Enhancing Personal, Relational, Professional, and Community Change for Socially Conscious Humans

Workplace & Group Interpersonal Conflicts

Workplace & Group Interpersonal Conflicts: Learning Healthier Conflict and Boundaries

Is your workplace or group in need of strategy and skill-building training and discussion on how to have challenging conversations?

Are there stressful vibes between two or more co-workers, and is the dynamic adversely impacting your workplace environment?

Are your team leaders seeking information and strategies to help folks reach agreement on how to welcome conflict, share differing ideas, clarify roles, and explore differences in communication?  

Are the current sociopolitical stress and trauma affecting your and your co-workers’ or colleagues’ abilities to communicate and connect respectfully with each other? 

Are you in need of guidance to sort through care and boundaries around a co-worker’s personal trauma and how it may become triggered and negatively acted out in your workplace? What does that co-worker and the rest of the staff need in those situations?

Are you wanting suggestions on how to be more assertive (and less passive or aggressive) in workplace meetings and with your supervisors and co-workers?

Is your workplace grappling with defining and respecting differing worker “definitions” of “tone-policing,” “comfort with conflict,” “appropriate behavior,” “acting professionally,” and “reasonable accountability” while still trying to get the work done?

Are you wanting to work with an experienced, trauma-informed helping professional who understands the intersectional dynamics of varying race, class, ability, gender, and sexual identities, the insidious nature of White supremacy in the workplace, the personal and systemic impacts of oppression, injustice, and political trauma stress, and the challenges, satisfaction, and joys that nonprofit workers can face?

MY SERVICES

I offer one-on-one and organizational communication and conflict-resolution support and training, as well as workplace conflict-resolution mediation and coaching. 

Coaching humans to build and sustain healthy personal and professional relationships is one of the most enjoyable, challenging, and humbling services I offer.

My coaching and teaching style is interactive, fluid, collaborative, challenging, balanced, fun, and inclusive. I am a national educator and have designed and facilitated hundreds of trainings and workshops. I am skilled at seeing the big-picture complexity of a situation while also able to dig into into the messiness.

I am committed to helping you and your organization learn new strategies to improve communication, problem-solving, and conflict-resolution skills so you can understand, talk, argue, and genuinely listen to each other with more respect and openness, maybe even compassion —even when you disagree.

SERVICE #1

Organizational Education and Training

Irene will design a workshop, specifically tailored to your organization, that addresses practical conflict-resolution and communication strategies that fit your workplace environment and challenges. 

Through fun role-plays, interactive conversations, templates, and brainstorming, we will learn the steps to prepare for and engage in brave and uncomfortable conversations.

Possible Workshop Topics and Sub-Topics:

  • The Seven Surprising Key Elements of Effective Personal and Professional Challenging Conversations
  • When Our Oppression and Personal Trauma Experiences Derail Our Conflict Resolution Skills
  • What the Insidious Tendrils of White Supremacy Teaches Us About Conflict and How We Can All Do Better
  • Balancing the Pros and Cons of Cancel Culture in the Nonprofit Workplace
  • What Does It Look Like to “Act Professionally and Appropriately” in Your Workplace: Balancing Diversity, Inclusion, and Differences with Directness, Community-building, and Getting the Work Done?
  • Approaching Conflict from a Relational vs. A Conflictual Mindset
  • Concepts & Strategies: Communication Resiliency, Emotional Regulation, and Engaging From a Place of FACE vs. FLEE, FIGHT, FREEZE, FAWN, FADE, and FACT 
  • The Four Components of a Conflict
  • The Power of Projections and Assumptions on Communication
  • Styles of Handling Conflict 
  • The Differences Between Personal Boundaries and Agreed-upon Guardrails 
  • Tips and Templates on How to Respectfully Engage in Hard Conversations
  • Open & Flexible Responses to the Other’s Grievances, Requests, Needs, and Perspectives
  • The Art of a Heartfelt Apology and Myths About Apologies
  • Establishing Mutual “Guidelines For Engagement.”

*These workshop options can be modified to fit your particular workplace environment, needs, and dynamics.

For information on Irene’s availability, rates, and process.

SERVICE #2

Individual and Group Communication and Conflict-Resolution Support and Guidance

Areas you can choose to address with Irene one-on-one, in your group, or in your workplace setting:

