[Opinion] Sometimes Accommodation Works in the Workplace

In the workplace, accommodating bad behavior, poor decision making, and the outcomes of both of those processes leads directly to accusations by others of organizational apathy and confusion.

When we talk about competence though (or write about it) the general idea seeps through the page that somehow being conflict competent requires abandoning accommodation as a strategy. But it makes sense as a strategy when:

  • The organization is so entrenched in whatever conflict choices they are making that the only way to resolve them all is to tear the organization down and start over again
  • The individual who is engaged in accommodating conflict choices has little to no positional authority and views their own power stance poorly in relation to the organization’s power stance
  • The groups or teams that function inside the organization actually run more fluidly with accommodation as a method of choosing how to address conflicts, because the people who are at the top of the organizational chart have role modeled accommodating as a perfectly valid choice.

If these all sound like terrible conflict modes, you would be correct. But most competency models focus on overcoming accommodation to match the dominant communication style that many organizations mythologize in the United States. Which is one of direct confrontation and attack.

In order to create a new kind of competency model, we have to acknowledge that competency at accommodation is not only a valid choice, but also one that creates space for outcomes to occur that may be suboptimal inside an organizational structure.

As a matter of fact, it would look like this:

[Opinion] Sometimes Accommodation Works in the Workplace

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

HIT Piece 1.5.2016

Well, it’s a New Year and here are some new hits:

It’s time to start saying “no” more often: This doesn’t mean that I’ll be saying “no” to every opportunity that comes along, but it does mean that there is going to be a newly instituted “three strikes and you’re out” mentality and behavior moving forward. It’s amazing to me that more professionals don’t say “no” when they are treated shabbily by large clients. Integrity and respect matter more this year.

It’s time to clean out my email inbox: With two (and upwards of three) different email accounts I juggle daily; last year was a time suck of epic proportions around email. I have started 2016 by deleting 19,276 emails from my “promotions” tab in Gmail. And that’s not an exaggeration.

It’s time to write more often: After working with an editor on my upcoming project, I have become more convinced that second drafts of blog posts are the way to go, rather than what I did last year too often. As a matter of fact, this is a second draft right here…

It’s time to read more books (that relate to where I want to go, versus where I am right now): Last year I read a lot, but this year, I’d like the reading to be more targeted, like The Consulting Bible by Alan Weiss. This book I started over the holiday and it’s been kicking my butt.

It’s time to be done by 6pm (or 7pm): The nights that my kids are home (and I’ve been at home grinding all day) I should be done by 6pm. Yes, I know that Gary Vaynerchuk and many others promote the grind and the 8pm to 12am philosophy of working, but I get up at 5am, so….

It’s time to be more “real” in my blog writing (and to get someone else to build a website/manage it for me): I spent an unconscionable number of hours last year on the back end of the website that supports this blog. But I’m not a webmaster, web designer, or web consultant. I’m a conflict engagement consultant, corporate trainer, and social media marketer for peace builders. It’s time to outsource the rest of it.

It’s time to “get real” about video, streaming and otherwise: Yes. I know about the upside down economics of working on YouTube’s farm. And I realize that less than 2.5% of the country has even heard of Periscope, Meerkat, Vine, Twitter Video, Snapchat Video, or realizes that Facebook rolled out video on their platform in the 4Q of 2015.

But I know.

And I know what they’re about and the utility (or lack thereof in some cases) of the applications to my business.

It’s time to travel more—for business: Last year, I logged close to 10,000 miles in travel. Just around the state of NY alone. I need to expand beyond the state of NY and expand into air travel, which means more targeted focus in the last area.

It’s time to meet my audience (both in person and digitally) and to engage with them more: The audience is everything and I need to meet them more. I know who my fans are, and I know what they like, by virtue of which blog posts they share, like and comment on. So, I’d like to meet them in person, to grow the network, grow the engagement and to talk with them about the upcoming projects and products, I’ve been developing and will be launching in mid-1Q, mid-2Q and mid 3Q. Stay tuned…

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] A New Model For Conflict Competency

There are few subjects more boring to read about online than how to attain competentcy in any area, from leadership to instructions on plumbing. And it doesn’t matter if that reading is directly from an organizational HR manual, or from the very informative HBR.org website.

Reading about watching paint dry might rank higher.

Typically, such articles are drily written and are rarely brought to life in any way that’s going to help you in a “real life” scenario.

Or, the advice contained in them comes off as “pie in the sky.”

Part of that is the way that these articles are written.

The other part is that you make a choice about what to remember and what to forget after about 8 seconds when you skim an online article or blog post.

So do I. So does that guy over there.

The real issue with such writing is not lack of reader understanding about the levels of competency or the modes of conflict. It’s not even the epidemiology of conflict, the fact that your boss may be a conflict incompetent, or even that there are really very few tangible KPI’s for reducing conflict in the workplace, other than emotional ones (and emotion in the workplace is a “no-no” as “everybody” knows).

The real issue is that there is very little robust measuring or tracking of the links from competency in any given situation to addressing how people actually behave when placed in a situation they find to be uncomfortable, distracting, irrelevant to accomplishing their goals, or that they have no interest in. There’s also very little robust descriptions of such situations to buoy the writing along.

Competency is the combination of observable and measurable knowledge, skills, abilities and personal attributes. Competencies are demonstrated by real people, who are able to recognize hazards associated with a particular task, and have the ability to mitigate those hazards witin a set of defined standards, consistently and over time in an organizational setting, from their home to their workplace.

This definition is so narrow and specific (and dry), that OSHA requires jobsites to designate a person on the site as the individual who is competent enough to perform safety tasks in a suitably repetitive manner. And by the way, merely appearing to be competent isn’t good enough when OSHA shows up on a jobsite.

Imagine if such thing were required in every workplace?

There are five levels of competency: the novices, the advanced beginners, the competent practitioners, the proficient performers and the experts. Competency used to be sexy and interesting in an Industrial Era focused on the metric of maximum production out of the maximum number of people, but that has shifted as fewer people can do more work. And in the Information Economy, even at the highest levels of many industries, competency (whether HR defined or emotional) is still confused with expertise—and rewarded.

So, it seems as though it is time to propose a new model for the workplace; or at the very least, initiate a mash-up of several research areas and to explain why a new direction is needed.

Who’s the “designated competent person” in your workplace?

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] A Common Confusion

Too often, mere competency is confused with expertise. And just as equally as often, expertise is confused with competency.

In the space of a fight, a disagreement, or a “difference of opinion,” the person who appears to be the most competent (and in the Western world, this looks like controlling your emotions and behaving “logically”) to the party they’re in conflict with, to others looking on from the outside, and to themselves, tends to be viewed as a “winner.”

But the appearance of competency is a strategy that most often comes from an internal place of previously codified passive aggressiveness, avoidance or accommodation responses.

The challenge in 2016 is to reset our assumptions around emotional and logical responses and reactions to the conflicts that are bound to pop-up this year. The challenge is not to manufacture disagreements, or strife, in order to show off how adept we are at defusing the bombs we make. The challenge is to change our perceptions around what true conflict competency looks like, not only for the people we see in conflict around us, but also for ourselves.

If we continue to carry the same confusions, assumptions, and appearances into 2016 that we had in the past year, we will continue to get the same outcomes as we did last year, no matter the resolutions we are making today.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/