Conflict management refers to long term management of often intractable conflicts between groups of people. In contrast, conflict resolution refers to a range of options including negotiation, mediation, diplomacy, arbitration, and litigation used to resolve specific conflicts between individuals and/or entities.
While the main campus of the John Hopkins University (JHU) is located in a fashionable center city location, the Medical Center makes its home in East Baltimore, one of the poorest communities in Maryland. With 30,000 employees, JHU medical system is the largest private employer in Baltimore. The stark contrast between the towering architecture of the Medical Center with its state of the art research facilities amidst the dilapidation of the surrounding neighborhood underscores the long simmering hostility assumed by many residents toward JHU, one of the wealthiest universities in the world.
JHU has long utilized conflict management techniques to maintain a safe and peaceful environment. By design, the Medical Center’s buildings are centrally located with peripherally located parking lots that serve as a partial geographical barrier between the two groups. JHU sponsors at considerable expense a variety of outreach clinics and programs that bring routine medical care directly to the surrounding residents reducing their need to travel to the main hospital. It maintains a considerable private police force which utilizes handheld metal detectors to screen high risk patients and visitors. Emails as well as other emergency communication systems are in place to notify staff and visitors of dangerous situations as they present.
September 16, 2010 was by all accounts a routine day in Baltimore, Maryland with warm seasonal temperatures punctuated by brief periods of light rain. Dr. David Cohen, an assistant professor of the medical school, had his usual Thursday caseload orthopedic surgery lined up. No one could have predicted that the day would end with Dr. Cohen in emergency surgery to fix a gaping abdominal wound while his 84 year old patient, Jean Davis, died when shot by her 50 year old son, Paul Pardus. Mr. Pardus later committed suicide in his mother’s room.
The source of the altercation was the contrast between an implied guarantee that the operation would allow Ms. Davis to overcome the crippling effects of her rheumatoid arthritis and the notification by Dr. Cohen to Mr. Pardus that the operation had failed so dramatically that Ms. Davis would probably never walk again. Overcome by the unexpected news, Mr. Pardus pulled a semiautomatic gun from a concealed location resulting in the shooting of his mother, Dr. Cohen, and himself.
An assessment by John Hopkins suggested that the shooting arose from a failure of their conflict management as Mr. Pardus was allowed to enter the facility with a gun. I am certain that their security measures can always be tightened although with 80,000 visitors per week using as many as 80 separate entrances, it is unlikely that conflict management will ever be totally successful.
I would maintain that this incident arose from the suboptimal conflict resolution between the family of a patient and the physician. Areas of potential improvement include additional staff training in optimal notification of adverse events, proper identification of potentially violent individuals so that uniform security staff could be visibly placed on the floor, and education of the patient and their family of available nonviolent methods of restitution for adverse outcomes prior to the operation.
Thank you for sharing this story with us. I found particularly interesting the unique environment that healthcare provides in the context of conflict resolution.
A hospital setting is a scary place for most individuals. When you come to a hospital, you are not able to help yourself. You have little control in your situation, and must hope that the caregivers are knowledgeable and skilled. Families trust physicians and nurses with their most precious gifts: their mothers, daughters, sons, or spouses. For those not familiar with health care, it is as though you have entered a foreign land. Everyone is speaking a different language (medical jargon) and the customs (processes) are unknown. Stress is high.
Now consider the perspective of a physician. As a physician, you spend countless years in school to master the complexities of medicine. Each day you are juggling patient after patient, considering not only the science, but also the social dynamics of that individual or family. When a mistake is made, you are held accountable by sometimes irreversible consequences. Families are expecting you to “fix” the situation, or at least provide answers, and sometimes medicine is not that easy.
Tough conversations have to happen between these two parties. People are told they have cancer, legs need to be amputated, or mistakes have been made. When these conversations turn sour, trust dissolves and care can suffer. The relationship and communication skills of medical staff can be just as important as the science. For example, studies have shown that when doctors admit their mistakes, malpractice suites actually decline.
You note that a hospital setting is scary and accompanied by a loss of personal control. I have given this issue some thought and have some personal views.
First let us agree that events that happen on this earth outside of human intervention represent the "natural" order. Sickness and death are an essential part of the natural order. Thus the inhibition of sickness with prolongation of life can be viewed as an unnatural or even a supernatural act.
