Works
- Want Collaboration? Accept and Actively Manage Conflict, Harvard Business Review, 2005
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Managing conflict across units. Weiss and Hughes argue that conflict is a natural result of cross-unit work and should be managed: give people a common method for resolving conflict and criteria for trade-offs, use escalations as coaching opportunities, and establish and enforce a requirement of joint escalation. Under joint escalation, the parties present a disagreement to their bosses together, which gives the decision-maker every side of the dispute and removes the advantage of getting to one's own boss first.
What it explains
Weiss and Hughes explain why cross-unit disputes become deadlocks when each side carries its own version to its own boss, and how presenting the disagreement together gets a better decision. The article is practitioner advice in Harvard Business Review.