There’s no question about it: Handling yourself well in conflict and negotiating well on your own behalf have positive impact on your career momentum.

So I’m dedicating this Labor Day 2008 issue of the newsletter to conflict and career. Here’s what’s on tap:

1. Handle conflict well, advance your career
2. Increase your earning potential with better negotiation
3. Tap — don’t suppress — conflict’s potential and make your meetings shine
4. Make ‘em smile

Handle conflict well, advance your career

Good conflict skills don’t just make you — and everyone around you — feel better and make life a little smoother.

They help you advance your career and influence perception of your leadership potential.

Career-enhancing conflict behaviors include expressing emotions constructively, reaching out, creating solutions, and reflecting before reacting. Career-stalling behaviors include winning at all costs, displaying anger ineffectively, retaliating, and avoiding.

While we can all point to leaders who’ve somehow defied the rule and moved up the ladder despite an abundance of bad behaviors, odds are you won’t be one of them if you have more behaviors from the second list than the first.

Increase your earning potential with better negotiation

It’s no secret that negotiating well on your own behalf translates into better salary — up to $500,000 more over the course of your career.

There are a ton of negotiation articles in the Conflict Zen® archives, and here are three negotiation tips with easy digestion after that Labor Day barbecue:

• Good negotiators know anchoring
• When negotiating, time of day matters
• When non-negotiables aren’t

Tap — don’t suppress — conflict’s potential and make your meetings shine

It’s tempting to smooth over conflict in meetings out of fear things will get messy or take too much time. Smoothing can be a big mistake, because important differences don’t disappear, they go under the rug or contribute to a workplace spiral of silence.

Instead of smoothing, show your team-oriented smarts and leadership potential with this trio:

1. Make your own peace with the conflict groan zone. Learn to keep your balance when the going gets rough and people will notice your calm.
2. Know the difference between resolving a dispute and managing a conflict. The latter requires more than a short-term sidetrack in a meeting.
3. Use good meeting habits and your colleagues will thank you — and remember.

Make ‘em smile

And speaking of effectively defusing problems in meetings: One of my favorite fun tools is Knock Knock’s Dial-an-Excuse, which takes “36 excuse-necessary scenarios and provides 180 corresponding excuses” in categories like “mundane,” “sob story,” and “far-fetched.”

Perfect for gently but directly dealing with the chronically late.

Digest of Conflict Zen® articles from the last month

In case you didn’t catch them the first time around, here’s a digest of the past month’s articles:

• A simple way to know if conflict resolution is making progress
• How to screw up an offer of apology
• Conflict at work: how to know when to let it go?
• What is conflict zen?
• Unclutter your conflict and clear out the crap
• Wired for compassion

Happy Labor Day,