Episode 44: Cinnie Noble — Coaching Your Way to Collaboration
In this episode, Cinnie discusses:
- How executive coaching inspired her to create conflict management coaching (a.k.a. conflict coaching)
- Being a better version of yourself when it comes to being in conflict
- What triggers us and what happens to us when we’re triggered
- Why participating in conflict and communication training can only get us so far
- The organizational impact of leaders who avoid or are afraid of conflict
- Designing a conflict management coaching program for airport security in the United States post-911 regarding how to respond to public pushback about increased security measures and how to support each others as peers
- The importance of normalizing conflict in organizations and figuring out a way to prevent unnecessary conflict and a way to deal with necessary conflict in constructive ways
- The value of effective conflict management becoming a core competency
- That many leaders aren’t aware of the financial costs (and other costs) of avoiding conflict and inadequate conflict resolution systems
- What a conflict-competent culture looks like in an organization
- The Conflict Dynamics Profile (via Eckerd College): what does it take to be able to behave in conflict in constructive ways so that when faced with a conflict, people don’t go for making it a personal attack on people – they look at what’s the task, and what needs to be done here in order to have an organization and relationships that look more to task than attacking each other?
- How coaches can facilitate conflict as a better experience so people will stop avoiding it and focus on what they can gain and learn about themselves and contemplate where the other party is coming from
- Normalizing conflict in organizations through leadership
- The value of a conflict-competence organization
- The issue of leaders treating other leaders with dignity and respect, but not treating non-leaders the same way
- The growth she’s seen in the world of conflict management coaching
- The importance of preparatory meetings and discussing what it’s like to be in conflict before going into a formal conflict process such as arbitration, mediation, or trial — as well as post-mediation coaching
- Why she won’t do “quicky” training in conflict management and has a minimum time requirement to allow for pre- and post- training
- How to manage the difficult situation when an employee complains about someone to a manager but isn’t willing to share that person’s name
- The value of organizations being proactive about conflict so that people in conflict don’t wait until a conflict has blown up then write each other off
- Why it’s unwise to have a default response of putting together parties in conflict to talk it out; a face-to-face dialogue isn’t necessarily the best way to deal with a conflict
- Making conflict systems tailored to an organization
- The link between resiliency and conflict
- Various ways that covid-19 has affected organization conflict and perhaps pushed some conflict under the surface
- How to introduce with a coaching client the idea that conflict is an opportunity for profound growth as a person
- Exploring conflict management options in high- and low-context cultures, individualistic and collectivist cultures, organizations with diverse subcultures, and international organizations
A summary of Cinnie’s model, CINERGY:
- C: Clarify the goal – to determine what the client wants to accomplish in coaching
- I: Inquire about the situation – to find out what lead the client to want or be referred to coaching
- N: Name the elements – to deconstruct the conflict and help the client analyze what happened for him or her and the other person (Cinnie uses a construct she created called the Not So Merry Go-Round of Conflict)
- E: Explore the situation – to consider what optional plans of action may suit the situation and conflict dynamic
- R: Reconstruct the situation – to make the plan a reality by visioning, practicing, etc. – depending on the outcome desired
- G: Ground the challenges – to consider what barriers preclude goal achievement
- Y: Yes, the Commitment – to commit to when, where, etc.
More About our Guest
Cinnie Noble, a former lawyer, is a Professional Certified Coach and a Certified Mediator with a Masters of Law in Dispute Resolution. In 1999, after extensive experiential research, Cinnie developed the CINERGY model of Conflict Management Coaching, and since then has provided this coaching process worldwide. She and her team also train mediators, coaches, lawyers and others in various parts of the world, in this unique model. Cinnie is the author of two coaching books: Conflict Mastery: Questions to Guide You and Conflict Management Coaching: The CINERGY™ Model. In 1991, Cinnie was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada for her pioneering work in the travel industry for people with disabilities.
Cinnie’s Resources
Resources Mentioned in the Episode
- The Conflict Dynamics Profile, through Eckerd College in St. Petersburg
- Controlling the Costs of Conflict: How to Design a System for Your Organization by Karl Slaikeu and Ralph Hasson
- Designing Conflict Management Systems: A Guide to Creating Productive and Healthy Organizations by Christina Sickles Merchant
- Getting Disputes Resolved: Designing Systems to Cut the Costs of Conflict by William Ury, Jeanne Brett, and Stephen Goldberg
- The Third Side by William UryCinnie mentioned a resource about resilience that a woman in Australia started and someone in BC has spoken with people from Ecker about it. That person is Catherine Carr
Quotes and Highlights
[3:42] “I’m not getting as many people in interpersonal disputes as I am leaders taking the opportunity to say, ‘I’ve got to figure out how to work better with conflict.’”
[10:20] “it’s all about tailor-making a process that facilitates a shift that somebody has in maximizing their potential to be a conflict masterful person.”
[11:35] Gordon: “There’s something really fundamental that you said about the practice of conflict coaching. People can take all the training they want, but it has a generic quality to it in that it’s designed to apply to almost anyone who would come to a class on conflict. What you’re saying is that we’re all individuals and we all have these deeply, almost psychological ways that we respond to conflict, and we need a more tailor-made kind of conversation or interaction with someone to learn and become more familiar with those sides of ourselves and start to make changes that we might want to make.”
[14:50] “If [an organizational leader doesn’t] have a core competency of effective conflict management to begin with, and you yourself are not conflict competent, then the message to everybody is that it’s not worth addressing until it’s too late.”
[20:18] “If I were to give advice to leaders, it would be starting at, do you have some systems in place? Whether it’s as dramatic as TSA [the airport security program she designed] — that was a big deal. That cost a lot of money and it was national. But if you look at, how do you make conflict and dealing with conflict accessible? It starts with the leader accepting that it’s going to be part of life, and showing that they are able to engage in conflict effectively. That starting point to me is if you haven’t got coaching, you need to get coaching. You need to even understand the concepts of that, the importance of it, to be able to then develop some sort of system and systematic way of looking at, how do we ensure people within our organization accept when there’s an issue and ask, What do we do about it? That could be everything from offering individual coaching, offering group coaching, anything to do with mediation…”
[27:42] “The whole idea of a conflict-competent culture, to me, starts with the idea of what constitutes conflict competence generally in that organization.”
[29:02] “My dream has always been that every time [someone is named as] a leader, they automatically get conflict management coaching on the basis that they’re going to have challenges with conflict. It’s inevitable! So let’s make sure that you know how to do it. So here’s your coach. That’s one way of normalizing it.”
[40:00] “I think organizations need to know that there are lots of [conflict] services that are out there that are preventative, which is much more proactive than other ones…”
