Skills for De-escalating Inter-Personal Conflicts: Part 1 Understanding Conflict

Interactive Conflict Management Workshop

This interactive workshop introduces foundational concepts and practices for understanding and managing interpersonal conflict. Participants will examine common sources and patterns of conflict, consider how communication styles, perception, emotion, and power dynamics shape difficult interactions, and develop greater awareness of their own responses to disagreement. Emphasis is placed on practical conflict management and de-escalation strategies, including active listening, reframing, perspective taking, and responding constructively when tensions begin to escalate.

1) Course Goals

• Build participants’ foundational understanding of how interpersonal conflict begins, develops, and manifests in workplace and university settings.
• Increase awareness of the personal, relational, organizational, and human-needs factors that influence conflict behavior.
• Help participants recognize their own conflict patterns and expand their range of intentional responses.
• Prepare participants for later skill development in de-escalation, communication, and problem solving.

2) Learner Objectives

• Identify common sources and triggers of interpersonal conflict in workplace and university environments.
• Explain how perceptions, needs, rules, norms, procedures, relationships, and organizational context can shape conflict.
• Recognize early indicators of escalation and patterns that may intensify conflict.
• Identify core human needs that may influence behavior and reactions during conflict.
• Complete and interpret a personal conflict styles assessment.
• Compare common approaches to conflict management and describe circumstances in which each may be more or less effective.
• Reflect on personal conflict habits, strengths, triggers, and areas for growth.
• Practice observing a conflict from multiple perspectives rather than relying solely on one interpretation.

3) Learner Outcomes

• Participants can recognize common causes, triggers, and patterns of interpersonal conflict more quickly.
• Participants can explain how workplace or university rules, norms, procedures, and unmet needs may influence a conflict situation.
• Participants can identify their own preferred conflict-management style and recognize how it may affect interactions with others.
• Participants can distinguish among several conflict-management approaches and select responses more intentionally.
• Participants can consider multiple perspectives and begin responding to conflict with greater self-awareness and purpose.
• Participants leave with a conceptual foundation for subsequent training in emotional regulation, communication, de-escalation, and problem solving.

4) Core Skills

• Conflict recognition
• Conflict analysis
• Identifying triggers and escalation patterns
• Human-needs analysis
• Perspective taking
• Self-awareness
• Conflict-style assessment
• Intentional response selection
• Understanding organizational rules and norms
• Reflective practice
• Early-stage de-escalation awareness