The connection between coaching and conflict
When we focus on coaching in the context of conflict management and conflict prevention, we can see that this is one of the areas where coaching as a tool is very useful.
With coaching tools, you can prevent conflicts by working with elements that improve the ability of individual employees, the organization, departments, etc. to handle potential conflicts without there being an actual conflict. Coaching can preventively address the healthy differences between employees and their views on different work tasks before they develop into conflicts.
In a broader perspective, coaching can be seen as a form of communication that aims to enable employees, with the help of the manager's questions, to identify how they can help themselves so that conflicts become constructive and developmental instead of destructive.
Developing yourself and your employees
Organizational change requires employees to be open to new initiatives, willing to try new approaches, etc. Improving the conflict culture in a company will often mean working with new ways of communicating and dealing with conflicts, etc. There are old habits and patterns among colleagues that need to be adapted. Challenges in daily work need to be seen from new angles. Habitual reaction patterns need to be reassessed. In short, the organization and the individual employee must be developed. To get the full benefit of the elements we cover in relation to developing conflict behavior, communication, conflict prevention and conflict management, you also need to consider what is called learning.
Fixed mindset or Growth mindset
When working with learning, we need to believe that things can be changed/improved. In continuation of this, we would like to point to the American professor and psychologist Carol Dweck, who researches motivation, personality and development. Carol Dweck emphasizes that the road to success is neither about ability nor talent - but about choosing a “mindset of growth”.
A person's mindset is understood here as a person's mental disposition that predetermines their interpretations and reactions.
Dweck's thesis is that our attitude towards our abilities determines how we interpret our experiences and what we learn from our experiences. According to her, people can be divided into two different groups depending on our attitude towards where our ability to succeed comes from:
Fixed mindset: The belief that ability is based on talent, is innate and therefore can only be developed to a limited extent. With the belief that you are born with a fixed mindset, it is almost impossible to learn new things. With this mindset, you can either achieve your results with little effort or you will never be able to do it, so you might as well give up. For example, “I'll never figure out how to use a spreadsheet” or “I'm so bad at reading, I'll never learn this”. Managers with a fixed mindset have a belief that the employee has no greater capabilities than what they currently realize. Then there's no point in trying to teach them to do it better or differently.
Growth (unfixed) mindset: The belief that ability comes from experience and hard work and can therefore be developed to a greater extent. People with this mindset believe that ability and success comes from learning and that it takes time and effort to learn. If you encounter challenges, you need to try harder, try a different approach, seek help, etc. The leader with a Growth mindset will have a belief that she is able to develop the employee. In other words, the manager perceives the employees they are responsible for in light of their potential, not in light of their current performance.
The interesting thing about Dweck's theory is that individuals are not necessarily aware of their own mindset, but that our behavior often reveals our mindset. According to Dweck, this is evident in our reactions to mistakes.
People with a Fixed mindset fear failure because it is a defeat that tells you something about their basic skills/abilities, while people with a Growth mindset don't mind or fear failure so much because they have the perception that their performance can be improved and have the attitude that “we learn from our mistakes”.
In the service industry, you can sometimes hear the following said about highly competent employees: “She was born with a service gene”. A remark that can be an expression of a Fixed mindset. This is not in line with the approach that the sports world, for example, takes to talent development today. Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon has said that it takes at least 10 years of intensive training before a person has gained the necessary experience required for world-class performance in any area of expertise.
Coaching creates reflection
Coaching is a way of creating reflection and learning. Ideally, the interaction in coaching is based on a relationship between coach and focus person (the person being coached) in which trust is built, enabling the focus person to feel safe enough to talk about and work with what is important to them in relation to the goals that have been set. In this context, this could be the ability to handle the friction that exists in a specific collaboration.
The coach can ask questions that motivate and influence the focus person to reflect on the work/collaboration. Whitmore also says about the learning perspective on coaching as a form of conversation that:
“Coaching is unlocking another person's potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping people to learn rather than teaching them” (Whitmore 1996, p. 12).
Whitmore's statement says something about how coaching and the tools/models used in this context can be seen as a learning activity, precisely because one goal of coaching is to help the focus person to learn and thereby realize their potential. Coaching predominantly takes place in a forward-looking perspective by virtue of the way in which the focus persons themselves find solutions, strategies and options for action.