rested in purchasing arts and antiquities. This is a highly competitive business in which a relatively small number of high quality retail institutions compete for what can best be characterized as a niche market of affluent consumers who require excellence in terms of both product and service. Consequently, salespeople in this field are highly valued and competition among store or business owners to obtain the services of the right kind of educated, skilled, and professional sales agents is quite intense. These salespeople enjoy a great deal of autonomy, often bring their own customer base with them to a store or gallery, and are highly regarded via a commission scale for their efforts.
Consequently, a person responsible for managing a sales force consisting of this type of professional must do a good amount of mentoring, nurturing, supporting, rewarding, and otherwise responding to the sales force. Members of such a sales force are themselves competitive with one another and this can and does lead to frequent conflict. In my situation, two very valued and successful sales agents working for the company were actively engaged in trying to convince one of their own customers to purchase a particularly valuable and rare painting that the owner of the business had taken in on consignment. Both of the salespeople felt that they were entitled to make the deal.
My job was first, to ensure that this valuable painting was sold for the best possible price. My second task was to prevent any conflict from erupting between the two salespeople. Unfortunately, at the time, I was somewhat politically unaware of their longstanding competition at this and other companies. Marilyn Gowing (89) notes that one element of emotional competence and EI is political awareness or the ability to read a group's emotional currents and power relationships. Similarly, among the social skills needed to exercise EI effectively are conflict managem...