Managing Conflicts at Work

Know When Your Boss Can Help Resolve a Conflict

Sometimes it’s better to address a conflict indirectly. For example, if you’re working in a culture where group harmony is important, you may not be able to directly confront someone about an issue. And sometimes people are more willing to take feedback from others — either someone more powerful or a close confidant. In these cases, it’s best to get a third party involved. Go to your boss and explain the problem. If a colleague is preventing you from running a successful meeting, your boss can step in and move the conversation along. Or if you and another team member don’t agree on how to spend your shared budget, you might ask your boss to make the decision,. That way, neither of you loses and you’re just carrying out your manager’s orders. In Western culture this indirect approach might be frowned upon, but in other places it’s more effective for handling disagreement.

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How to Tell a Good Failure from a Bad One

Not all failures are bad — some of them are actually good because of the valuable learning opportunities they present. Dividing your organization’s failures into three categories will help you distinguish the good, useful failures from the bad, useless ones:

• Preventable failures in predictable operations. These are caused by inadequate training, inattention, or lack of ability. They’re easy to diagnose and fix — by using a checklist, for example — but they’re not very useful.
• Unavoidable failures in complex systems. Small process setbacks are inevitable, so considering them failures is counterproductive. They can usually be averted by following best practices for safety and risk.
• Intelligent failures at the frontier. These good failures happen as a result of forward-thinking innovation. They provide valuable knowledge that can help you get ahead of the competition. But they can become bad failures if your organization starts working at a larger scale than is necessary.

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