ABSTRACT
Conflict between members of a work group or team is one of the biggest challenges faced by leaders, partly because it is so disruptive to the workplace, reduces performance and diverts attention from the achievement of goals, but also because it is hard for leaders to deal with. It is hard because it is, thankfully, fairly rare in most workplaces so leaders don’t get a lot of practice in handling it. To make things even harder, leaders are often judged by those they lead on the basis of their ability to deal with conflict successfully. Success or failure in doing so can spill over into all other aspects of the leadership role, especially into the level of trust that people have in you (something we look at in more detail in Chapter 13).
