The effects of conflict in workplace are widespread and costly. Its prevalence, as indicated by three serious studies, shows that 24-60% of management time and energy is spent dealing with anger. This leads to decreased productivity, increased stress among employees, hampered performance, high turnover rate, absenteeism and at its worst, violence and death.

Conflict in workplace is result of a variety of factors. Perhaps most significant cause is when someone feels taken advantage of. This might happen when a perfectionist boss demands same dedication and commitment from employees as he or she exhibits, but does not compensate them for late or weekend hours.

Other scenarios include employee having unrealistic expectations of what their job position really is, or of being misunderstood in workplace. Conflict also arises because of values and goal differences in company. The company may not have goals or not adequately express goals and values to their employees. Conversely, employee may have personal goals and values at odds with those of company.

There are four specific steps managers can take to reduce workplace conflict. The first is for managers to look at communication skills, both in terms of how they communicate and how they’re teaching their employees to communicate with each other. This, of course, includes using ‘I’ statements instead of ‘you’ language. Owning your own feelings and your own communication is a much more effective way to communicate and even more, teaching your employees to communicate that way with others, goes a long way toward reducing conflict.

The second part of communication is for managers to beef up listening skills. Active listening involves things like actually trying to understand what other person is saying, and then communicating to other person that you do indeed understand what they’re saying.

The second way to decrease workplace conflict is to establish healthy boundaries. Without boundaries, there will be conflict and squabbles, power struggles and all kinds of circumstances that make for messy situations.

You can be professional and be empathetic and compassionate toward your employees, without crossing line of becoming their friend. This is especially important when there’s a power difference between two people in an employment situation.

One exception is my book, A Manager's Guide to Newsletters: Communicating for Results, which I did get finished. Even on that project, though, getting finished wasn't a slam dunk -- it took more than seven years.

Do you have that problem, too? Many of us do, apparently, and it holds us back from reaching some of our goals, or reaching them as quickly as we would like.

So, let's explore what's happening, and what we can do to keep moving ahead with big communication projects.

First, hurdles. One that immediately comes to mind is determination to make everything perfect (at least in our own eyes) before we let others read, see, or hear it. Rather than settle for acceptable work (and after all, not everything has to meet standard of excellence), we keep polishing and polishing.

Trouble is, as you'll know if you've done this often enough, additional work doesn't always equal additional quality. Sometimes we actually make things worse by repeated editing and rewrites.

If you're troubled by this habit, ask yourself how you'll be judged. If you'll be judged as a writer or speaker, then it probably makes sense to put in extra hours. On other hand, if you're preparing a technical report, then your ideas probably matter more than manner in which they're expressed.

Here's another hurdle: not enough planning in advance, and you end up making too many changes. Communication projects generally move more quickly if we start with at least an outline. We can set out, in advance, our objectives, a profile of target audience, and what we want audience to take away. From an editorial perspective, we could write an outline that stipulates how message will unfold.

In addition, it's often easier to revise or procrastinate than to create new material. Especially if you haven't done any advance planning. In that case, you might not be sure what comes next. Polishing existing material gives us an excuse not to do sometimes hard work of creating new material.

If your big communication project involves writing, you've probably known -- or will soon know -- writers' block and all other barriers that keep you from getting words on paper or on a computer screen.