Problem Solving Exercise

During the phone call, I thought the conversation flowed very naturally. I felt comfortable talking about the subject and since his conflict was with employees that he supervised, I could relate to the situation. I didn’t ask him if he thought the conversation flowed naturally but my guess is that he would think so as well. He was recently promoted to a supervisory position and two of the people that he supervised were previously co-workers that he was friends with. Now that he supervises his friends and they are reluctant to accept his direction, it’s putting a strain on the relationship. I didn’t have any solutions to offer but it sounded as if he was handling it in a mature and respectful way. I asked him if the two staff persons were men or women and he responded there was one of each. I asked if he thought their friendships would survive the transition and he said that the friendship with the male would come through it ok but the friendship with the female was most likely beyond repair. I’m a woman but I’ll be the first to admit that women tend to hold on to a grudge a lot longer than men.

Because the call was during work hours for me, I had two interruptions from a staff person with questions. They were interruptions but very minimal ones since both questions were one word/phrase answers. I think I even just wrote the answer to one of the questions on a note pad and held it up so he may not have even noticed.

My conflict was regarding the blogs for this class. This was a new experience for me and since my email address on file with National is my work email address, I was getting a huge influx of email from classmates, conflicting with work. Since the director of my department is pretty understanding about letting me do homework on my lunch or take time out of work for assignments when I need to, I try not to let going to school interrupt my work. My partner to this assignment had some good suggestions for me and was willing to help in any way that he could. Overall, I thought the conversation was productive. I believe our conversation went over the twenty minutes because we were still talking. If I had to make some judgments about him based on our conversation, I would guess that he is an outgoing person that talks with other people easily. I would also guess him to be in his late twenties or early thirties. If I dared venture on guessing an ethnicity, I would say he’s Caucasian, or at the very least, born and raised in the U.S., probably California. I’ll have to ask him to find out if my judgments are correct.

Ps. I don't mention his name here because we are encouraged to share our blogs with friends and family. If he decided to share his blog with co-workers like I did, I might be escalating his conflict.