As I write this post, I am sitting in an office in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia. Tonight I speak to a group of business owners in Brisbane (about 2 hours by car). This is not my first opportunity to work with people in a different country. To date, I have worked in Canada, Germany, England, Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, China, Thailand, Taiwan and now — Australia. This trip has triggered a thought for me that directly affects our approaches to resolving conflict with people at work... Read Full Story

     Conflicts often arise when people have unmet needs. People will do everything in their power to get their needs met. They often start the search to have their needs met with a “whisper.” The whisper can take many forms depending on the person. When the whisper is not heard, they often raise the volume until they begin to “yell.” Like the whisper, the yell can take many forms.      Outgoing, task-oriented, dominant people may whisper by tapping their foot or finger. They may yell by... Read Full Story

     Conflicts with supervisors or people in positions of authority seem to come up frequently in my work. People often ask me how to confront their supervisor or manager to address frustrations and irritations.      I start by recommending caution. Confronting someone who has the positional authority to retaliate against you presents some very real political risks. That being said, here’s one approach I have found that often works well, and it significantly reduces the risk of retaliation... Read Full Story

     According to research cited by Daniel Goleman in a video recorded at a TED conference last year, humans have a natural bent towards compassion.         Reflecting on this video, Tammy Lenski over at Conflict Zen says: “We’re wired for compassion — our default setting is to help. But sometimes we turn off that part of ourselves.”      Tammy’s comment and Goleman’s video got the wheels spinning in my head. I immediately thought of the concept of self-deception that I first learned from... Read Full Story

     I am pretty reserved and definitely task-oriented. I care about people, but I expect people to behave logically.  When I work, I focus very intently on the work in front of me. Distractions and interruptions frustrate and annoy me.      My wife is outgoing and more task-oriented than people-oriented. She likes to move fast. She tends to make decisions on-the-fly and to work in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. She finds it easy to jump from topic to topic or from task to task.      My... Read Full Story

Conflict conversations often go wrong when the two parties disengage too soon. As Daniel Dana, author of Conflict Resolution, says; people often don’t “argue” long enough because of a hard-wired behavioral approach commonly known as the “fight-or-flight” response. This natural response can serve us well as a protection from physical harm, but it seldom helps during the normal interpersonal conflicts we experience at home and at work. Our natural response tends to create two behaviors that... Read Full Story

Check out this excerpt from Kevin Eikenberry’s Remarkable Learning Blog: Here are seven steps or actions you can take to mend, improve and even nurture working elationships (or any relationship for that matter). The Seven Steps Decide. The first step is you must decide that you want to improve the relationship. The precursor to this step is recognition - recognizing that the relationship needs improving - but the heart of this is the decision that this relationship matters enough for you to... Read Full Story

Misinterpreting other people’s intentions creates one of the biggest challenges I see in much of my coaching and training work. I suppose this is a natural part of human nature. Often, the only frame of reference we have for interpreting other people’s behaviors is our own. As a result, we often interpret their behaviors based on how we believe we would react or behave if we were in their situation.Unfortunately, we often don’t know everything about their situation.In a post earlier this week... Read Full Story

Two weeks ago, I had the priviledge to work with my friends at Personality Insights in Atlanta at Share the Passion 2008. On Sunday morning, Christopher Coleman spoke. Christopher’s story is really amazing. In summary, Chris was declared dead at birth and he stayed that way for fifteen minutes until his twin sister was born. When she cried, he cried. So, he was without oxygen for the first fifteen minutes of his life. As a result, he has cerebral palsy, and he is always in a wheelchair. Many... Read Full Story

   As I read through some of the blogs I really like this morning, I found two posts that intrigued me. One comes from Victoria Pynchon at Settle it Now (Negotiating Influence How to Help Your Opponents Change Their Minds) and the other is from Diane Levin at Mediation Chanel (The Mind and Magic Conjuring Up Ways to Improve Awareness). They are both really interesting, and I suggest that you take a look. I’ll quickly summarize what I got from them individually, and then I’ll comment on the... Read Full Story