Carole noticed that Cliff was checking his watch again. "Got somewhere to go?" she asked. "We all do, you know, but unless we can get these people to stop bickering and start engineering, nothing else matters."
"I know, sorry," Cliff said. "But I'm out of ideas. They all believe they aren't the problem."
Carol, Cliff, and Daryl sat silently for a minute, though it seemed longer. Then Daryl had an idea. "What about conflict training? I hear from HR that they have someone and people say he's pretty good."
Cliff really had given up. "I can hear them now: 'Oh, training. Another day lost.'"
But Carole was more optimistic. "Let's do it. We've tried everything else. Maybe it'll help."
In desperation, and with good intentions, Carole, Cliff, and Daryl are about to deal with a team conflict problem with conflict training.
Training rarely hurts, but considering all the costs, it can be a mistake. To understand why, imagine waking up one morning with a pain in your left side. You call your doctor and manage somehow to get an appointment that morning. You walk into the office and say, "Doctor, my left side hurts. Please remove my appendix."
Self-diagnosis is risky
when your health is at stake,
and it's no less risky in
the organizational contextOf course, you'd never do that. Instead, you'd probably talk about your pain, and submit to an examination. Maybe it's appendicitis, but maybe not — it's unlikely, since normally, the appendix is on the right side.
Self-diagnosis is risky when your health is at stake, and it's no less risky in the organizational context. Instead of deciding for yourself what to do, have a consultant investigate what kind of problem there might be, then tell you what your options are, and recommend action.
Here are some advantages of professional assessment:
- Fit
- If there's too much tension in the air, training might not be a fit. Some people might be too hurt or too steamed to learn much. You might need another kind of intervention first.
- Cost
- When you include the cost of participant time, training can be more expensive than more direct and focused interventions. A professional assessment can control costs.
- Opportunity cost
- The people attending the training could be doing something else, and that work might be delayed by the time spent in training. The cost of those delays can be significant.
- Expertise
- Experts are more likely to uncover the real issue. You gain the benefit of their skill and experience with other organizations.
- Outsider status
- During the assessment, some people in your organization are more likely to reveal key information to the outside expert than they would be to you or to someone within your organization.
- Objectivity
- It's difficult to be objective about interpersonal issues. Since we have a tendency to overlook our own contributions to problems, self-assessment can be less objective than a professional assessment.
An assessment can be helpful even when you think everything is OK. Think of it the way you would your annual physical. Would you skip a physical because you feel fine? Top Next Issue
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Situs inversus is a condition in which internal organs are organized as a mirror image of the norm. It affects one in 7-8,000 humans. There are also other conditions that can cause the appendix to be on the left side. More.
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
- Status-Report as a Second Language
- Sometimes, the clichés the losing team's players feed to sports reporters can have hidden meaning.
So it is with Project Status Reports, especially for projects in trouble.
- Enjoy Every Part of the Clam
- Age discrimination runs deep, well beyond the hiring decision. When we value each other on the basis
of age, we can deprive ourselves and our companies of the treasures we all have to offer.
- Virtual Communications: I
- Participating in or managing a virtual team presents special communications challenges. Here are some
guidelines for communicating with members of virtual teams.
- Guidelines for Sharing "Resources"
- Often, team members belong to several different teams. The leaders of teams whose members have divided
responsibilities must sometimes contend with each other for the efforts and energies of the people they
share. Here are some suggestions for sharing people effectively.
- Disjoint Awareness: Systematics
- Organizations use some policies and processes that can cause people in collaborations to have inaccurate
understandings of what each other is doing. Performance management, politics, and resource allocation
processes can all contribute to disjoint awareness.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
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- And on March 27: Allocating Action Items
- From time to time in meetings we discover tasks that need doing. We call them "action items." And we use our list of open action items as a guide for tracking the work of the group. How we decide who gets what action item can sometimes affect our success. Available here and by RSS on March 27.
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