One of the challenges that managers, coaches, and consultants face is helping groups and teams to effectively balance productive work with work that builds and sustains their productivity. The key to that is understanding that working on the group’s functioning is also real work.
Conflict is a natural part of working together in groups, yet in the midst of it, it can feel terribly dysfunctional. There’s no shortage of ideas about how to work through it, and there are lots of tools available. How do you know where to get started?
Whenever we try to help a person or group change, we intervene at some level of depth. For any given change, we almost always have multiple options for how to involve people. As managers, coaches, or consultants, we need to know how deep we are asking them to go.