From the The Five Percent Blog in Psychology Today: Most of what you have learned about conflict resolution is often wrong. Or at least it’s ineffective in the workplace between people with unequal power. We have been conducting conflict resolution workshops for decades and have often had participants ask us, “What if you have a conflict with someone with more power?” Or, “The people who work for me do not seem to be willing to disagree with me. What can I do to make them more candid?” And we realized that neither we nor anyone else had great answers to those questions. How can we get to win-win when power differences get in the way? The whole idea of win-win negotiations was first popularized by the best selling book Getting To Yes. To this day it is a great book, one of the most innovative and insightful books ever written about conflict and negotiation. But even GTY has little to say about disagreements when power is unequal. However, a new, free, interactive app developed by our team at Columbia University goes further to offer strategies for handling disagreements up and down the food chain at work. The Making Conflict Work App shows you exactly what to do to reach your goals depending on what kind of leader you work for.  And shows leaders how to get subordinates to be more candid, more creative, and to take responsibility for problems instead of waiting to be told what to do. The app picks up where GTY and other great books on conflict resolution leave off: it talks straight about how to deal with disagreements when the other party is your boss, or you are the boss and you want others to be more honest with you. Read the full blogpost here: Psychology Today Photo Credit: Thomas8047

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Published February 19, 2016