  • Gain clarity about how to use your values to guide your interpersonal work relationships, stressors, and conflicts vs. your triggers, hurts, dissatisfaction, and burnout.
  • Envision the kind of professional relationship dynamics and boundaries that are realistic to your workplace situation and role.
  • Build discernment about what you can and cannot control and how this mindset can empower you to be less resentful and more assertive.
  • In your particular workplace, what are the situations where stress and conflicts are likely to arise?
  • Understand how perfectionism increases stress and anxiety levels and can build tension between co-workers
  • What is your happy place? Understand what it looks like for you to be emotionally, mentally, and physically grounded, so you are less likely to interact in stressed-out, dysregulated, and defensive ways.
  • Identify your default reactions and coping strategies to conflict and stress. Learn about the self-protective and defensive communication concepts of Fight, Flee, Fade, Fact, Freeze, or Fawn. And how are those different than Face? Identify your default reaction when you are stressed or upset. Learn how to shift it to Face so you respond from an intentional, grounded, and values-based perspective instead.
  • Learn how not to take things personally by building tolerance and resiliency skills so you can better face differences and not fear conflict and all of its messiness and complexity.
  • Discuss how the current social-political climate of stress and fear is impacting you and how it might be carrying over into your workplace. [See Irene’s workshops on the social-political climate of stress and fear and resilience designed for progressive helping professionals, non-profits, and community members.]
  • Identify your problematic communication patterns and improvements you want to make
  • Learn how to work effectively together while agreeing to disagree about conflicts and perspectives.
  • Learn how to risk saying and hearing the “hard stuff” that otherwise, left unsaid and unheard, erodes connection and builds resentment.
  • Contact Irene
SERVICE #3

Organizational Consultation and Conflict Resolution

Workplace or Group Conflict Resolution Services I offer:

I can mediate existing workplace conflicts and challenging interpersonal situations. I will help each person identify and respectfully convey their varying experiences, needs, and goals, slow down and really listen to each other’s perspectives (even if they are dissimilar), build clarity and understanding (even if they agree to disagree), reach a possible resolution, or define mutual guardrails and boundaries to move forward as co-workers.

I will: 

  • listen carefully to each person’s experiences, perspectives, needs, goals, and where they “are stuck.”
  • collaborate with those involved to create a stable, interactive, and inclusive “communication container” for everyone to address their concerns together.
  • pay attention to the interpersonal dynamics around the varying skills, privileges, roles, learning and communication styles, and neurospicy dynamics of the participants.
  • facilitate the discussions in a balanced, organized, flexible, and clear manner (with some dollops of humor and joy).
  • help brainstorm possible solutions.
  • offer observations, concrete strategies, worksheets, resources, and fresh, new approaches.

For more information

Other Conflict Resolution Services

Irene also provides conflict resolution coaching for other relationship configurations: family members, adult children and their parents, romantic partners, and friends, and offers conscious uncoupling to folks who are transitioning their relationship.

About Irene

Irene Greene MSED: (she/her/lesbian) Irene has 29+ years of experience as a positive psychology holistic wellness coach, mental health professional, group facilitator, relationship coach, and national educator. Irene is the Chair of the MN LGBTQ+ Therapists Network, a psychological first-aid street medic trainer, and has certification trainings in conflict resolution, helper compassion fatigue and burnout, and trauma. Irene was the first director of the UMN-Sexual Violence Program, worked in the State of MN’s Crime Victim Unit as a nonprofit program grants analyst, served as Chair of the MN Coalition Against Sexual Assault, and was on the board of MN Women in Psychology. Irene currently facilitates three support and skills groups: a sexual abuse survivor skills group, a support group for LGBTQ+ executive directors of nonprofits in the Twin Cities, and a resiliency, burnout, and compassion fatigue group for helping professionals. Irene provides conflict resolution and communication, burnout, vicarious trauma, moral injury, and compassion fatigue trainings to social service, medical, educational, psychological, nonprofits, and community-based grassroots organizations.

Examples of organizations where Irene has provided trainings and consultation: Regions Hospital, St. Paul, MN; Denver Health Medical Center, Denver, Colorado; Anatomy Bequest Program, University of Minnesota; MN LGBTQ+ Therapists’ Network; Headway Emotional Health Services, Twin Cities; The University of Minnesota Advising Program: Office of Undergraduate Education; Telling Queer History, Twin Cities; BECAUSE Conference, St. Paul; The University of Minnesota Department of Earth Sciences; Travis County Texas Prosecutor’s Office, Austin Tx; Way to Grow, MN; State Conference for Headway MN; MN Coalition of Sexual Abuse Programs; MN Department of Corrections; Anti-racism Coalition, New York City; MN United Way; MN Coalition of Domestic Violence; Northstar Street Medics of MN; The Minnesota Aliveness Project; The Family Tree Clinic, Minneapolis, MN; MN Women in Psychology; Touchstone Mental Health, Minneapolis, MN; OutFront-MN.  

A Few Conflict Resolution, Boundary, and Communication Resources

Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself by Nedra Glover Tawwab
The Set Boundaries Workbook: Practical Exercises for Understanding Your Needs and Setting Healthy Limits by Nedra Glover Tawwab

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman

The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

Facing Codependence by Pia Melody

Because We Need Each Other, Part II: Understanding Cancel Culture by Kazu Haga, Celia Kutz, Erica Sasson and Shilpa Jin

What Nonprofits Need to Know About Conflict De-Escalation | Nonprofit Risk Management Center

Handling Interpersonal Conflict | Apple Podcasts

For information contact Irene