Clinical psychologist and executive coach Michelle Brody shows how using a simplified version of powerful tools and mindsets from couples therapy can radically improve how you coach conflict.

Why won’t a coworker accept your client’s feedback?  How can they get around their report’s defensiveness? What can be done about a micromanaging, undermining, uncooperative or thwarting colleague? 

Understanding the circular dynamics that operate in both workplace and home conflict will maximize your conflict coaching effectiveness. 

1. Conflict is circular, not linear.
2. The intuitive methods leaders use to manage a “difficult coworker” (forward action, problem solving, accountability) often backfire and drive more of the unwanted behavior, not less. We can help with some key mindset changes.
3. “Difficult behavior” doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It is most often “armor” in response to threat. Understanding the interpersonal and systemic threats that caused the armor and the vicious cycles the armor creates, is what gives leverage to change it.

Team Coaching is complex even in optimal circumstances, but when interpersonal conflict is present, even the best interventions can get derailed.

Navigating the undercurrent of conflictual team dynamics is difficult without a map of the territory. In this session, clinical psychologist and executive coach Michelle Brody shows how you can use simplified versions of powerful tools and mindsets from couples therapy to radically optimize your approach to team coaching when conflict is killing productivity.

1. Under-the-Table dynamics cannot be solved with Above-the-Table interventions.
2. Defensiveness is not a personality trait. It’s a state that we all go to when under threat. When an environment is difficult, everyone understandably armors up. But armor then adds more threat to the system of a team, which drives a vicious cycle.
3. To help a team recover from bad dynamics and change the vicious cycle to a virtuous one, we coaches need to invite each person to consider how their armor inadvertently contributes to the dynamic, and ask them to own their armor.