As we know, the power to perform the unnatural act of healing is restricted to a relatively small segment of society which possesses special knowledge which is utilized in unique buildings. In a sense, we view the modern operating room in the state of the art hospital as an updated hut of the medicine man of years past. The rattle and chants of past healers have been replaced with mysterious high tech machinery and indecipherable medical language. Mere mortals are incapable of even finding where they need to go in the maze of hospital halls. It is a place of mystery and power to be treated with respect and a bit of awe.
Of course it is a myth that medical personnel are all knowing and capable of healing all ailments. But is a myth which has perpetuated the ages across multiple societies. And it persists to this day.
Effective communication of information and decision is an essential component for management-employee relations. There are many reasons why conflict arises within an organization from miscommunication. The conflict arises when one part of the communication lines either the manager or the employee fails to convey or grasp what is trying to be communicated. This happens often in organizations. One of the reasons contributing to this mentioned in class is filtering. A solution is to communicate face to face so that employees can ask questions and better understand what is anticipated and expected from them in the quality of their work and how they should be contributing to their organizations. Some organizations believe that employees should perform a specific task. At work, one of my managers was relating to the differences between our organization and others. She explained how when she worked at AT&T there were stiff penalties for performing tasks outside of your job descriptions. She was reprimanded for mailing off a letter without having a secretary perform the duties. Conversely, our organizations on a much higher level then mail of course encourage and foster employees to take charge of their business units and provide value outside their roles. It is very important to understand how a particular company views employees and expectations set for those employees. This is communicated early as many employees enter the organization through events like orientation and on the job training sessions. It’s important to understand the management style of the organization. In class we discussed personality types. In my current company, the style is one of an intuitive work environment as opposed to a sensing. One of my challenges was to adjust to this way of doing business after having worked in an organization where specific job tasks and projects from start finish were all that was allowed. Different conflicts arise from different ways of conducting business. It has been the most important thing to learn. Some traits that are important to fitting into an organization are leadership traits that I have found in the 360 Leader by John Maxwell. This book shows anyone how to diffuse conflict between an employee and a manager and to fit into any management style by understanding what any manager wants. I read only 2 weeks ago but can attest that it has made an impact on me and why work and helped me understand what I need to do to be successful and bring value to my organization.
I have lost jobs over conflicts at the workplace. I was never able to get over the conflict because the origin of the conflict was always the laziness or how unprofessional the other employee was. It always ate me up and I could not help but point it out to the individual and my boss. I was in the right, and I am not just saying that...I was right about this person, but I could never handle it professionally enough to keep me in the right.
I have learned lessons from all my prior life experiences and I am now in a very good job. I love my job but of course I work with someone who is very unprofessional and lazy. What I have grown to realize is that I am the common denominator in these problems and that every workplace is going to have lazy people and I will continue to run into them throughout my career. I believe so much in doing your part and doing your job which makes me in the right and this other employee in the wrong but I pushed myself into the wrong by not handling the situation the correct way. In my current job I have learned to "kill'em with kindness" and I do not make any problems. What I do to satisfy my sense of right and wrong is just do my job, leave the other person alone and when there is clear proof of them not doing their job or being unprofessional I make sure to let my boss witness it without directly throwing it in my boss's face or complaining too much. I found that even if there really is a legitimate problem and you are in the right, your boss can become tired of your complaining and start to see you as the problem if you are always bringing things to them or complaining. So, like I said, I "kill the other person with kindness" and let everything else take its course with only some gentle nudges from me.
Conflict resolution can sometimes be a conflict within its self. So, how do you learn to deal with the conflict? Over time, I have learned that every situation is different, every person is different and the needed answer to the problem was not like the one before. I found that with each passing instance, my general knowledge of the subject grew, but then the next instance would seem to hinder that growth. This was true until I realized that maybe the single related factor in the situations could be just be me. How often is it that we look at ourselves as the cause of the conflict? And what are we doing to resolve it? I may not have been the factor to cause the conflict, but maybe I was the factor to keep it going. Keeping it going was not resolving it. Having been through many conflicts related to both work and personal life, I decided to take a look at the situation from an outside the box view when possible. This helped me to learn and see what other people both directly and indirectly related to the issue were experiencing. By doing the out of box viewing, I was able to gain a personal knowledge on the subject to see what and how my actions affected someone else. I am normally an aggressive person who will cause a conflict to spur reactions. I like to see the reactions so that I can grow my skill set at dealing with large conflicts in the future. The next time you see a conflict or involved in a conflict, step back and take a different viewpoint of the situation. You may find something interesting about your own thoughts and the thoughts of others regarding the circumstances and conditions presented to the setting.
