Managing Conflict with Respect: Essential Techniques for Leaders
Whether it’s friction between individuals or groups, stereotyping and negative assumptions, miscommunication and a silo mentality, clashes between different personalities and behavioral styles, or a dismissive attitude and resistance to feedback, these challenges are all too common in today’s organizational environments. Let’s explore the current state of workplace conflict...
“Are They Talking About Me?”
Recently, clients in the global financial services sector have asked for our guidance on a challenging workplace issue that I’ll call “the assumption of negative intent.” Shortly after the Israeli-Hamas conflict exploded in October, Jewish employees in these large companies based on the US’s East Coast began complaining to HR about other employees speaking in Arabic to each other at work...
Why Trying to Put the Opinion Genie Back in the Bottle Doesn’t Work (and what you can do instead)
Despite his recent arrest in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking, and despite climate activist Greta Thunberg’s cutting take-down tweet (one of the most-liked in history!) mocking him, and despite the understandable temptation to dismiss him as some odious, disrespectful, self-promoting, narcistic, attention-seeking, arrogant, infantile jerk, we cannot ignore the fact that...
Respect Your Elders
A good friend – a middle aged man – recently took a job at a local Starbucks to bring in some extra cash. He’s twice the age of everyone else who works there, which doesn’t seem to bother him or them at all. But, when a young colleague – someone most would consider a “millennial” – tried to coach him on using the point of sale system, she got frustrated with his slowness and...
Upset? Angry? Try Respect.
Right before Christmas, we discovered we had been lied to by a sales rep at our cell phone store and, furious, we went back in January to return some unwanted merchandise we’d been told we “had to buy.” But the “lead” customer service rep who was processing our return – despite knowing we’d been lied to – acted as if we were the liars and refused to treat us with respect. And when we got even...
Respect For Opponents?
Respect can surprise us in interesting ways. How many of us would have the courage to deliberately lose an important race to an opponent who’d made a mistake? In December of 2012, in an extraordinary show of respectful sportsmanship, Ivan Fernandez Anay – a long-distance runner from the Basque region of Spain who was running in second place in an important race – deliberately...
Keeping Politics at Bay in the Workplace
It’s fairly obvious the American political scene is red-hot right now. Many of the candidates are making statements about social issues that are designed as “red-meat” for their base voters, but which may be off-putting or even upsetting to those who don’t agree. But from a teamwork and collaboration point of view, keeping politics out of the workplace makes very good...