Resolving Conflicts at Work: Eight Strategies for Everyone on the Job

by Kenneth Cloke, Joan Goldsmith, Warren Bennis (Foreword)

Here is a completely updated edition of the best-selling Resolving Conflicts at Work. This definitive and comprehensive work provides a handy guide for resolving conflicts, miscommunications, and misunderstandings at work and outlines the authors’ eight strategies that show how the inevitable disputes and divisions in the workplace actually provide an opportunity for greater creativity, productivity, enhanced morale, and personal growth. This new edition includes current case studies that put the focus on leadership, management, and how organizations can design systems to change a culture of avoidance into a culture of creative conflict. The result is a more practical book for today’s companies and the people who work in them.

Genres: Management

384 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a worthwhile book for developing the ability to resolve conflicts at work or anywhere. The authors address eight "strategies" or needs, skills, and tools for getting past impasses in conflict to resolution. For those who are involved in negotiation or mediation, this is a particularly good compelement to the integrative or "mutual gains" styles of negotiation. Cloke and Goldsmith identify the following strategies for resolving conflict, and in parentheses I have included what I believe to be some related negotiation issues:

Strategy 1: Change the culture and context of conflict (framing, setting the tone for integrative negotiation)
Strategy 2: Listen actively, empathetically, and responsively (Clarify interests and task information)
Strategy 3: Acknowledge and integrate emotions to solve problems (separate the people from the problems)
Strategy 4: Search beneath the surface for hidden meaning (look beyond positions to the underlying interests of the parties)
Strategy 5: Separate what matters from what gets in the way (separate people from problems, and positions from interests)
Strategy 6: Stop rewarding and learn from difficult behaviors (handle dirty tricks without departing from an integrative approach to negotiation)
Strategy 7: Solve problems creatively, plan strategically, and negotiate collaboratively
Strategy 8: Explore resistance, mediate, and design systems for prevention and resolution.

This is another book that is required reading in my graduate class on negotiation, and one which I often recommend in my corporate training programs.

[Elizabeth]

As seen in FYI: For Your Improvement.

[Henry Sienkiewicz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good read, wonderful insights

[Carole]

I need to puchase this book.