Interpreting Thomas-Kilmann Instrument (TKI) results helps leaders understand how they naturally approach conflict and which strategies are most effective in different workplace situations. Recognizing both dominant and secondary styles supports more intentional leadership decisions.
Key Insights
- Evaluate your TKI results holistically rather than focusing solely on the highest or lowest scores.
- A significantly high score indicates a dominant style, while similar scores across categories suggest flexibility in conflict response.
- Each conflict style offers benefits and limitations, and leaders should match their approach to the needs of each situation.
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Welcome back. I bet you found those scores pretty interesting. And again, we don't want to rely just on what was your strongest score, high score, and what was your lowest.
Really look at your scores in combination with each other. And what I would say to you is when you look at your raw scores, let's say all of your scores are very close together, maybe 6, 7, 7, 8, 5. What that would suggest to you is that you're almost as likely to use any of those conflict resolution approaches as the other. If, however, you have one that's very dominant, meaning separated out from the rest of the scores, let's say you have an 11 and then the next score drops to 7, it would indicate that that 11 score is the most likely approach that you would take, because that's your comfort area.
It doesn't mean you wouldn't ever use the other score modes, but you are most likely to naturally gravitate to one mode versus the others. In any case, what you're going to find, and I'm sure you found it as you were reading through the report, is that every style or every mode has what we call advantages to the style as well as some disadvantages to the style. And that's why as leaders we want to consider how can we be able to best decide which of these five styles is most appropriate to the situation that's in front of us.
But to get us started on that analysis, what I'd like you to do in exercise 3.2 is to take a look at what is your highest raw score that you received in the TKI. Now, it's possible that you had a tie, and again, there's nothing wrong with that, but if you do have a tie for your highest score, what I'd like you to do is choose the score that was the higher percentile. All right, that's how you break your tie.
And what I'd like you to do for your dominant style is, using the information that's in your report as well as what you know about yourself, what are the advantages of using your style, and what are the disadvantages of using your style, your dominant style, and when are the best occasions for you to use your style. Now, if you have two scores that are very, very, very close to each other, you might want to do the same assessment for the second score or the second mode as well. It's up to you, but this is to get you thinking about, yeah, whenever I look at any of these modes, there are going to be advantages and disadvantages, and certain situations that will help us make some decisions about whether or not this is the best approach to conflict resolution.
So, I'll give you some time to work on that.
