 Debate and disagreements at work are productive; fighting is not. (Click to Tweet!) Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Annie McKee, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and author of How to be Happy at Work, says, “We each bring our own baggage to work each day. And, some of our issues rear their heads again and again.”
Topping McKee’s list of sources of work conflict are personal insecurity (fear of admitting we are imperfect), the desire for power and control (attempting to position oneself above others), and habitual victimhood (relinquishing control to avoid accountability). What can we do about conflict at work? McKee suggests the following:
What causes fighting in your workplace? Do you think you can play a role in transforming it? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.
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 Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki has researched what he calls “positive conformity.” In his research, he notes, “participants who believed others were more generous became more generous themselves.” This suggests, “kindness is contagious, and that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.” (Tweet it!)
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company, says, “Zaki’s insight is vital for improving society, but it applies to companies too.” However, instead of treating kindness as a “directive,” he suggests treating it like a contagion and creating “the conditions under which everybody catches it.” Taylor cites a case study detailing customer service transformation at Mercedes Benz USA. When Stephen Cannon became president and CEO, he understood that almost every customer transaction “came down to a personal encounter with a human being in a dealership who could either act in ways that were memorable or could act the rote way most people in most dealerships act.” He set about creating a grassroots movement to encourage and empower customer-facing employees to rise to any occasion. “There was one dealer who’d closed a sale and noticed from the documents that it was the customer’s birthday. So he ordered a cake, and when the customer came in to pick up the car, had a celebration. Then there was the customer who got a flat tire on the way to her son’s graduation. She pulled into a Mercedes dealership in a panic and explained the problem. Unfortunately, there were no replacement tires in stock for her model. The service manager ran to the showroom, jacked up a new car, removed one of its tires, and sent the mother on her way.” Taylor believes that this bottom-up, peer-to-peer commitment to customers at Mercedes-Benz USA is “a reminder for leaders in all sorts of fields: You can’t order people to be kind, but you can spark a kindness contagion.” Can you share an instance of kindness in your organization that sparked others to act similarly? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs.  We all complain at times. Some just do it more often than others. Some seek attention by complaining; some use complaints to badger others; but many complainers are ruminators, repetitively worrying about problems.
Repetition, however, is the mother of all learning. When we repeatedly focus on the negative by complaining, we’re firing and re-firing the neurons responsible for the negativity bias—and, as Rick Hanson, a neuroscientist and author of Buddha’s Brain, reminds us: What gets fired, gets wired. In other words, the more we complain, the more we notice things to complain about. (Click to Tweet!) Thanks to something called “neuroplasticity”, negative habits change our brains for the worse. But positive habits change them for the better. If you find yourself caught in a complaining loop, try breaking it by:
Have you ever noticed that complaining usually leads to more of a negative outlook? What happens when you try to break the cycle? To join the conversation, click "comments" above. If you would like to learn more about creating a habit around masterful communication, check out our online learning programs. |
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