Win at Work!: The Everybody Wins Approach to Conflict Resolution

Chapter 6. Challenge 3 Speak Up about What's Happening or Remain Silent?

What happens when you have to defend your organization to an outsider, all the while knowing that what your company did was not right?

How difficult is it to defend the actions of your boss to a subordinate when you disagree with the boss?

How do you handle a meeting where you know one of the participant's lies may cause great damage?

These are situations that can keep us up at night. This isn't a book about ethics; however, ethics and conflict often form a symbiotic relationship, one feeding upon the other. We face a very real dilemma when we witness something that undermines the success of the organization in the long term. The dilemma becomes even more poignant when what we observe has the potential to undermine our personal success.

This challenge isn't about those situations where laws or regulatory practices are broken. In those cases, each of us has a moral and legal obligation to take action. Still each of us has personal decisions to make and no one can guide us but our conscience. It's easy to say, "Take action!" It's the taking action that's hard. In those very difficult circumstances, I suggest you move ahead carefully, get sage and/or legal advice, and be as brave as you can be.

Here, I want to focus on those more frequent occasions where your actions might be at odds with your conscience. No laws or regulations are being broken, but the actions of another person or the organization are, you believe, ...