5 Key Skills You Can Build to Manage Conflict in the Workplace
is a guest blog by Walter Bodell
Conflict is an inevitable part of life. People with the healthiest relationships, both personally and professionally, understand and recognize this fact. Rather than trying to simply avoid conflict, they learn to manage conflict and work through it. Developing good conflict resolution skills for the workplace is possibly one of the most important things you can do to create a healthy working environment both for yourself and for others. By learning to manage and resolve conflict in the workplace, you can make yourself an invaluable part of almost any team. Here are 5 critical elements to you can use to manage conflict in the workplace.
Odds are if you’re like most engineers, you show up at work each day, solve problems, go home, and then come back the next day and repeat that process. Obviously, I am simplifying things here. Within that, ‘solve problems’ generalization, lie thousands of amazing projects, inventions, and solutions that move our world forward. Engineers create extraordinary things. But what career-related items do you partake in outside of your engineering projects, and how you do you decide when or why to execute them and move your engineering career forward?
Switching engineering jobs isn’t as easy as switching car gears. There’s a lot of paperwork and bureaucratic red tape involved, a lot of re-training, and of course, the awkward handing in of your two weeks notice followed by the dozens of goodbyes from your coworkers. Nonetheless, this shouldn’t scare you into pursuing what you are truly passionate about. Here are five tips to help you iron out smooth career transitions:
I started my bachelor’s in civil engineering in 2001, more than 15 years ago. I wanted to become a civil engineer, design new roads, buildings, power plants, and fancy high-rise buildings. “Design” is a core concept in the civil engineering curriculum, where students learn to calculate loads, predict capacities, and optimize their precise solutions in very specific cases. In doing so, they become familiar with another concept, “risk”. In school, engineering students learn how to identify risk, quantify it, and attempt to minimize it within their design.