I would agree with Garon that my direct, and sometimes aggressive delivery, has resulted in fanning the flames of a situation, shoving it from “situation” to “conflict”. That being said, a good manager can make a situation better worse depending on how they react, or proceed, when someone like myself makes their point. I have seen the gambit of scenarios played out, some with good or acceptable outcomes, and others that did not end well.
In the workplace, it is easy to find yourself in an employer-employee conflict. In these situations, many commentators on this situation write that a manager should not respond in kind to a disgruntled employee, they should not start playing the blame game, and they should not psychoanalyze the employee. Earlier in my career, I had a boss who did all of the above. I would, in my own special way, point out an issue I had with our small company and my boss. His reaction was always to “even the score” by verbally attacking me, blaming my work for the reason something he was in charge of wasn’t done, and then telling me to look deeply at myself and see what was “really” causing my frustration.
Later I had an issue where some of my co-workers informed me one of my superiors was providing “false information” about me and my work to my co-workers when I was not there. I foolishly escalated the conflict by firing off an email to his boss and my direct supervisor. My supervisor did a decent job handling this conflict. He met with each of us separately, reprimanded me for my communication decision, and then relocated me to a different office so that superior and myself no longer had to work together, thus eliminating the conflict.
Being in sales, I have had conflicts arise with customers where they feel they were misinformed or that there was a lack of full disclosure. Usually I take copious notes and have the customer initial them after each meeting to prevent this issue, but once I failed to do this, and I had a customer complaint. Here, my boss employed the conflict resolution technique of mediation. He called in both myself and the customer and acted as a mediator until the conflict resolved.
Finally, my current supervisor does a good job of heading off potential conflicts before they ever have a chance to surface. Ever since his promotion, he has made a concerted effort to truly understand the situations, both work and private life, of each of his subordinates. Anytime he asks you to do something new, rather than making it sound like an order that must be followed, he leads into it by pointing out how you will benefit, or why you should care about doing it. He seems genuinely concerned about his employees’ well being. I, for one, know that I am much less on edge when having conversations with the supervisor than any other I’ve had before.
This just points out that managers should understand how to handle conflict situations, what their options are, and what a desired outcome would be. But more importantly, a really good manager resolves conflicts before there is one to resolve.
As I lack much experience in the corporate world, I can only slightly relate to you guys when discussing conflict resolution.
My recall of organizational conflict was from one bad apple in the company I worked for. This is not just my stance, but from all the other coworkers of this individual. He was incredibly lazy; when someone worked harder than he did, he felt that they were trying to make him look bad. When it was actually required that he work hard, he would become stressed out and take out his exhaustion and anger on everyone.
The problem was that the owners of the company would avoid the problem. Often, the other employees would complain to the owners about this individual, at which point they would just kinda chuckle or shrug and hope it would die down. This had the opposite effect. It made the situation worse. Since this individual would occasionally vent on people for no reason other than the fact that he had a bad day at school or work, NOBODY wanted to work with him.
I think in this instance, it's better to work in a large corporation, where HR usually has some sort of conflict resolution procedure set in place rather than at a small company that has no measures instituted to prevent issues as such.
I agree with MichaelU's "kill 'em with kindness strategy to a degree, but at some point, one must take a stand, and it'd be much easier if managers and owners and whatnot would actually step in to mediate.
For me, it is not if conflict will arise, but when. Conflict is a daily part of our life. Sometimes conflict stems from very simple decisions, like where to eat or what color should be used in the company logo. Other times, as some have already noted, conflict is personal or can become personal. The difficulty, for me, in conflict resolution is staying objective when I feel that the conflict is personal. I know that I have lost my objectivity when I begin to think of the other person as "the problem," ignoring the real problem or issue.
I would love to hear from others about what methods or resolution tactics they use in order to maintain their objectivity. I like MichaelU's "kill'em with kindness" strategy.
I usually try to compromise and find a middle ground before the conflict escalates. My handicap is that I am a competitive person. I have friends who can easily accommodate others when conflict becomes personal, but not me. If I cannot reach a common ground with the person, or if he is unwillingly to compromise, then the REAL issue moves to the background and he becomes the issue.
I have never lost my job or caused others to lose their job over interpersonal conflicts, but I certainly can improve on how I handle these types of situations. I appreciate the candor displayed in the previous posts. If I have learned anything it is that I should always listen twice before speaking and try seeing the situation from the other person's perspective.
