Conflict in the Workplace: A Waste of Time and Energy?

I thought today I would write about a subject people tend to avoid, conflict in the workplace.  Webster’s Dictionary defines conflict as the following:

a) competitive or opposing action of incompatibles : antagonistic state or action (as of divergent ideas, interests, or persons) b) mental struggle resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, drives, wishes, or external or internal demands

I define conflict as a clash of perceptions.  Typically conflict arises when two people perceive a situation in two different ways.  More simply put, one person thinks they are “right” and the other is “wrong,” and vice versa.  If people could find a way to lose this “right/wrong” mentality and consider that the other person is looking at the situation differently (not wrongly), I believe the amount of conflict in the corporate world would be drastically reduced. [Read more...]