Conflict coaching: Effective strategies for resolving professional conflicts
Misunderstandings within a team, tensions with superiors or escalating disputes – professional conflicts can be challenging. Conflict coaching helps you to resolve them effectively and strengthen your own conflict competence. The timing is certainly not insignificant – the earlier, the better! Protracted and smouldering conflicts are not only expensive for companies, they also cause lasting and profound frustration for the parties involved, including health problems.
For many years I have been supporting companies and individuals as a business coach on their path to sustainable success.
My in-depth understanding of business and leadership dynamics, combined with my many years of coaching expertise, enables me to develop targeted and sustainable solutions with my clients.
My coaching is not only based on experience, but also on sound training: I have acquired numerous recognized coaching certifications and continue to further my education.
From competitive sport, I know how to deal with pressure, motivation and stamina – crucial factors that are also of central importance in business. This knowledge always flows into my coaching.
My coaching benefits from my German-Japanese intercultural background, which gives me a special sensitivity for diversity, communication, leadership and people from different backgrounds.
Whether in German or English – my coaching adapts to the linguistic and cultural needs of my clients.
Personal growth, individual development, both privately and professionally – everyone has their key to this: that is my conviction as a coach.
I am Christina Yuko Vogel – half-Japanese, former competitive basketball player & coach in the 2nd Bundesliga and managing director.
I coach in German and English.
“Mental health, stress management and resilience are always an integral part of my coaching, if not really the foundation of it.”
– Christina Yuko Vogel
As a business coach, my focus is on the people involved and their personal expectations, perspectives and attitudes as well as the conflict at hand. I see myself as a mediator and supporter of all parties involved.
Conflicts often have a habit of developing their own momentum almost unnoticed. I therefore accompany you on the path to regaining clarity and insight into the actual origin of the conflict. Only when we understand what is actually at stake can we work on effective strategies to resolve the actual conflict.
Even when solutions have been found in and for a conflict or between the fronts involved, the issue still often echoes - that is very human. It is therefore always important to me to look to the future in order to become aware of the existing skills and resources that can help to maintain an overview in the next situation and prevent a renewed escalation between the conflict parties.
Managers often play a decisive role in conflict resolution, as they are either directly involved in conflict situations or are consulted by employees in order to resolve the conflict or intervene as mediators.
For this reason, it is fundamentally very helpful and necessary to strengthen and encourage managers in their ability to act and deal with conflicts.
Dealing with conflicts and crises should also be seen as a form of mindful leadership and is a decisive factor in improving the working atmosphere by recognizing and resolving a conflict situation at an early stage.
How can conflict coaching support managers in dealing with conflicts?
Whether it is general business coaching or conflict coaching, when working with managers there is always the aspect of the “role model”. How does the manager deal with a conflict situation? Do they communicate openly or do they prefer to look the other way in the hope that the problem will hopefully resolve itself?
Regardless of the respective corporate culture, teams look to their superiors, especially in crisis situations. Conflict management that is characterized by self-responsibility, a self-effective attitude, efforts to be objective and open and honest communication holds great potential - not only for the conflict situation as such, but also for the establishment of a constructive culture of dispute and discussion within the company.
Managers are often faced with the challenge of resolving conflicts, for example among themselves within a team or between two different teams or even across several departments.
In such cases, as a conflict coach I have been able to help de-escalate the acute situation, bring all the people involved together for discussions and work together with the manager on strategies and potential solutions.
When faced with a conflict or crisis, very few people will shout out loud with happiness “finally a really nice conflict again”. In a business context, they are primarily seen as obstacles on the path to achieving ambitious and diverse goals.
The view of what is happening in general is usually clouded by the conflict or, at the very least, one is distracted. Making decisions is now suddenly influenced by many more factors than just the facts and the factual content. Uncertainty often arises.
In coaching, we therefore always start by analyzing: what is contributing to the conflict, who is involved, who needs to be talked to, who can provide support, what skills are available that could also help with conflict resolution, and much more.
It is also important to consider which decisions in an acute situation could possibly be postponed in order to avoid acting from a position of imbalance.
In such situations, I always work with managers on communication. Silence and a lack of transparency are rarely good advisors. It is important to find the fine line between communication and overcompensation through too many words.
There are certainly many situations in which no one asks themselves whether conflict coaching is necessary because the signs are unmistakable in everyday working life.
Such acute conflicts have either already been fermenting for some time or they are accompanied by such accelerants that they escalate within a short space of time.
Due to the high level of emotions and the often very complex situation, coaching can help at this point to create clarity and to put everyone involved in a “workable” state to work on the conflict together.
However, it makes a lot of sense to either make use of conflict coaching at a much earlier stage or to facilitate it for your own teams and employees. Smouldering conflicts before they escalate can usually be dealt with more quickly and with significantly less collateral damage.
In any case, conflict coaching is indicated if a satisfactory or pacifying solution cannot be found despite repeated attempts and undertakings to solve the problem.
From my point of view as a coach, I have a different approach to the situation because I am not trying to assert any personal interests or was already emotionally involved in the development of the conflict. This means that I am always in a position to provide objective support for the entire conflict situation.
In principle, conflict coaching can of course be conducted online. The privacy of a virtual one-to-one preliminary meeting with one of the conflict parties often provides a safe setting. However, if the conflict coaching is later held in a group, for example, I am a great advocate of the physical and personal presence of all participants in one room. Of course, this can also be done virtually, but I am convinced that conflicts are such a sensitive matter that they should ideally be dealt with in a joint physical presence.
Regardless of what you are looking for a coach for, you should always make sure that he/she has a profound coaching education, and it is often worth taking a look at the training institutes themselves where the coach has trained. The market is large and broad.
I have completed several coaching training courses, for an overview please visit my About Me page.
An equally important aspect alongside training is the coach's CV and background. You don't just learn coaching by reading books. There is a lot more to it and the coach's professional and personal background can give you a good impression of whether he or she is up to your requirements or could be a good fit.
The most important ingredient for a productive and constructive coaching process is the “human fit” or, to put it bluntly, that things flow smoothly. This is what preliminary talks are for, to find out exactly this and to get a feel for us coaches. And vice versa! I also make my selection, just as you should do. It has to be a human fit, because otherwise other disruptive factors will join the process that simply have no place there.
Links
Coaching address
Phone
Copyright © 2025 Business Coaching Vogel