Conflict Reolution

I am just about as non confrontational as they come.  In ninety-nine percent of situations, I actively try to avoid conflict.  I simply do not see a purpose to run in to a conflict when there is any way to avoid it.  I am a happy person who tries to be around people who are happy so I just do not like being around anger.  With that being said, I have been in my fair share of conflicts.

I worked at a country club for 4 years as a lifeguard.  After my third year as a guard, our manager announced that he was going to quit and nominate a successor.  There were really only two candidates for the position.  It was one of my good friends at the club, code named Beth, and myself.  I ended up getting the position because of my great relationship with my boss.  My boss and I really had become very close. 

At first, there did not seem to be any sort of conflict at all.  For the first few weeks of the summer, there was never any problem in terms of scheduling or problems at the club.  Then a problem arose.  There was a concert on a Friday afternoon that a ton of our employees wanted to go to.  I had already decided that I was going to work the event.  A little background about our policies.  We do not schedule shifts based on seniority.  Unless previously notified, I was in charge of choosing who works when. 

Since this event was one of the biggest events of the year for the club, I scheduled our most experienced employees.  There were five of us working that day and everything seemed to be going just fine.  The event ended and Beth came up to me and told me that due to the decisions I had made that she was going to quit.  At first I was taken back.  At the moment I could not realize that I had made any terrible decisions that could lead to a person quitting, especially one of my friends.  Instead of arguing with Beth at the time, I asked her if we could meet the next day so we both had some time to think it over and she agreed. 

Over the next 24 hours I thought about a lot of things.  I took this very personally as I was in charge of the operations of the pool and Beth is one of my friends.  I tried to look at the conflict through Beth’s eyes.  She was upset that she could not go to this concert.  In my opinion that was no reason to quit. 

The next day we met and we both had a chance to say our piece.  I told her that I was sorry for putting her on that day, but she was very understanding of what I had to do.  I tried to put her into my shoes and let her see the situation that was presented to me.  She ended up talking to me about how she realized that she may have overreacted a little.  She clearly had thought about the conflict a lot as well.  She told me that her biggest problem with the situation was that we had been working together for 3 full years together and that she had no say in the situation.  That was the first time that she had shown any animosity towards me about being elected pool manager over her. 

Clearly the source of this problem was that I was given hierarchy over Beth.  Once everything cleared up, we both new that we had both made some minor errors in the situation and that we both would like to redo some actions we took.  This was a huge learning experience for me.  I really learned a lot about conflict resolution and leadership. 

My favorite part of the situation was that it was handled between Beth and I.  We were the most mature and had been there the longest and it was imperative that we handled it just between us.  I feel as though the conflict could not have been avoided because even if it did not happen right then, there were emotions building up towards what happened.  Overall, I am happy with how the situation ended as Beth stayed at the pool and that helped me grow as a person.

Teamwork and Sharing

In my experiences, working as a team has always produced greater results versus when people are working alone.  Having the ability to bounce ideas off of one another really allows peoples ideas to evolve and turn into something greater.  When working alone, everybody is relatively close minded because they have no one else to talk to about their ideas. 

Last summer, the group of interns I worked with and I were given a project with about 3 weeks left in the summer.  For the most part, all of us had been doing work individually and we had not really collaborated a lot on anything.  Our project was to plan an event for our company. 

The event was a type of career fair sponsored by the National Association of Professional Women.  There were about 50 companies at the event and we needed to organize it all.  We had to coordinate where we were going to have different parts of the event and we had to develop a well thought out time all of it.  All of us interns had different specialties.  We all had different ideas and we were all nervous about planning our first event. 

Two weeks in we were done with all of our planning and our boss came in and gave us an interesting option.  He told us that we were going to decide how much we all were going to get paid.  He gave us one lump sum of money and told us that however we thought the money should be allocated is what he would do. 

I think that our boss doing this was an incredible decision by him.  Realistically, the money was not that great of an amount as we were only interns and did not get paid that much.  After our boss left the room, we all started throwing out some ideas.  We ended up all agreeing that the easiest solution to this problem was splitting the money evenly.  Even though some people did more work than others, it would be impossible to negotiate a difference in pay because nobody would be willing to accept less money than the less person. 

