Conflict management style assessment (TKI)

Your team’s conflict profile

The 21-page TKI Team Report uncovers your team’s conflict profile. It reveals the team’s typical approach to conflict and identifies any signs of overuse or underuse of the five conflict modes. Once the profile is on the table, interpersonal and decision-making challenges become much easier to address.

The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument is published by The Myers-Briggs Company and has been used with teams worldwide for decades.

Individual insight for team harmony

Each team member also receives their individual TKI profile. Comparing it with the team profile shows how their own conflict-handling style relates to the team’s dynamics: the similarities, the differences, and the personal challenges worth working on.

Challenges and remedies

The report goes beyond profiling. It identifies likely challenges and offers evidence-based remedies for both team and individual development, whether the pattern is overuse or underuse of a mode. The remedies are practical, and we build the session around trying them on real situations.

The five modes

• Competing: assertive and uncooperative. Useful in emergencies and on matters of principle; costly when overused.
• Collaborating: assertive and cooperative. Working through the disagreement to a solution that satisfies both sides; slow, and worth it for the decisions that matter most.
• Compromising: moderate on both. Splitting the difference to keep things moving.
• Avoiding: unassertive and uncooperative. Sidestepping the issue; sometimes wise, often the source of a team’s unspoken problems.
• Accommodating: unassertive and cooperative. Yielding to preserve the relationship; generous, until resentment builds.

No mode is wrong. Each fits some situations and costs in others. The work is learning to choose on purpose rather than by default.

Where we use it

• Team-based conflict management: improve how the team resolves disagreements and create a working environment people want to be in.
• Team building and development: strengthen bonds, improve communication and lift overall performance.
• New team formation and onboarding: integrate new members smoothly and speed up their contribution.
• Team leader development: give leaders the insight they need to guide their teams through disagreement.

The TKI is the instrument behind our From Conflict to Confluence work with executive teams.