Conflicts in the workplace are more common than most of us would like to admit. They are everywhere in our popular culture, from our music, to our literature, to our T.V. shows. I have so many memories of my mother who works for a state university coming home from work fuming about one co-worker or another that by the time i entered the work force i suppose i had simply accepted it as a part of life as an adult. What surprised me however was the frequency of conflict in the workplace of outdoor professionals. In all of the different fields and offices (ha) that I have worked in I have found outdoor professionals to be some of the most conflict- prone people that i know. I also know from experience that whenever I have tried to vent to friends outside the field about troubles with other raft guide or ropes-course instructors that the first response I always get is almost always more akin to surprise that I have trouble at my job than anything relevant to the conflict or problem that I have just outlined.
There are more guesses than I could ever care to take as to why outdoor professionals seem to get so feisty with one another but the main way in which I have always interacted with it has always seemed to center around perception. When I first started guiding as a full fledged guide at Environmental Traveling Companions (E.T.C.) a nonprofit in California I was about 17-years-old. I had also been a part of a year long internship where I had learned how to plan trips, how to debrief, and all the other essentials of how to be an effective leader. On top of my internship, I had chosen to focus my Senior Project at my high school on E.T.C. and had spent over 1,300 hours (yes, that does say thirteen hundred,) planning my very own fundraising and awareness overnight E.T.C. trip for friends and family of the other interns. Now you can never really be fully prepared to guide anything because people are fickle and the world is a crazy place and I am in no way trying to say that I learned everything in a year but i was definitely competent, something that a lot of my co-guides were refusing to recognize because of my age. Of course no one ever came out and said it, but I sometimes felt ignored or looked over.
The second place I encountered this conflict was here at Western when as a freshman I started to work for the Outdoor Center on campus at WWU. At the OC I encountered for the first time in my life real exclusion within the outdoor community. There is a certain hierarchy there amongst the staff of what is "cool" and who deserves respect and friendship all of which is grounded in absolutely nothing. I have always understood that not everyone has to like everyone or everything else but I think that the OC staff as a whole could use a healthy dose of tolerance. Such an important step in conflict resolution is the attitude from which we approach said conflict and if your attitude says "you aren't important so I'm not going to bother" then nothing ever stands a chance of getting resolved. At that point, conflict resolution essentially becomes one-sided where in which one party is actively trying to solve a problem or work out an issue and the other party wont even entertain the idea. Sadly at this point there isn't always much that can be done besides changing your approach or maybe involving a superior. It's too bad that bad attitudes like this are so prevalent in the outdoor professional community and that we haven't yet found a way to collaborate more.
