The Art of Conflict Management: Achieving Solutions for Life, Work, and Beyond

By: Michael Dues, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Michael Dues

Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

In 24 lectures brimming with practical tips, tools, and techniques everyone can use to better manage conflict in his or her professional and personal lives, gain the essential skills of conflict management. As presented by Professor Dues, these lectures will show you how to effectively deal with conflicts of all kinds, using the "win-win" model that has dominated the field for the past six decades.

You'll gain effective techniques for handling conflicts in your workplace, other organizational settings, or your personal life, whether you're dealing with supervisors, coworkers, acquaintances, close friends, or family members. You'll learn the best ways to analyze conflicts and work through the steps toward resolving them, including clarifying goals, handling difficult emotions, and negotiating agreements. And you'll grasp the fundamental tricks of the trade that experienced negotiators have long used to deal with even the most seemingly intractable moral and cultural conflicts.

While drawing on the latest groundbreaking research, Professor Dues has designed these lectures to be as practical as possible. Requiring no background in conflict management, negotiation, or psychology, they offer you not just knowledge, but strategies and tactics you can put to work in your own life right now. Best of all, you'll be able to see those strategies and tactics in action through 70 professionally acted dramatizations that illustrate different conflict situations at home and in the workplace.

You don't have a choice about becoming involved in conflict. You do, however, have a choice about learning to manage it successfully by using the invaluable tools these lectures can give you.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2010 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2010 The Great Courses

Do not Avoid the Argument...

Instead of avoiding conflict, I highly recommend hearing out Professor Dues, learning and honing this Art.

a bit repetitive

Good content, ok presentation, but somewhat more repetitive than I would've liked. The course could have been completed in fewer chapters. I did find the information beneficial and would recommend to anyone.

Most useful of all the Audible books so far

This course is worth going through several times and taking notes. The professor is excellent and has the perfect demeanor to teach this course. I plan on going through it again.

great lectures

can't stop appraising. great course worth of time and money. easy to implement. great speaker. should be taken at really age of life. it's looking process but great guidance

Remarkable and helpful course

Amongst the many great courses that i have downloaded, this course by Michael Dues is amongst the best. While we are reasonable and fair (or try our best) in our dealings, diffrences amd conflicts are inevitable. This book is very very good at providing the reader with the required temperament, mindfulness in avoiding the common errors that instead of resolving conflicts, actually magnifies them. Avoid seeking revenge instead look towards dealing with the issues not the person. Truly, an eye for an eye mentality will just lead to damaged relations. There are ways to achieving our goals with less stress less drama. This course helps.

Fantastic!

I have studied this subject for many years and still learned alot from this. Great material.

Highly recommended for anyone and everyone

I am actually trying to get all the people I care about to go through this and make conflicts work out better

Great material but too many um’s

Seriously! He knows his material but his bad habit of saying um is really a test of my patience. I will listen again but I will have to not be tired so I can bear with his bad habit.

Inspirational, Earnest, Idealistic

Why (I Listened)
I want to become an effective communicator since I hire and work with a lot of freelancers of different backgrounds and nationalities.

How (it Executed)
This teaches many flexible and helpful processes with specific steps for you to model. You can feel how honestly Dues wants you to learn these processes because of how the course is structured. Every lecture starts with an overview of what this lecture will be about and ends with a recap, a homework assignment, and a sentence or two about what he'll be teaching next. It gives the series a great sense of flow and progress.

To illustrate the processes at work, Dues uses acted-out examples. Since he's modeling his own experiences and his students', most of the time the examples are realistic. However, sometimes they oversimplify human emotions, making conflicts be resolved too easily for the sake of showing how well the processes he suggests can work.

In one example, a co-worker tells another that during a meeting, the co-worker wasn't paying enough attention, and they feel that has caused conflict in the past and could cause conflict in the future. This isn't an especially rude thing to say, yet one would expect the co-worker to be offended by such a statement. Instead, they say "Yeah, you're probably right" and then the issue is dropped. I would have liked to see more challenges to the processes suggested in these lectures so we can learn how to handle them.

I had some minor issues with the audio. You can hear Dues's clothes shifting as he thinks, and sometimes he pauses mid-sentence for so long, I thought my bluetooth was having hiccups.

What (I'll Remember)
The final few lectures are about how we have made huge leaps in resolving conflicts on a worldwide scale, from better teaching children in schools to arguments over holy lands. It provided a rare, positive take on humanity and where we're going. I really appreciated that.

A 2nd and 3rd listening should be mandatory!

Well paced and easy to listen to. Highly recommend to others! Great information from Michael Dues.