Are team meetings run effectively? Is communication clear and inclusive of all team members? Are you having the difficult conversations necessary to ensure optimal performance on and off the field of play? How do you handle conflict on your sports team? How do you keep it from spiraling into a large, public dispute? How do you keep conflict from destroying a season? What support is available for an immediate problem? How can you minimize the downside of your sports conflict situations and maximize the upside? How can you ensure issues are resolved with the least amount of negative impact on your team relationships? How can you mitigate risk and optimize performance? How is sports conflict coaching valuable to your sports team or organization?

Comprehensive and Time Tested

SCI uses a comprehensive and time-tested facilitation process to assist groups in developing and agreeing on workable, realistic plans or solutions to issues or challenges facing your sports team or organization. We help clients achieve open communication, clear direction, and decisive action.

Team Facilitation

Even the most effective teams and organizations can benefit from an outside facilitator who can masterfully and neutrally manage the meeting agenda, work through team dynamics, and help the team achieve its desired outcomes. This is especially important in minimizing distractions early before they become destructive conflict and to get the grit out of the team’s machine as early as possible. A neutral facilitator focused on effective process and open communication can save a season and help ensure optimal performance.

Team Collaboration

Teams can find themselves mired in what feels like difficult, immovable situations. When collaboration seems like it is a challenge, our expert facilitators leverage their skills and experience to help teams begin to manage team dynamics to elicit the most effective collaborative approaches.

Team Communication

Communicating well within a team is one of the most difficult tasks a team faces. SCI helps teams work through individual, interpersonal, and team communication dynamics to uncover unspoken words, surface “the elephant in the room,” and find collaborative ways to once-again work together toward building a winning atmosphere.

Conflict Management Is Important

Conflict management is a key competency area with skills that are difficult to master in the abstract or through reading and classroom alone. Coaches, Administrators, Team Captains, Athletes, and others learn best when in a situation that requires some guidance and support from a conflict management expert.

Key to a Healthy Team

Effective conflict management is key to a constructive locker room culture. Serious conflicts can cost your team in terms of performance on and off the field. It can also open the door to unnecessary escalations that, at their worst, involve legal action, investigations, terminations and departures, and lost seasons and careers.

Sports Conflict Coaching is Effective

Sports conflict coaching is effective. In essence, it is training for one and provides a better way to understand conflict and how to effectively manage it. Most importantly, it allows focus to remain on critical activities necessary to prepare to perform optimally within the sport itself. By addressing key sources of negative stress, energy is preserved for the demands of the sport itself.

Process Consultation

Team process consultation consists of activities designed to increase team awareness and understanding, so that the team or organization can take steps to improve the way that its members work together.

Observation and Assessment

The consultant observes and assesses the interactions between members of the team or organization in the normal flow of practices, meetings, and games. The consultant then provides feedback to members of the organization or team to help them in resolving team conflict and learning to identify the attitudes and behaviors that help or hinder the team’s success, and to take steps to improve the way the team functions.

Consensus Building

Many sports conflicts are public in nature and involve numerous, diverse stakeholders. Conflicts may center around stadium funding, fan treatment and behavior, neighborhood relations, intra-university disputes about the role of athletics, proposed rule changes. These are complicated and require experienced support to ensure better outcomes.

SCI uses a proven methodology, based around consensus-building, to facilitate constructive dialogue around your most critical issues. Calling a meeting and allowing everyone speak their mind is probably not going to be sufficient; addressing complicated, volatile disputes requires careful, systematic planning.

Larry Susskind and his colleagues have detailed the basic approach to Consensus Building that SCI follows.