Communication and conflict management

In this topic you will learn to communicate effectively in the workplace and to manage conflict when it arises within the team or between teams. It covers the fundamentals of interpersonal communication, effective communication within the team, contexts of complexity (distributed work, cultural diversity, AI in communication channels), the nature and dynamics of conflict, conflict management styles and strategies, internal facilitation of conversations between parties, and conflict at the organizational level. You will train the following key competencies:

• Identify in which element of the communication process (sender, channel, noise, receiver, filters) a failure has occurred and formulate a practical diagnosis.
• Build the conditions of psychological safety that enable honest communication, effective feedback, and healthy conflict in a team.
• Give and receive structured feedback (SBI model or equivalent), distinguishing when feedback is the appropriate channel and when the situation requires a conflict conversation.
• Adapt communication to distributed or hybrid contexts: channel selection, synchrony, management of information asymmetries, and team agreements.
• Classify a conflict according to its type (task, process, relationship) and its escalation stage (Glasl's model), and select the appropriate type of intervention.
• Conduct a conflict resolution conversation applying the Harvard interest-based model, NVC, or the Difficult Conversations framework, depending on the context.
• Facilitate a conversation between parties in conflict with active neutrality: opening, exploration, option generation, and agreement.
• Identify when a conflict exceeds the limits of internal intervention and manage the appropriate referral.