding of how conflict emerges and how to respond in ways that will leverage conflicts to their advantage. Team members will learn the importance of establishing a safe team climate, agreeing on processes to guide interactions, and use of constructive communication skills in order to develop a conflict competent team. As the authors say, conflict is not to be avoided, but embraced and explored. This often results in new, previously unimagined opportunities, solutions and results. The authors include stories, interviews, and examples that provide entertaining and thought provoking insights. They dedicate one chapter to techniques and processes for addressing team conflict that has gone awry. Runde and Flanagan also include useful tips and tools for assessing your team's current state of conflict competence and suggestions for addressing the challenges of today's virtual and geographically dispersed teams.

Genres: Business, Personal Development, Leadership, Psychology

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2008

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book starts from the premise that conflict (in organizational life) is bad and offers a series of palliatives to improve conflict-ridden situations. Mostly, it comes down to better communications and the familiar advice from a host of previous business books that says that alignment is the answer. There's very little that's new here; The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (if I remember the title correctly) is better and more original.

[Caitlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was fairly interesting and I like the way it was organized, but it was not written in a way that kept me very intrigued or invested in the content. In addition, a lot of it seemed like common sense to me, or at least just not anything new or groundbreaking.

[Rob O'Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a solid introduction to managing conflict in teams. Based deeply in systems theory, the authors combine a wealth of personal and professional experience, gleaned from their own leadership endeavors and from their consulting work, to provide the reader with a solid framework.