Conflicts of Interest

Conflicts of Interest are always a good time, they bring a party to life! Seriously though, I feel that this chapter was well organized and can be a great self reflective exercise for any leader in a group. I enjoyed how the authors discussed strategies for managing conflicts of interest, and then mixed negotiating into it. For this great blog of mine, I would like to concentrate on my YMCA experiences since I was brought into the Springfield College program.

Once I began to read more into the styles of managing conflict, I immediately started to think of my experience this past summer. During one of my many projects, I had a difficult time effectively working with an individual that in the past I got along well with. It primarily stemmed from an incident out of the working environment, and as a result we began to have separate interests. Our team leader handled the situation very well by facilitating a thirty minute conversation where we were all able to express how we were feeling. It was a good strategy for handling the intergroup conflict but it still was not one hundred percent successful. I had mixed emotions with all of this because I knew that our number one team goal was to complete the project. My life is all about having fun, and I unfortunately felt like I was unable to enjoy myself. I no longer felt like I could be my true self around this person. As a result, I was not fully expressive and made a classic mistake. I placed individual blame on a person for a mistake our group made. It was a common mistake that many make, but I realize that my actions were not based on the interests of the whole group. It reflected the personal conflict I was having with this individual. If I was completely interested in the whole group, I would have calmly talked to the whole group about our fault and how we can recover from it. It sounds sad, but not until I read this chapter, have I felt really complete with this whole situation. I now realize exactly how I would handle the situation in the future, and have learned to manage my conflicts of interest in the working environment.

This past summer I also witnessed my first formal negotiating experience in a YMCA setting. I would clasify it as an integrative negotiation with two people both having the shared vision of a successful music program. Even though the intent was to create a great new program, I still felt tension between the two people in the conversation. They both explained what they wanted in a descriptive way, and backed it up with how they felt. The one factor that shaked everything up was that one person received some critical misinformation. This misinformation involved the salary and exactly what her job responsibility/description would be. So basically she was informed at the meeting that they wanted her to do more but receive a smaller salary. It was quite comical because once they were all on the same page, they still remained repeating the four steps of the negotitation process It took forty minutes of intense debate to finally start creating some possible agreements that would maximize the joint outcome. They finalized the music program, her responsibilities in the program and she would be compensated financially. It was a great learning experience as a student who knows that they will in some day handling the finances of a YMCA.

Managing conflicts of interest can make or break the efficiency of a group. I know that when it comes to successfully working with any group. I will need to have the skills necessary to adjust to different styles of negotiation, intergroup conflict and managing conflicts of interest. Another week brings another great blog! Keep tune to next week when we look at diversity!