Conflict is a part of life. Get the tools you need to navigate it.

Which leadership style gets the best results? Research on servant leadership, trust, and team performance, plus one practical step to start this week.

If your family is struggling with decisions about an aging parent's care, medical treatment, or end-of-life wishes, I want to start with the thing I say to families in my mediation practice all the time: you are not alone, and neither is your family. This is not an easy season, and there is a lot to navigate at once. And while this is not the conversation any of us wants to be having, it is one of the most important conversations you can have.

What is a conflict ecosystem? Kimberly Best of Best Conflict Solutions, based in St. Louis, explains how organizations build conflict skills that last. Nationwide.

People in conflict tend to argue about what happened or didn’t happen. Who said what, who did what, who started it, who was right and who was wrong. That is almost never what the conflict is about. Underneath the argument, four things are running at once. Emotions that are hard to see and harder to name. Values that feel non-negotiable. Interests buried under stated positions. Needs that go unspoken because they are the hardest thing to say out loud.

Your culture is not the values on the wall. Your culture is what your system has actually learned about how to interact, especially in difficulty, accumulated over years, and it is running whether anyone is paying attention to it or not. And left to chance, it often outlives the people who formed it.