A520.6.3.RB - Conflict Resolution

A520.6.3.RB – Conflict Resolution

Conflict is an inevitable part of organizations in today’s complex and fast moving world.  An effective conflict resolution process can help maintain a positive work environment while also help creativity and innovation.  The text discusses several sources of conflict such as personal differences, informational deficiencies, role incompatibility, and environmental stress (Whetten & Cameron, 2016).  There are a few different approaches which one can take in the conflict resolution process to help deal with these sources of conflict.  You can take the accommodating approach, forcing approach, avoiding approach, compromising approach, or the collaborating approach.  All of these different approaches have both positive and negative aspects when dealing with conflict.

A recent situation where I was faced with conflict was with my previous supervisor.  There were several issues I faced which caused conflict between me and him.  To begin with when he first took over in our office he pulled all of us in the office together and told us a little about him. The main take away I got from his briefing was that he was a “change for change” guy. As a 17 year career Air Force member I was used to change with new leadership and while I struggled sometimes with it I have learned how to accept change and press. However, this was a new level of change for me. Part of what I do in my office is take information we collect during interviews and write reports based on this information.  These reports are generated in a system which all IG offices in the Air Force use.  So no matter what base you are located at everyone who is in the IG and writing these reports uses the same system.  My new supervisor had a hard time understanding this and he liked to change the way these reports were formatted.  Which does not sound like a huge problem.  Until I mention that every report I would submit I would incorporate the changes he made on the last report and then he would change something else.  The first time I noticed this I just pressed and when it happened on the next report and then the next one after that I asked if we could talk.  I explained to him how the system we used to write reports works and asked him if he could give me a template of what he would like it to look like so I could stop having to fix these reports every time I submitted one.  I explained the difficulty I was facing by not knowing his expectations and that I felt like I was playing a guessing game because nothing I submitted was ever good enough however, he would not tell me how he wanted things.  Unfortunately no matter how I tried to address this issue I never was able to get a clear answer or good guidance on what he expected from me.

I then approached another member of the leadership within my office and asked for his help.  I explained what I was dealing with and how all I needed was guidance and expectations so I could know and understand what this person wanted.  Even when I sought help from a third party I was unable to get clear guidance or expectations from this supervisor.  I feel like I had gone through all the different types of approaches and even tried using mediation to help me with this issue.  After all this I was still at square one.  We would conduct our inspections and gather information.  I would take the information summarize and load into the computer system we used.  I would generate the report and send it to this supervisor and he would send it back with a bunch of new changes.  A good example of how difficult this was for me was that during one inspection we looked at three different units.  For this process I had to generate three different reports.  I sent all three of these report to this supervisor at the same time and in the same format.  Within a day I had all three sent back to me and all three he had reformatted differently.  He changed so many things that he could not even keep track of the changes he would make.  I took these to him to show him how he was making things very difficult for me and he looked at me like he did not even remember he had changed the reports. 

Looking back at this situation there are a few things I could have done differently.  First off I could have asked right from the start how he would like for the reports to be formatted.  By waiting for this to happen a few times before addressing it I only made my frustration grow.  This clouded my judgment and did not help me in the end deal with this conflict. I could have also involved a third party sooner.  Maybe if another individual approached this supervisor on the issues sooner he would have understood the problems or at least gave us some better more clear guidance. I could have also just avoided the issue all together and continued to fix everything he changed on every report even though there was no method to the changes he was making.    This however, I believe would have led to more issues than by approaching him and asking for clarification.  At the end of the day we really never settled this issue.  Unfortunately this supervisor never would give me any guidance or standards he just continued to changes things no matter what I tried.  This person has since changed station so I now no longer have to deal with the conflict.  This has greatly reduced my stress and conflict within my office.  The new supervisor is very clear and concise on his expectations.  When I send reports to him he lets me know how he wants them formatted and other than minor typographical or grammatical errors the changes are miniscule.

 

    Whetton, D. A. & Cameron, K. S. (2016). Developing management skills,

        9th ed. Boston, MA: Pearson.