Conflict Resolution: General Office

Credit for the work, and who presented it to the client. A missed deadline that quietly became somebody else’s late night, and has not been mentioned since. Two people who now copy you into everything, which is not information, it is evidence gathering.

Seniority against competence: the person who has been here longest and the person who is better at it, in the same meeting. A remark in a chat channel that read as a joke to the person who sent it and did not to anyone else.

Half of it happens in writing, which means it is durable, forwardable, and read by people who were not there. That is what makes an office different.

You choose the situation and have the conversation by speaking it. The agent plays the colleague, and it responds the way people do when they feel their professionalism is in question, which is to say not always graciously.

It is also the only realistic way to practice moving a dispute out of an email chain and into a room, which is usually the actual fix and is almost always the part that gets avoided.

Scored on whether you separated the problem from the person, whether you dealt in observable behavior rather than motive, whether you found the interest underneath the stated position, and whether you closed with something specific enough to be checked.

You can run it repeatedly. Nobody sees the attempts, which is the whole advantage over trying this out on a colleague.

Start with the free guide on managing employee conflict. It is the framework this rehearses and it costs nothing.

Do not use this to prepare for a formal disciplinary or a dismissal. Those have a process, and it is not a rehearsal. This is for the conversation you should have had three weeks ago, while it is still a conversation.