What are you doing to ensure your organisation is conflict-proof?
Companies and their boards spend huge resources on strategic planning, financial decisions and governance but few, if any, have a plan for dealing with conflict and yet disputes, particularly at board level, have the capacity to render the entire organisation dysfunctional.
Imagine if the board of a large company discovered one of their products had defects which could result in loss of profits, loss of jobs and huge reputational damage. It is unthinkable that the board would ignore the evidence and would fail to act upon it. Yet every day hugely successful organisations are failing to achieve their potential as a result of conflict at the highest level and worse - 29.6% of directors (in one particular survey*) experienced conflict on the board that actually destroyed an organisation.
Successful companies are run by strong boards, but strong boards are made up of individuals who need to be able to express strong opinions. They need to be able to debate crucial decisions and have disagreements. Unfortunately healthy debate can so easily become a dispute when other agendas and behaviour enter the equation. In the same survey directors said that, not surprisingly, the main subject matter of disputes they had experienced was ‘financial, structural or procedural workings of the organisation’. What may be more surprising is that this was very closely followed by the second most common cause ‘the personal behaviour and attitudes of directors’.
What if you could take some very simple steps to ensure that your organisation was ‘conflict-proof’? In the real world it is not possible to prevent the potential for conflict arising, but is entirely possible to include in your structure and governance a proactive plan for dealing with it – spotting it at its earliest possible stage, intervening before it festers and resolving it before the damage is done.
the better way provides a bespoke service to help you design and implement simple, straightforward strategies to ensure that your organisation is not risking its hard earned profits through ineffectiveness at board level due to conflict.
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*IFC/CEDR Report on Boardroom Disputes 2014