Organizations looking for help with conflict often hear two terms that sound similar but are not the same: conflict coaching and conflict consulting. Both can be useful, but they serve different purposes and are structured differently.
Conflict Coaching: One-on-One Skill Building and Support
Conflict coaching is a one-on-one process that helps an individual understand a conflict more clearly and build the skills to handle it more effectively.
In a typical conflict coaching engagement:
- The coach works privately with one person, not with both sides together.
- Sessions focus on clarifying what is happening, exploring options, and strengthening the coachee’s communication and conflict-management skills.
- The goal is to help that person navigate a specific conflict and become more confident and capable in handling future conflicts.
Conflict coaching can stand on its own or be used alongside other processes. For example, some organizations offer coaching when mediation is not possible, when someone wants support before a difficult conversation, or when a leader wants to work on their overall approach to conflict.
Conflict Consulting: Organizational Diagnosis and Intervention
Conflict consulting is broader, and typically revolves around a direct intervention to resolve one or more conflicts inside an organization.
In conflict consulting engagements:
- The consultant looks at the system around the conflict: structure, roles, processes, history, and culture.
- The work may involve multiple people and groups, including leaders, HR, team members, and sometimes whole departments.
- The consultant helps diagnose what is driving the conflict, designs an intervention such as a series of facilitated conversations, and advises on changes to prevent the patterns from repeating.
In my own conflict work, I’ve focused at several different levels. The most common has been to come into a team that has conflict that either keeps coming back or has never been resolved. In those cases I follow a common process of interviewing everyone ahead of time and then facilitating a conversation that generates resolutions. I often include some follow up work to ensure that the resolutions are sticking.
Some of my projects have involved multiple organizations, like an association that has an affiliated Foundation, but they share some staff. That structure has some conflict built into it, but a good process for working through issues can keep both organizations functioning well.
In some cases I take an even broader approach and examine the organization’s conflict system. This includes processes for surfacing and routing conflict and governance criteria for understanding which conflicts are more important and should be prioritized.
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