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

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.

And underneath all of it, kids need to know that we believe in them. They are not too young. They are not too distracted. They are the next generation of people who will have to live with the world we leave them. They will rise to whatever expectations we hold for them. If we expect them to learn to handle conflict skillfully, they will. If we expect them to fail at it, they will deliver on that too.

If you read my recent post on the five signs of quiet cracking on your team, here's the part I intentionally set aside for this post. The people responsible for noticing quiet cracking are cracking themselves. If your strategy for the next twelve months doesn't have managers at the center of it, you're missing the actual story.