Workplace Referees: The Importance of Conflict Management As Project Managers
In the fall of 2016, I had the pleasure of taking Mr. Leslie "Jim" Sklenar as a professor for my Communications Management course. While there were many key takeaways from this course, the biggest takeaway for me concerned conflict resolution and management. Although this was not the primary purpose of the course, the brief overview of conflict resolution and management led me to a simple yet very relevant thought: It is not only the responsibility of a project manager to manage and control the triple constraint, but a project manager may need to also be a peer mediator. This year, during the fall of 2017 in an elective course titled "Special Topics in Project Management", Mr. Marcus Parker further broadened this perspective for me. A project manager's responsibility regarding conflict management is not limited to just peer mediation, but at times may require the project manager to be a teacher, a mentor, and (dare I say it), a referee. Though initially insult...