Creating a Drama-Free Workplace

The Insider's Guide to Managing Conflict, Incivility & Mistrust

Career Press, 2020

15 min read

7 take-aways

Audio & text

What's inside?

Avoiding drama in the workplace boosts your performance and your health.

1×

Editorial Rating

Qualities

Eye Opening
Concrete Examples
Engaging

Recommendation

Workplace conflict consultant Anna Maravelas draws on her long experience to explain how to prevent and resolve workplace clashes. She illustrates her suggestions with short case studies which make the book instructive and entertaining. She also enlivens the reading experience for senior managers and HR professions by adding insights from various other disciplines. Managers can put her practical advice to work right away.

Summary

Workplace conflicts unfold in three different kinds of corporate cultures: “hostile,” “indifferent” and “connected.”

Your overall corporate culture determines how conflicts emerge and how best to resolve them.

Consider three kinds of corporate culture:

“Hostile” – Teams at some corporations show open antagonism toward one another. The workplace is full of uptight, unreasonable and unhappy emotion. Members of these organizations feel threatened. They hate going to work and avoid meetings. Hostility saps employees’ energy and leads to lower productivity. Merely working through the critical issues that agitate your team members, and thus, eliminating anger, is not enough, however. Employees’ involvement in their work might diminish if they’ve been using hostility to fuel their energy. On the other hand, if they can move past hostility, and then learn to reconnect and appreciate each other, they can draw on those new links for positive energy.
“Low energy, indifferent” – In this environment, employees disengage and feel apathetic toward ...

About the Author

Anna Maravelas is the president of Thera Rising International. She teaches conflict resolution and her work has appeared in publications such as Oprah Magazine and Harvard Management Update.

Comment on this summary

More on this topic

In our Journal

4 months ago

Journal Article

Resolve Conflict with Compassionate Communication

Conflict is bound to arise in the workplace. Here’s how to nip it in the bud or, better yet, channel it productively. Angry outbursts have no place at work. But wherever people gather together, including the workplace, conflict is bound to arise sooner or later. People often bring their dysfunctional relationship patterns to work, without […]

3 years ago

Journal Article

The News Is Fake, the Anger Is Real

Anger, misdirected, can wreak all kinds of havoc on others and ourselves. It also primes a person for misinformation. Here is how to lower the temperature. You read the news; it boils your blood. You take to social media and it stokes the rage. Next thing you know you’re firing off inflammatory posts to soon-to-be-former friends. […]

4 years ago

Journal Article

“How Do I Prevent and Resolve Workplace Clashes?”

Yes, conflicts also occur at the fully digitized remote workplace – sometimes even more often and more severe. Here is how to deal with them. In the vast majority of cases, conflicts with other employees result from poor communication. Since communication is more than just sending around and working through to-do lists, and since we […]