The Top 50 Management Dilemmas

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Challenges around conflict

Your job is to be able to recognise whether the conflict you are observing is functional or dysfunctional and then knowing what to do next. This section has practical advice which will help you to resolve conflict where necessary and embrace it where appropriate.

Once you accept that conflict exists whenever people hold different opinions, you quickly realise that conflict is a daily staple of professional life. The question is not whether there is conflict that you’ll have to manage; the question is rather how you will manage the conflict that you are bound to encounter. We’ll look at what happens when people do try to brush conflict under the carpet, think about how to deal with both emotionless and emotional ...