New Manager’s Guide to Resolving Conflict
The IBM Center for the Business of Government just released a 50-page report called A Manager’s Guide to Resolving Conflicts in Collaborative Networks. Written by our friends Lisa Bingham and Rosemary O’Leary, the Manager’s Guide report helps public managers navigate how to manage and negotiate the conflicts that may occur among a network’s members.
From an article at FCW.com by Florence Olsen about the guide:
New public policy research shows that managers can adapt to changing rules of governance in the public sphere by becoming, in essence, better listeners. Multiagency collaboration and decision-making demand a new kind of public manager, one skilled in negotiation, bargaining, collaborative problem-solving, conflict management and conflict resolution, according to a new report published by the IBM Center for the Business of Government. Among the managerial attitudes described in the report, adversarial is out, cooperative is in.
Negotiations across organizational lines in which no one person is in command demands a special attitude, said the report’s authors, Rosemary O’Leary, professor of public administration at Syracuse University, and Lisa Bingham, professor of public service at Indiana University at Bloomington. That attitude, they said, must be one of “understanding others when they misunderstand you, consulting others even if they appear not to listen…being non-coercive and not yielding to coercion, and accepting others and their concerns as worthy of consideration.”
Click on the guide’s title above to download the resource, or learn more about the guide in its NCDD Resource Center listing.