Conflict management refers to long term management of often intractable conflicts between groups of people. In contrast, conflict resolution refers to a range of options including negotiation, mediation, diplomacy, arbitration, and litigation used to resolve specific conflicts between individuals and/or entities.
ReplyDeleteWhile the main campus of the John Hopkins University (JHU) is located in a fashionable center city location, the Medical Center makes its home in East Baltimore, one of the poorest communities in Maryland. With 30,000 employees, JHU medical system is the largest private employer in Baltimore. The stark contrast between the towering architecture of the Medical Center with its state of the art research facilities amidst the dilapidation of the surrounding neighborhood underscores the long simmering hostility assumed by many residents toward JHU, one of the wealthiest universities in the world.
JHU has long utilized conflict management techniques to maintain a safe and peaceful environment. By design, the Medical Center’s buildings are centrally located with peripherally located parking lots that serve as a partial geographical barrier between the two groups. JHU sponsors at considerable expense a variety of outreach clinics and programs that bring routine medical care directly to the surrounding residents reducing their need to travel to the main hospital. It maintains a considerable private police force which utilizes handheld metal detectors to screen high risk patients and visitors. Emails as well as other emergency communication systems are in place to notify staff and visitors of dangerous situations as they present.
September 16, 2010 was by all accounts a routine day in Baltimore, Maryland with warm seasonal temperatures punctuated by brief periods of light rain. Dr. David Cohen, an assistant professor of the medical school, had his usual Thursday caseload orthopedic surgery lined up. No one could have predicted that the day would end with Dr. Cohen in emergency surgery to fix a gaping abdominal wound while his 84 year old patient, Jean Davis, died when shot by her 50 year old son, Paul Pardus. Mr. Pardus later committed suicide in his mother’s room.
The source of the altercation was the contrast between an implied guarantee that the operation would allow Ms. Davis to overcome the crippling effects of her rheumatoid arthritis and the notification by Dr. Cohen to Mr. Pardus that the operation had failed so dramatically that Ms. Davis would probably never walk again. Overcome by the unexpected news, Mr. Pardus pulled a semiautomatic gun from a concealed location resulting in the shooting of his mother, Dr. Cohen, and himself.
An assessment by John Hopkins suggested that the shooting arose from a failure of their conflict management as Mr. Pardus was allowed to enter the facility with a gun. I am certain that their security measures can always be tightened although with 80,000 visitors per week using as many as 80 separate entrances, it is unlikely that conflict management will ever be totally successful.
I would maintain that this incident arose from the suboptimal conflict resolution between the family of a patient and the physician. Areas of potential improvement include additional staff training in optimal notification of adverse events, proper identification of potentially violent individuals so that uniform security staff could be visibly placed on the floor, and education of the patient and their family of available nonviolent methods of restitution for adverse outcomes prior to the operation.
Thank you for sharing this story with us. I found particularly interesting the unique environment that healthcare provides in the context of conflict resolution.
ReplyDeleteA hospital setting is a scary place for most individuals. When you come to a hospital, you are not able to help yourself. You have little control in your situation, and must hope that the caregivers are knowledgeable and skilled. Families trust physicians and nurses with their most precious gifts: their mothers, daughters, sons, or spouses. For those not familiar with health care, it is as though you have entered a foreign land. Everyone is speaking a different language (medical jargon) and the customs (processes) are unknown. Stress is high.
Now consider the perspective of a physician. As a physician, you spend countless years in school to master the complexities of medicine. Each day you are juggling patient after patient, considering not only the science, but also the social dynamics of that individual or family. When a mistake is made, you are held accountable by sometimes irreversible consequences. Families are expecting you to “fix” the situation, or at least provide answers, and sometimes medicine is not that easy.
Tough conversations have to happen between these two parties. People are told they have cancer, legs need to be amputated, or mistakes have been made. When these conversations turn sour, trust dissolves and care can suffer. The relationship and communication skills of medical staff can be just as important as the science. For example, studies have shown that when doctors admit their mistakes, malpractice suites actually decline.
Thank you for your comments.
ReplyDeleteYou note that a hospital setting is scary and accompanied by a loss of personal control. I have given this issue some thought and have some personal views.
First let us agree that events that happen on this earth outside of human intervention represent the "natural" order. Sickness and death are an essential part of the natural order. Thus the inhibition of sickness with prolongation of life can be viewed as an unnatural or even a supernatural act.
