Category: Level Seven

May 15, 2019

Conflict Resolution: A new perspective

MOVING FORWARD WITH THE RESEARCH

Helping teams to resolve issues often focuses on interpersonal behaviours and relationships. These are undoubtedly important, but other issues can arise with more of a task focus: ideas may not get heard, low risk tolerance can stifle creativity impacting on team performance and productivity. (This article succinctly sets out the range of challenges facing teams: https://workplacepsychology.net/2010/12/17/eight-common-problems-teams-encounter/)

Our current research project seeks to identify the types of task based challenge that impede team success. As trained coaches and mediators, we are fascinated by team dynamics and how synthesizing our work as coaches and mediators can facilitate the harnessing of conflict into productive outputs.

Through listening to individual stories of conflict and analyzing emerging themes, we aim to identify the most common challenges that lead to conflict. These themes will then form the basis of a tailored team coaching workshop that will facilitate reflection, creative adaptation and action planning. https://www.level7live.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/General-team-conflict-flyer.pdf

We’d love to hear about your experiences of conflict in teams and how that conflict has been channeled into successful outcomes. Do get in touch with us to share ideas and help with our research. Email us at info@level7live.com.

March 30, 2019

Conflict Resolution: A new perspective

The desire for organisations to innovate has become deeply embedded in the organisational psyche; whether that be private, public or not for profit type organisations. The word innovation appears in vision and mission statements, in lists of value statements and in key performance indicators. Innovation is the new ‘change’.

Level Seven has always been interested in helping organisations and individuals to be the best that they can be especially within the backdrop of improving innovation, leadership development and personal performance https://www.level7live.com/leading-the-human-interface-of-innovation/ As professionals working in the area of talent development, we use coaching and conflict resolution skills on a regular basis. https://www.level7live.com/conflict-resolution/

As a result, we have become increasingly fascinated by the systems within which people operate, in particular the impact of individuals on teams, and of teams on innovation performance. What has emerged for us is a strong interest in how positive conflict resolution can be applied in the context of innovation performance and team coaching.

Studies on innovation in the workplace have been conducted from many perspectives, including, business performance, leadership performance, team performance, individual creativity to name but a few. We are specifically interested in two areas that we believe impact on successful innovation performance. The first is how conflict in teams can be seen as a positive concept and second whether using a process of conflict mediation within a team can have a positive impact on innovation performance.

We are undertaking our own research project that focuses on the human factors of innovation in a team environment concerning relationship issues between different stakeholders. We will investigate what issues arise that put people into conflict with one another; how they have attempted to embrace these issues in positive ways whilst still working with the usual constraints such as budgets, timescales and evolving needs of users and customers. What are the stumbling blocks to successful innovation and what have teams done to overcome them? Drawing on models of team coaching, we will explore how these models can be synthesised into a process of conflict resolution such that the team’s innovation performance can be enhanced.

If you are located in or around Northamptonshire or Cambridgeshire and think that your teams would benefit from the insights that taking part in our team conflict resolution research can provide, please get in touch at info@level7live.com.

December 20, 2018

Reflection 7: Output and action or what do I do with my reflective output?

Reflection 7: Output and action or what do I do with my reflective output?

Over the last 6 blogs, we have shared insights into how to be more reflective and support reflection in ourselves as well as our colleagues. We hope that you have felt inspired or at least had your reflective strategies validated by the ideas and sources of information that we have shared. In this our 7^th and final blog in the series, we highlight a selection of strategies for action……having reflected, what next? How can we make effective use of the outcomes?

November 16, 2018

Reflection 6: Intuition, Incubation and Insight

In our last blog, we looked at cognitive biases and the effect these can have on our reflective capabilities and outputs. In our blog No 4 on cognitive preferences we considered how cognitive preferences can both hinder and help the act of reflection.

In this penultimate blog in the series of reflection, we would like to stay with cognition and consider the concept of intuition and its role in helping to deepen our ability to reflect effectively.

September 14, 2018

Reflection 5: Cognitive Biases

In our continued journey into the art of reflection, we shall be looking at the interrelated concepts of mental models and cognitive bias and how they impact on our capacity to reflect meaningfully. In our previous blog post in this series, we discussed the idea of cognitive preferences and suggested that when reflecting we could enhance our reflective activities and outputs by applying System 1 and System 2 type thinking modes to the issue that we were reflecting on (Kahneman, 2011).

August 22, 2018

Coaching for China – developing our global community of practice

One of our obsessions is spreading the word about the power of coaching and contributing to both local and global communities of practice. Earlier this summer, we were delighted to work with Paul Lin, founder and president of Oxford Educational Cloud (http://www.oecglobal.org/about/team/), to tailor and deliver our Introduction to Coaching workshop for a group of Chinese entrepreneurs. The group were on a visit from China to soak up the culture of Oxford and Cambridge and also to access quality academic learning to inform their business leadership and practice.

August 8, 2018

Reflection 4: The act of reflecting

Reflection 4: The act of reflecting

In previous blog posts we referred to personal preferences relating to reflecting. We suggested that some people might prefer to have some structure to enable them to think effectively whereas others might prefer a more free-flowing approach to this process. We proposed that two types of opportunities for engaging in reflective activities; these are formal sessions where groups of people might get together to reflect on specific issues or there may be more opportunistic moments that occur to reflect informally under more solitary conditions.

Continuing with the dichotomy of preferences, let us turn now to the granular aspect of reflection; the act of thinking or cognition. How we think is an integral aspect of reflection. Cognition has and continues to be of interest to various disciplines, including among others, Neuroscience, Philosophy and Psychology. Antonio Damasio, whose professional interests span all three areas attempts to explain the concept of consciousness, as without it humans would not be able to engage in acts of cognition. Due to technology and non-invasive procedures, it is now possible to look into a living brain and observe neural pathways as they activate when a person is thinking about something, which in the context of these blog posts is what we refer to as reflection; therefore to be able to reflect draws on the need to be conscious.

https://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_damasio_the_quest_to_understand_consciousness

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