Although I haven't yet received an email about the prompt questions, I just thought I'd give this post a shot anyways.

Conflict Management:

1) What was your most important take away from Adrian Klemme's presentation?

I had two epiphanies during his lecture.

The first was something I already kind of knew, but until now hadn't realized in just this way. It came about when Adrian demonstrated how we perceive and pass judgement on things when we do not understand/have complete information in different situations (when the girls went up and rated the description of the guy). I realized that even though their initial judgements may have been assuming and harsh, there is no solution for those judgements not to be made, and thus it is important to communicate and inform people clearly. When he applied it to business settings I realized how important it is for individuals to understand the Why behind the What, and that as a leader I can really empower those I lead by helping them understand.

The second epiphany was just a connection I made to economics that had to do with Compromise. Like Adrian said, compromise is not when one person wins and one person loses, rather I realized that it is just like trade in economics where both parties benefit and are able to consume more than they would have otherwise (outside of their production possibilities frontier--technically speaking). So like trade, compromise is indeed a good thing both theoretically and in reality.

2) What are two examples, good or bad, of conflict management that you have experienced and/or seen?

Okay, so a good example of this took place in my dorm a while back. We were having trouble keeping the kitchen sink from filling up with dishes and even though there was a rule that said you must put away/load dirty dishes in the dish washer, the rule was rarely followed. Finally we'd had enough and decided to agree upon another rule. We reasoned that if the sink has nothing in it then it is clean, but if just one dish gets put in it then it becomes dirty and then no one feels guilty about adding to the mess; so, the new rule was that whoever's dishes were caught in the sink, that person had to unload the dishwasher until someone else was caught. Since then there has only been one perpetrator. Unfortunately, he's gotten tired of unloading the dishwasher and has stopped which is a problem; so, to avoid unnecessary conflict and to just be nice, I've started to unload it and gratefully the dishes continue to remain out of the sink :)

I've had many experiences with bad conflict management at work with my brother. Although we've learned how to deal with it now, we used to argue about the littlest things, never compromising or admitting that we were personally to blame. For some reason I just didn't let things go and he didn't either, and sometimes it was really embarrassing when we'd be openly arguing on the job and our customers would approach us and we'd have to try and act normal, haha. After that occurred a couple hundred times, we finally figured out that it was best to just admit faults or try things in different ways and that as we began doing so we both began to agree with each other more often an fighting each other completely stopped.

3) What are you going to do to apply the things you learned about conflict management to your leadership role?

At the moment I can't think of any conflict that my team has, we're pretty smooth functioning. That said, I will strive to prevent conflict by better informing my team mates about goals and project ideas so they can be empowered. I will also prepare myself to deal with conflict by remembering that there is usually a solution/compromise that can benefit everyone more than any one sided solution could, and that such a solution only needs to be discovered.

I hope this works for the blog post :)