As we know, the power to perform the unnatural act of healing is restricted to a relatively small segment of society which possesses special knowledge which is utilized in unique buildings. In a sense, we view the modern operating room in the state of the art hospital as an updated hut of the medicine man of years past. The rattle and chants of past healers have been replaced with mysterious high tech machinery and indecipherable medical language. Mere mortals are incapable of even finding where they need to go in the maze of hospital halls. It is a place of mystery and power to be treated with respect and a bit of awe.
Of course it is a myth that medical personnel are all knowing and capable of healing all ailments. But is a myth which has perpetuated the ages across multiple societies. And it persists to this day.
Effective communication of information and decision is an essential component for management-employee relations. There are many reasons why conflict arises within an organization from miscommunication. The conflict arises when one part of the communication lines either the manager or the employee fails to convey or grasp what is trying to be communicated. This happens often in organizations. One of the reasons contributing to this mentioned in class is filtering. A solution is to communicate face to face so that employees can ask questions and better understand what is anticipated and expected from them in the quality of their work and how they should be contributing to their organizations.
ReplyDeleteSome organizations believe that employees should perform a specific task. At work, one of my managers was relating to the differences between our organization and others. She explained how when she worked at AT&T there were stiff penalties for performing tasks outside of your job descriptions. She was reprimanded for mailing off a letter without having a secretary perform the duties. Conversely, our organizations on a much higher level then mail of course encourage and foster employees to take charge of their business units and provide value outside their roles.
It is very important to understand how a particular company views employees and expectations set for those employees. This is communicated early as many employees enter the organization through events like orientation and on the job training sessions. It’s important to understand the management style of the organization. In class we discussed personality types. In my current company, the style is one of an intuitive work environment as opposed to a sensing. One of my challenges was to adjust to this way of doing business after having worked in an organization where specific job tasks and projects from start finish were all that was allowed. Different conflicts arise from different ways of conducting business. It has been the most important thing to learn. Some traits that are important to fitting into an organization are leadership traits that I have found in the 360 Leader by John Maxwell. This book shows anyone how to diffuse conflict between an employee and a manager and to fit into any management style by understanding what any manager wants. I read only 2 weeks ago but can attest that it has made an impact on me and why work and helped me understand what I need to do to be successful and bring value to my organization.
I have lost jobs over conflicts at the workplace. I was never able to get over the conflict because the origin of the conflict was always the laziness or how unprofessional the other employee was. It always ate me up and I could not help but point it out to the individual and my boss. I was in the right, and I am not just saying that...I was right about this person, but I could never handle it professionally enough to keep me in the right.
ReplyDeleteI have learned lessons from all my prior life experiences and I am now in a very good job. I love my job but of course I work with someone who is very unprofessional and lazy. What I have grown to realize is that I am the common denominator in these problems and that every workplace is going to have lazy people and I will continue to run into them throughout my career. I believe so much in doing your part and doing your job which makes me in the right and this other employee in the wrong but I pushed myself into the wrong by not handling the situation the correct way. In my current job I have learned to "kill'em with kindness" and I do not make any problems. What I do to satisfy my sense of right and wrong is just do my job, leave the other person alone and when there is clear proof of them not doing their job or being unprofessional I make sure to let my boss witness it without directly throwing it in my boss's face or complaining too much. I found that even if there really is a legitimate problem and you are in the right, your boss can become tired of your complaining and start to see you as the problem if you are always bringing things to them or complaining. So, like I said, I "kill the other person with kindness" and let everything else take its course with only some gentle nudges from me.
Conflict resolution can sometimes be a conflict within its self. So, how do you learn to deal with the conflict? Over time, I have learned that every situation is different, every person is different and the needed answer to the problem was not like the one before. I found that with each passing instance, my general knowledge of the subject grew, but then the next instance would seem to hinder that growth. This was true until I realized that maybe the single related factor in the situations could be just be me. How often is it that we look at ourselves as the cause of the conflict? And what are we doing to resolve it? I may not have been the factor to cause the conflict, but maybe I was the factor to keep it going. Keeping it going was not resolving it. Having been through many conflicts related to both work and personal life, I decided to take a look at the situation from an outside the box view when possible. This helped me to learn and see what other people both directly and indirectly related to the issue were experiencing. By doing the out of box viewing, I was able to gain a personal knowledge on the subject to see what and how my actions affected someone else. I am normally an aggressive person who will cause a conflict to spur reactions. I like to see the reactions so that I can grow my skill set at dealing with large conflicts in the future. The next time you see a conflict or involved in a conflict, step back and take a different viewpoint of the situation. You may find something interesting about your own thoughts and the thoughts of others regarding the circumstances and conditions presented to the setting.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with Garon that my direct, and sometimes aggressive delivery, has resulted in fanning the flames of a situation, shoving it from “situation” to “conflict”. That being said, a good manager can make a situation better worse depending on how they react, or proceed, when someone like myself makes their point. I have seen the gambit of scenarios played out, some with good or acceptable outcomes, and others that did not end well.