I do not believe that the pay rates were fair because two other interns and I did a majority of the work.  We really took a leadership role in the group and organized all of the work we had and made it manageable for the entire group to accomplish.  Although I do not necessarily agree with how we all got the same amount of money, I obviously understand why that was the only way that we were all going to agree.

My situation at my internship was related to the first situation in the “How to get riches out of marbles” article.  It is obviously a much different scenario, but I believe that the principles of sharing are the same in the two situations.  For the kids, when they worked together and got a different amount of marbles, the kid who obtained more marbles feels a sense of obligation to give his extra marble to the other kid because of the fact that he could not have received any of the marbles without the help of his partner. 

In my situation, even though we did not all do the same work, when delegating the money, we all felt a sense of teamwork and the fact that we really did need everybody made us all split the money equally.  In theory, if we were to have delegated the money solely on how much work every person did, our situation would have been more like the third condition in the article. 

You earn your money by doing work.  The kids pulled the ropes separately and got their own marbles because they pulled their rope.  There was no teamwork involved which is why the kids felt no obligation to share the extra marble with the other kid.  This would not work for our group because there was a great amount of teamwork involved in us producing our outcome.  Teamwork is a huge component of feeling a need to share.  You feel a sense of obligation to share because you needed to rely on the other people in order to do your own job.  This reliance leads to a willingness to share.

Risk and family successes

When I think about the future, I feel as though there is a huge cloud over my head because it is filled with a great deal of uncertainty.  It is impossible to predict where I will be in 3 years let alone 5 or 10 years from now.  I have not even made a clear decision about what I want to do for the rest of my life. 

I feel as though my life choices so far have created a pretty decent path for me to follow into the future.  Being an economics major at the University of Illinois, I feel as though my options are endless.  Since economics cover so many different types of fields, I feel as though I can adapt to countless types of jobs.  One negative about the major is that while it is a very broad based major, that means that I do not necessarily have a specific specialty.  I know the parts of economics I thrive in and I know the parts where I struggle greatly in.  I am not an accounting major who only has one real career path.  I have countless possibilities and it is my job to find my way and choose the right one.  I know that the future has a lot of risk, but if I can find the right career for me, I feel as though I will be able to minimize that risk and thrive in the future.

I am a junior, and over the summer I had an internship.  It was not the best internship in the world, but it was a great learning experience for me.  I think that I got a leg up on a lot of kids my age who are now focused on starting their internship process.  Working last summer gave me a great experience, especially for my resume which is going to be a key factor for whether or not I will be able to find an internship for this next summer.  If and when I find a great internship for this summer, I believe that I will be able to really find myself at the place I work.  I know that it is not possible to predict whether I will work at the place that I intern at this summer, but I know that it will only bring me to higher places in the future.  The better I prepare myself now with getting great internships, the more income I will be able to start off at with my first real job.  Although I am very nervous, I am confident I will find my way in life very soon.

I have two older siblings.  My sister is 22 years old and she is now in medical school.  She has not needed to test the job market out as she went straight from college into applying for medical school.  My brother on the other hand is a great success story.  My brother is 25 years old and he started working for the company he still works for when he was 18 years old.  My brother is already making an insane amount of money that is difficult for me to even comprehend.  My brother works as an insurance salesman for a company that is run by a family that is from my hometown.  He is absolutely incredible at what he does.  He makes a ton of money and he saves about fifty percent of it which is amazing.  He has never really had to go through the job market because he has always had his job, but he has his whole life together.  I honestly would predict that he will work at this company until he retires.  He has already made his way pretty high up the company and I feel as though he will only keep getting farther and eventually be either the chief executive officer, chief financial officer or the chief operational officer. 

In terms of my financial future, my brother is without a question my biggest role model.  I know that he will always be there to guide me and help me find my way in this world.  It is so nice to have somebody in my own family who has gone through the market and came out on top.  I hope I can be as successful as my brother and create very little risk for my economic future.