Having been in such a situation before, I would like to share my story here. I hope that if you have time to read it, you will take precautions in what you say/do so as not to hurt your friend, like what I did...
Just recently, I was managing the welfare team for Vietnamese community. We have been through a few events together, from organizing the Mid-autumn festival to organizng a vacationm camp for the Vietnamese students, and the Lunar New Year gathering also... Another special activity that we do is a radio show, in which you send wishes or thoughts (anything you can write, basically) to people you care, accompanied with a song. Handling the creation of the studio is me, AAA - my event organizing buddy and four member of the welfare team: BBB, CCC, DDD and EEE.
We have been doing 5 shows so far, all receive a moderate amount of response. And then, the next week is already 14/2 - VDay, so we decided to make a special program for it. Everyone was excited, and we talked a lot about making it as special as the day itself. I even went out photographing a picture and crafted somekind of teaser-picture for the show.
We received around 10 request in total (around the same as our previous shows) and proceed to making the show. While I was writing the script with AAAPhu, the image part is given to DDD and CCC, while EEE and BBB was in charged of the publishing part.
All gone quite well. We finished writing the script, the image took a bit longer and we finshed getting all the material at 8. So I called BBB and asked him to publish the show.
Then we waited, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour... and then it was already 10:45. Wondering what has happened I called BBB (for the 5th time) to check, and he was still doing it (normally, it only takes 10 minutes to publish the show). As VDay is almost over and the show was still not on, we get lots of question from those who sent us the request, and somehow, that frustrates me and AAA, having us complaining about the attitude of the publishing team. Plus, they have not been active so far, so we get even more irritating...
In the end, the show went on air at 11:20, with us having to jumped in and do something else as well. And we are nowhere happy about that. Thus, I and AAA called the guy and scolded him!
In the next day, he quit! ....
After a few days, we actually calm down, getting back to our sense and started talking to BBB. We found out that at that time, he has just returned from his part-time work, tired because of a lot of work and complains from the boss also. Hence, that slowed his progress a greate deal. After that long lunch, we decided to let the guy go and take care of his work him. In addition, the mental injury that we made him gone through (by what we said) is somewhat healed (not completely), as we came down to a common understanding. But the aftermath is that, we lost a team member and almost destroy our relationship with BBB also, just because we did not understand his situation...
That's story of mine. Though it might not look like a conflict case, but I think this one is qualified as a conflict in interest and ideas, as his need and ours was different at a time, so do our expectation of his performance. And since we was not able to come to a common solution for that, the conflict was not solved effectively, leaving the result like that.
Nevertheless, we walked away with big lesson but paid a big price as well. In short, what I can say is that when these kind of things happen, be it conflicts in your interests, our ideology, or anything else, please take a deep breath first, be calm and analyze the pros and cons of each actions. Moreover, you will need to keep a warm heart to accept others's faults also, as they also have their limts and can't always do what you want them to.
P.S: As I am writing in a rush while traveling back home, the article is not organized very clearly. Please excuse for any errors I made and points them out so I can fix them :)
