Tips From the Trenches
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Conflict in the Workplace Through the Lens of Polarities |
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 High-Low, Positive-Negative, Friend-Foe, Hire-Fire, Profit-Loss are
divisions or opposite poles that we might often encounter in our day to
day lives. However, there is a particular polarization especially
meaningful in business today … Declining business economy – inclining
conflict in the workplace. Likewise, as conflict increases,
productivity decreases as does profits. As a business leader, you know
what I’m talking about. Absenteeism, grievances, complaints, lawsuits,
poor decision making, lost opportunities, wasted time, poor working
relationships, low morale, stress, loss of employees – the list seems
endless when it come to the affects of disgruntled, unhappy, quarreling
employees.
When Eckerd College Leadership Development Institute (LDI) surveyed
executives and managers asking about their toughest challenges, they
found that the leaders’ answers focused on what LDI says is “the heart
of emotional intelligence: conflict management.” The emotionality of
conflict was a main reason sited for the challenge. Granted, emotions
can be difficult to handle and yet, handling the emotional aspect of
conflict is necessary and key to being an effective leader.
Leaders are only as effective (or ineffective, another polarization) as
the character and competencies they possess. Accordingly, conflict
competency needs to be part of a leader’s repertoire. If you are not
comfortable with personal conflict, you won’t be good at managing it
among your staff.
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Team Understanding |
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Enhance Your Organization’s Success
 Trying times have brought a reduction in business to many which in turn, have resulted in a reduction of the number of people in the organization. Still many organizations expect to stay on their success plan without missing a beat as in ‘doing more with less’. What we would like to point our readers to is the value and benefit of creating a team that is cultivated with respect, admiration, and a real understanding for each other. Do this and, voila! You have expanded the productive capacity of the entire organization!
Being a leader, whether you are a CEO, executive, a manager, or employee is one of the most important factors in determining the success of your own career, the accomplishment of your team, and, the victory of your overall organization.
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The Conflict Interruption |
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 In the last two editions of ‘BOLD Print’ we have been addressing the challenge of doing more with less as companies have either put a freeze on hiring or have actually had staff reductions. And still they intend to conduct business as usual … only with fewer people. What today’s business environment requires, then, is being as efficient as we can be in every aspect of our jobs. This tip is about conflict resolution and how effective we are at it in terms of time spent.
The typical manager spends 25-40% of their time dealing with workplace conflicts? That is one to two days of every work week. When dealing with conflict, it is important to realize that most people have no idea what to do when confronted with disagreements. People learn to settle disagreements by using a style or set of behaviors they learned by watching others, which most of the time is not effective management.
If you are a manager who finds yourself spending a lot of time dealing with conflict, here are practical insights into the fundamentals of a conflict.
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Creating High Performing Teams |
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 What makes a work team more or less successfully regardless of type? What accounts for some teams being able to really ‘click’ from start to finish and others that appear to slowly and often painfully, prod through their tasks? There are numerous theories that address these questions and there’s one in particular to which we subscribe. It is called the Team Diagnostic Assessment developed by an organization that has conducted a great deal of research in the area of team effectiveness. It’s one that we have often utilized in our work with teams and each time, we validate its’ truth.
A team’s effectiveness and success is closely tied to factors that define the extent to which two key elements exist within the team … those related to both productivity and positivity. Here’s some insight to what these are and how they are interrelated.
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