> I don't work well while being yelled at. I don't want to deal with that. And so I refuse to work in environments where I get yelled at.

Completely agree. I have a very simple philosophy: Nobody yells at me. Ever. Nobody has that right - not my parents, not my wife, not my boss, not my friends, NOBODY. I am very compassionate and understanding. If you are nice to me and reason with me, I will climb mountains for you. If I make the smallest mistake, I will man up and apologize before you even know something's up. But if you yell at me, I walk away regardless of whose fault it is. I am an adult, treat me as such with respect and dignity.

Also, I've noticed that yelling is a VERY good indicator of the morale of an office environment. I can't much speak for warehouse/construction-type jobs where yelling might in fact be the rule but I have not once seen happy employees in a place where managers or CEOs can yell at anyone they so choose. This is a free country. A salary does not entitle anyone to belittle me, regardless of fault.

Once I resigned from one ad agency to go work for another agency, my boss started screaming that I was a traitor and that the other CEO (they were on the same board of an association) was stealing his employees. The guy didn't talk to me for an entire week... in a 8 people company.

Now we are still in contact, he periodically call me or chat to me to see how I am doing and how is life, he still call me meatball just like when I was working there and everything is good.

I wouldn't be surprised if I have more experience of conflict and relationships than you have.

My experience tells me that it is possible to have conflict without yelling. And that yelling makes conflict more difficult to resolve. Which is important. If you're trying to achieve a shared goal, then the inevitable conflict needs to be resolved so you can return to what is important - the shared goal.

My opinion on relationships is similar. I've been married for 20 years. And in that time I've learned the importance of finding ways to recognize conflict, de-escalate it, then re-engage and deal with the source of the conflict. Furthermore I firmly believe that if I hadn't learned that lesson, I wouldn't still be married 20 years in.

For both cases, what are the key steps to turning theory into practice?

Step 1 for both cases is realizing that you have a choice. Realizing that you do is the first step in making the choice you want.

Step 2 is recognizing that while you're in the grip of strong emotion you don't have much control. That's why you need to develop the habit of disengaging when you go off the rails. And since the same holds for other people, choose to be around people who have learned that lesson as well.

Step 3 is returning to the underlying issues and actually addressing them. If you don't do that, you'll find yourself back at step 2 repeatedly until you do. (Even so you'll wind up at step 2 from time to time. But with less frequency.)

I think the point is more incendiary conflict, ad hominem, chest thumping than a lack of conflict. Conflict sharpens the mind, conflict examines all the avenues, but that conflict is measured and rational.

If you devolve into a shouting match under any professional circumstances, you have failed. It doesn't matter which side of the table you're on.

There is a big difference between a heated debate between passionate enough individuals that grows into an yelling match, which then somebody tries to break ("Stop arguing!!") when both actors turn on the mediator ("WE'RE NOT ARGUING!!!").

Or on the other hand - a straightforward domination attempt - where individual A (with possibly higher socio-economic rank) approaches individual B and proceeds to tear them a new one without any forewarning.

Case 1 - Good: indicates passion and willingness to break stalemate.

Case 2 - Bad: me big gorilla approach.

Personally when situation 2 arises, I kindly notify the would-be Alpha. Just like the parent. That nobody and really nobody yells at me and gets away with it. I'm prepared to go extraordinary lengths to satisfy people or to avoid mistakes or even make them up - just to avoid getting yelled at - so whenever situation 2 arises there are only 2 options:

1. Somebody needs somebody else to release their steam on.

2. Somebody wants to prove a point that I'm a looser without even giving me option of proving them wrong.

In any case - yelling at (not with) people is bad, really really bad.

He didn't say that.

He's not talking about conflict. He's talking about yelling, which is a monkey dominance game for someone who has lost interest in finding the right answer. It's just a hair below shoving on the "cannot control himself, belongs in a cage" scale of warning signs.

What am I made of? I'm a human being, not a slave, so I demand zero tolerance for this in any workplace.

I think it can be expected in a professional setting in the US. Given your line of thinking, almost any behavior can be excused.

I'll also add that it depends on the expectation of the job when you applied. Normal white collar work in the US usually doesn't entail being yelled at. Being a football player does. So does signing up to be a Marine.

I've been in a relationship for two years that hasn't involved any yelling. The year-long relationship I had before that didn't involve any yelling. The 1.5 year relationship before that was mostly long-distance, but didn't involve any yelling, either. The one before that had some yelling in it, and I found it unpleasant enough to avoid yell-prone relatioships from that point forward.

I'd be happy to be filtered out by that criterion if my employer thought that was an important filter to test for. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1233385 for an admittedly biased description of the person you've just decided you didn't want in your organization.

As for whether yelling happens, of course it does. But not bloody often in healthy organizations. I think I've been yelled at by 3 people in the workplace in the last decade. None of whom I reported to. One of whom apologized fairly rapidly. I accepted it - he had a lot of other stuff going on in his life. The others my manager arranged buffers with so I wouldn't need to have interactions.

In the same period I've yelled at 2. Once at a social event when someone dumped water on me without checking whether I had electronics I cared about on my person. (As soon as the shock passed I apologized for yelling, and the other person apologized about my cellphone. Which luckily was not harmed.) The other case involved someone who physically hit me without provocation or warning. (He had mental problems which I had not known about.)

If your average is significantly worse than that, I suspect you have an issue that is worth looking into.