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YES, it's possible, and it can be a good learning experience.
CONFRONTATION. How do you feel about this word? If you're like most people, your first reaction is to do everything you can to avoid it. None of us needs any more aggravation in our lives, and a confrontation is almost assuredly going to add to our anxiety level. Some of the predictable outcomes of confrontation are anger, resentment, yelling, reduced performance, decreased effort, and, in some extreme cases, turnover. Yes, people leave jobs over confrontation. In fact, according to a study done in 2002 by C. Pearson at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, more than 50% of people who have had confrontations at work lost work time worrying about the incident or future interactions with that boss or co-worker. Slightly fewer than 50% had thought about changing jobs to avoid the instigator, and 12% actually left their job to get away from the unwelcome behavior. So there's a real cost to confrontation, but it keeps on happening. The question is, "What can we as managers do about it?"
One thing we can do is shuck the old definition of confrontation that most of us carry around in our heads. Confrontation is not, as Dictionary.com says, simply "discord or a clash of opinions and ideas." We need to strive to make confrontations something positive. Although our first reaction is to avoid it, we must ask ourselves, "Can we really avoid confrontation?" The answer is "no." We can only postpone it. And the more we postpone it, the more likely the confrontation when (not if) it happens will be as bad as we feared it would be. Therefore, we must look at confrontations differently.
CAN THEY BE GOOD?
What are the potential positive outcomes of a confrontation? First and foremost, understanding. If I avoid you and never confront the differences that exist between us, we will never bridge them. They will simply loom there, larger and larger until they are insurmountable. When we do finally have to come to some kind of accord, we will each have dug in our heels so deeply that it will be impossible to see the other person's point of view. We will be arguing the positions...