Conflict and Communication

If you have more than one person in your guild, you will have conflict. It's the way life is.

Plenty of people believe that communication is the key to successfully resolving conflict, that everyone would agree with each other if they could only understand each other.

This is false.

People have conflict because, at their core, people are different. Though communication is necessary to reach understanding, sometimes people understand each other perfectly and they still fight -- because understanding someone is not the same thing as agreeing with them.

Still, it is an important part of managing (and preventing) conflict to have successful channels of communication for your members. Large businesses who don't provide places for employees to comfortably give feedback or suggestions (who essentially ignore their workers), in the very worst scenarios, are the ones who have disgruntled people coming in with shotguns.

So, if you don't want your members coming at you with the proverbial crazy, make sure to provide them with plenty of opportunity and different ways to give you feedback.

Some people are only comfortable going to a specific officer with their problems. Some don't care who knows. Others would prefer to remain anonymous. You might consider this as the difference between A) going to your boss and laying all your problems on the table, B) yelling it across a row of cubicles, and C) dropping an unsigned note in a box when no one is looking. A Warcraft difference might be whispering someone, saying it in gchat, or dropping feedback in a website form that keeps the sender anonymous.

Whatever you do, just make sure to provide easy-to-access ways for your members to tell you what they're thinking. Because the more you know about what's going on with them, the more problems you can anticipate and try to prevent.

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Beth Blevins is an officer in In Vino Veritas.

She's a writer, artist and avid blogger.

Beth's been married since her junior year of college.