ReplyDeleteIn the workplace, it is easy to find yourself in an employer-employee conflict. In these situations, many commentators on this situation write that a manager should not respond in kind to a disgruntled employee, they should not start playing the blame game, and they should not psychoanalyze the employee. Earlier in my career, I had a boss who did all of the above. I would, in my own special way, point out an issue I had with our small company and my boss. His reaction was always to “even the score” by verbally attacking me, blaming my work for the reason something he was in charge of wasn’t done, and then telling me to look deeply at myself and see what was “really” causing my frustration.
Later I had an issue where some of my co-workers informed me one of my superiors was providing “false information” about me and my work to my co-workers when I was not there. I foolishly escalated the conflict by firing off an email to his boss and my direct supervisor. My supervisor did a decent job handling this conflict. He met with each of us separately, reprimanded me for my communication decision, and then relocated me to a different office so that superior and myself no longer had to work together, thus eliminating the conflict.
Being in sales, I have had conflicts arise with customers where they feel they were misinformed or that there was a lack of full disclosure. Usually I take copious notes and have the customer initial them after each meeting to prevent this issue, but once I failed to do this, and I had a customer complaint. Here, my boss employed the conflict resolution technique of mediation. He called in both myself and the customer and acted as a mediator until the conflict resolved.
Finally, my current supervisor does a good job of heading off potential conflicts before they ever have a chance to surface. Ever since his promotion, he has made a concerted effort to truly understand the situations, both work and private life, of each of his subordinates. Anytime he asks you to do something new, rather than making it sound like an order that must be followed, he leads into it by pointing out how you will benefit, or why you should care about doing it. He seems genuinely concerned about his employees’ well being. I, for one, know that I am much less on edge when having conversations with the supervisor than any other I’ve had before.
This just points out that managers should understand how to handle conflict situations, what their options are, and what a desired outcome would be. But more importantly, a really good manager resolves conflicts before there is one to resolve.
As I lack much experience in the corporate world, I can only slightly relate to you guys when discussing conflict resolution.
ReplyDeleteMy recall of organizational conflict was from one bad apple in the company I worked for. This is not just my stance, but from all the other coworkers of this individual. He was incredibly lazy; when someone worked harder than he did, he felt that they were trying to make him look bad. When it was actually required that he work hard, he would become stressed out and take out his exhaustion and anger on everyone.
The problem was that the owners of the company would avoid the problem. Often, the other employees would complain to the owners about this individual, at which point they would just kinda chuckle or shrug and hope it would die down. This had the opposite effect. It made the situation worse. Since this individual would occasionally vent on people for no reason other than the fact that he had a bad day at school or work, NOBODY wanted to work with him.
I think in this instance, it's better to work in a large corporation, where HR usually has some sort of conflict resolution procedure set in place rather than at a small company that has no measures instituted to prevent issues as such.
I agree with MichaelU's "kill 'em with kindness
strategy to a degree, but at some point, one must take a stand, and it'd be much easier if managers and owners and whatnot would actually step in to mediate.
For me, it is not if conflict will arise, but when. Conflict is a daily part of our life. Sometimes conflict stems from very simple decisions, like where to eat or what color should be used in the company logo. Other times, as some have already noted, conflict is personal or can become personal. The difficulty, for me, in conflict resolution is staying objective when I feel that the conflict is personal. I know that I have lost my objectivity when I begin to think of the other person as "the problem," ignoring the real problem or issue.
ReplyDeleteI would love to hear from others about what methods or resolution tactics they use in order to maintain their objectivity. I like MichaelU's "kill'em with kindness" strategy.
I usually try to compromise and find a middle ground before the conflict escalates. My handicap is that I am a competitive person. I have friends who can easily accommodate others when conflict becomes personal, but not me. If I cannot reach a common ground with the person, or if he is unwillingly to compromise, then the REAL issue moves to the background and he becomes the issue.
I have never lost my job or caused others to lose their job over interpersonal conflicts, but I certainly can improve on how I handle these types of situations. I appreciate the candor displayed in the previous posts. If I have learned anything it is that I should always listen twice before speaking and try seeing the situation from the other person's perspective.
Best Regards.