TKI

How can we help you reach better resolutions?

Change your approach to conflict and you can change the outcome

As an OPP Consultant, I work with many teams across a wide variety of sectors and industries. I was recently talking to a client, herself an L&D practitioner, who asked me about my approach to team coaching – in  particular what my ‘top tips’ were for ensuring that the work had impact and made a real difference to how the team functions. This got me thinking about the key elements involved.

Leaders are quick, decisive, and know what they want; they aren’t afraid to make unpopular decisions and they can be fiercely competitive. This might be a somewhat old-fashioned view of leadership, but new research by OPP suggests there is more than a grain of truth here.

Visits to our Personality Matters blog were at an all-time high in 2014, and we covered a wide range of topics in our weekly posts. Over the last 12 months we've talked about the best MBTI-based books and the various resources available for L&D teams. We’ve promoted Movember, and we’ve commented on the Paul Flowers furore. We've also continued to thrive as thought leaders in a diverse range of workplace psychology issues, from recruitment and assessment centres to polarity management. But what are the top five posts that readers have returned to again and again?

To celebrate the launch of the new OPP shop we thought it would be useful to highlight the most popular resources that have been purchased through our online ordering during 2014. These are the items that our customers find most useful (along with the many popular reports ordered by practitioners via OPPassessment). How many of them are in your portfolio of essential resources?

In Act 1 of my blog posts marking 40 years of the TKI, I described the circumstances surrounding the development of the instrument. In this continuation of the story I’ll explain how ongoing research and validation enabled it to become the world’s best-selling conflict management tool.

"While I don’t recall if there was a single moment, an epiphany of sorts, at some point Ken and I must’ve said out loud: 'Let’s develop a new instrument to measure the five conflict-handling modes'..." Ralph Kilmann recalls the origins of the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument in the first of two blog posts celebrating 40 years of the TKI.

Few things in life are free – but OPP has some really cool free resources to support you in your work! To help celebrate our 25 years in the business, we’ve taken a trawl through the various goodies available for zero outlay on our website. They range from white papers and feedback materials to fun quick guides and infographics – many of which can also be found on our practitioner downloads page.

How separate am I from my environment and its influences? Can I influence (and thus change) my surrounding systems so they are more supportive of my true and complete self? Ralph Kilmann looks at how conflict-handling tools might address these fundamental issues.

Conflict is essential for powering change in an organisation. It is a catalyst for the evolution - revolution, even - that drives success.

In a world of conflict, is it too ambitious to imagine that the TKI model can shed light on areas of political confrontation?

Defusing high-intensity conflicts and raising empathy between parties.

How to make bad behaviour unacceptable in the workplace.

Assessment tools must address potential social desirability response bias if they are to be considered credible.

Conflict, more often than not, stems from the system rather than the people. So what exactly is this 'system' that creates conflict?

Many organisations appear to adopt a strong avoiding culture when it comes to conflict resolution.

Unless a family, community or work group consciously and deliberately identifies and closes its culture-gaps, cultural norms tend to stay negative.

By seeing your assumptions face-to-face, you have the chance to revise them, which will surely inspire you to change your beliefs or modify your behaviour.

It's easy to get stuck in a life rut, but knowing more about yourself can help you identify areas that need change.