Response 1) (Luke) – We learned this week how conflicts can be both positive and negative. Unfortunately, I believe most conflicts have negative consequences, many of which include confrontation. Dealing with this confrontation is something that we must all learn to do. Whether you are the leader dealing with the conflict, or one of the people involved in the conflict it is something many of us dread. One very important quote from this week’s reading. “Remember: It’s not about whether things go wrong. It’s about how you handle them when they do”. (Plowman p 152). Throughout my career, I have seen my leaders deal with conflict in many different ways. Some of them are good whereas some of them are not so good. Ultimately I believe it depends on what career field you are in. Take for example my time in the Army. I was a young soldier in Basic Training and after many weeks of training together people began to have disagreements. The Drill Sergeant learned of the disagreements and gave us boxing gloves so that we could “squash the beef”. This sounds like a very primitive way of dealing with conflict, but unsurprisingly it worked quite well. Now we must all understand this is not a way to deal with conflict in corporate America, we must approach things much differently. We must tailor our conflict management to whomever we are dealing with. If we can do this we will all be successful project managers.
References:
Plowman, Connie, and Jill Diffendal. Project Communications: A Critical Factor for Project Success. Business Expert Press, 2020.
Response 2) (Jesse) – I have seen conflict on a team before and the results have varied based on the situation. When I was in the Army, conflicts happen quite often on a team and there is usually a solution. In this type of environment any conflicts between team member needs to be brought to light and dissolved, otherwise the results can have life and death consequences. Sometimes it needs to be talked out, other times you have to work it out other ways, say you made a dangerous move during a training exercise that could have gotten someone else hurt or killed in a real situation, tensions get high and people can get mad or upset.
On the other hand we have a serious issue with a few conflicts on my team at work and the easiest thing in this instance is to act like its not there but the problems are causing people to apply for jobs on other teams and departments and I’m pretty sure we’re going to end up losing a few really good people over it.
Response 3) (Ava) – A conflict that I have seen in my workplace was when we got new scheduling software for our tennis courts. When the software first was created, it was not 100% free of bugs, which is expected, but made it harder to do our jobs compared to before. As a team, we were resistant to the change because we had been using the old software for around ten years. At first, we could not mark any court as paid, could not put names on the courts, and overall just had major glitches. As a result of this, we were unable to audit the courts to see who had paid or not and could not keep track of who was on the court. If this had not been fixed, the club could have lost money and upset our members because we told them we had open courts when we did not. It also made the staff upset because it took us longer to do our jobs, we were unable to do our jobs and management was unaware of the problems so we were getting yelled at for not getting things marked as paid. Once they knew about the issues they were fixed, but not fast enough. We have had this scheduler for a year now and it is still not 100% fixed which is overall very frustrating.
