Komus employees improve their remote team management and conflict management skills

Komus is a major Russian production-and-trade company that owns a network of stores selling school and office supplies along with promotional and souvenir products.

The company has adopted a matrix organization with a wide geographical distribution of 60 branded stores in 14 regions of Russia. Such a complex structure requires sophisticated team management and quality collaboration. To assist the company in these efforts, the ManGO! Games team developed and delivered an educational program featuring tests, games, and training sessions.

This enabled Komus's top managers to master relevant e-learning techniques to better cope with complex situations and effectively manage remote teams. All this knowledge was later consolidated through a test case.

Mission. Hold a corporate training session to improve the company's top managers' matrix interaction, conflict management, and remote team management skills.

Background. The company is actively pursuing the development of project management through continuous initiative elaboration. However, it's not uncommon for conflicts of interest to arise between members of overlapping project teams. All that necessitated strengthening and developing project management skills in a context allowing one person to participate in up to 10 teams at the same time.

To meet this challenge, the ManGO! Games team developed a program featuring:

• initial testing of participants,
• two 1-day training sessions,
• follow-ups to test the knowledge gained on each day.

The two-day training covered the following important topics:

• Planning.
• Team management basics.
• Roles.
• Team development stages.
• Peculiarities of remote team management.
• Stress management in conflict situations.
• Conflict management model.
• Individual and typical mistakes in conflict management.
• Conflict exploitation techniques.

The active use of ManGO's "Symbols" and "Houston, We Have A Problem" games made the training even more lively and engaging.

The final test showed over 85% efficiency of knowledge digestion. That is the extent of the company's top managers' current knowledge and capacities for the implementation of the content delivered.