[Opinion] The Imp At The Door

Tell us what you think when you hear the word “impossible”?

The word means different things to different people, but we think that the most important function of the word “impossible” is that it focuses us on lack and regressions, versus prosperity and ascension.

In dictionary terms, the word serves as a descriptor to a person, place or thing that is very difficult, not able to occur, or unreasonable.

Now, your personal definition of “impossible” may vary from ours, but much of the time, when we address the coming conflicts of the next ten years –over access to the Internet, water use, energy use—the nascent solutions that we propose to resolve the conflicts are deemed by listeners to be “impossible.”

Though, it was pointed out to us, that the word “impossible” begins with the construction “imp,” which is a mythological being associated with mischief, disruption and change.

When the normal, the expected and the day-to-day is disrupted with a sense of mischief, typically the imp is alive and well, creating trouble, difficulty and unreasonableness.

-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: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] You Are Doing Great Things, I Know It…

Performance evaluations, feedback, criticism and “suggestions for improvement” in people’s performance all serve as ways to separate leaders from followers.

We had a conversation this week about caring (see here) and we keep coming back to the idea when we think about how leaders should encourage their followers’ hearts. Most of the time, people analyze what we do—as either leaders or followers—and then make judgments about our performance. Often this judgment is then equated with a person’s character, wisdom or ethics.

But organizations and institutions can’t—and don’t—care. Only people do. And in order to encourage people to continue to follow, leaders must care about the people that they are leading, enough to guide them through the necessary risks to execute the mission.

Performance evaluations, feedback, “suggestions for improvement,” criticism, and many other forms of feedback are often used as a cover for the vulnerability that really caring about followers requires.

“But what do you do if people aren’t doing the ‘right’ thing and screwing up the process?”

This question is a corporate variation on “How do you tell the truth in grace to someone?” and it’s an excellent one. Here are three ideas:

Know what you care about as a leader and why—Some leaders care about process more than people. If that’s the case, recognize and praise the process, rather than attempting to recognize and praise the person.
Be genuine with yourself as a leader—Some leaders struggle with self-awareness. But feedback, criticism and other forms of “improvement” lectures don’t work, and can often be seen as blameing and excuse making. Being genuine with yourself means care about what your role is before caring about your followers’ roles.
Seek to understand first—Some leaders are self-absorbed, narcissistic and vainglorious. Harsh sounding words, yes, but in a world where genuine recognition of others is the only way to effectively encourage a heartful followership, a leader must seek to understand their followers’ hearts—and care about them.

In the short run, caring about people and building relationships is the only way to go for a leader. Celebration and rituals, combined with the importance of symbols, done with authenticity and heartfelt pride in ones followers, can do more to cement long term growth than any amount of money, service development or process change.

Encouraging the heart requires caring about people and creating long term, value based relationships.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] The Last Crusade

Stress comes from managing two areas unsuccessfully: yourself and others.

Many uninitiated people have the most trouble managing themselves, but lack the self-awareness to realize that the stress they have comes about due to a lack of awareness about why their stress is activated.

Many uninitiated people think that managing other people is the Holy Grail of stress management; but really, the people that chase those dragons are the same ones that lack self-awareness in the first place.

Other people give you stress if you let them. But only you are responsible for your own emotional responses.

Getting self-aware about what drives you, what motivates your reactions to external stimuli, and why you respond to people and situations the way that you do, is the real Holy Grail of stress management.

Of course, choosing to manage the wrong area is just as bad as picking the wrong cup if you are Indiana Jones…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Supervisory Flattening

Here’s an idea:

Unbundle the supervisor from the team.

In a work world, where more employees can be more productive—and have their productivity tracked in more ways—it makes no sense to have someone else standing over them and directing their production.

Unless, of course, your organization looks at people as merely widgets; production as merely a process and measures success or failure by what the stock price says for today.

However, when the supervisor is unbundled from the team, and the team is allowed to engage with their productivity with autonomy, resiliency and a sense of accomplishment, then what grows is not supervisory skill, but actual productivity.

Some organizations have tried this in the past and many more are trying it now.

But in a work world that is transforming around distributive teams, flat processes, and digitized output, unbundling the supervisor role is the only thing that makes sense.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] The Cultural Bleed

During our time when technology is flattening the formerly meaningful differences between people and systems, and turning—what once used to be a disk that was thicker at the center than the edges, to one where the edges are getting sharper and sharper—culture still matters.

Competency in how to handle the steep decline from the comfortable center of cultural assumptions to the bleeding edge of cultural competency, should be one of the most sought after skills by employers.

But it’s not.

Mainly because employers are people first and positional titles second, and people tend to lack the courage and self-awareness to break their own frames, in order to attain competency.

Any kind of competency.

The distance between the thick comfortable center and the scary bleeding edge (which is as sharp as it sounds) is not a straight line. It’s curved, with switchbacks, dead ends, false starts and bad beginnings.

But the courage to break our frames and skate toward the bleeding edge of cultural competency, is a core leadership trait that any employer should alwasy be in the process of creatively destroying and rebuilding, before looking to develop it—or hire it—in others.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] Leading Through Obligation

If you are a manager in an organization of any size, with any mission or scope of responsibility, it is your obligation to lead.

Now, obligation is a loaded word, filled with the stresses of accountability, responsibility, and eating last in a world where everyone wants to eat first.

Obligation comes along with the word “honor,” which, as a verb, means to “fulfill (an obligation) or keep (an agreement).

There is a tacit agreement between leaders and followers: Leaders set a tone, provide a secure space for initiatives to be implemented and then codify action through words and deeds. Followers implement the initiatives as they are proposed, rally behind the leader in times of stress or conflict and promote the tone of the actions.

At least, in a perfect world.

Unfortunately, we live in a world of imperfection, mixed motives, lies and deception and selfish pursuits.

In this world, leadership is even more critical and, at the core, requires human leaders to sacrifice resources (material, emotional and even spiritual) in order to accomplish a greater good for their followers—even when they believe that the greater good is wrong.

This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between politicians and statesmen.
This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between role models and celebrities.
This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between leaders and followers.

A leader’s responsibility is not to chart a course for the followers and then blindly lead them there, in spite of everything.

A leader’s responsibility is to chart a course for their followers (after actively listening to their followers) and then convince, persuade, cajole and move the followers toward accomplishing those goals.

This process requires an understanding, and an acceptance of, the definitions of obligation, honor, responsibility, accountability, character and honor.

-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: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] 20-80-100

80% of the conflicts in your organization will be solved by 20% of the people in your organization.

And, not all of those people will have positional titles, effective job descriptions, or even work in “traditional” departments that “are supposed to” address conflicts.

Pushing the frontier of who gets what, so that the majority gets more value out of the conflict resolution process, should be the goal of all organizations.

But, there’s a ceiling on that value, generated by competing goals and desires, differing value placed on outcomes and the lack of ability for some in an organization to accept the efficacy of pursuing more than one outcome.

As long as 20% of the people in organization are overcoming 80% of the ceilings in 100% of organizations, the ceiling on claiming value will not move effectively.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Integrative Change

The systems undergirding our lives, our families, our communities and our organizations, governments and businesses are based on distributive mindsets, philosophies, behaviors and approaches to conflict.

Distribution grows from the foundation of perceived scarcity of resources, competition, a “winner-take-all” mentality, and limited outcomes around things that matter.

But sometimes, even inside of these systems, and working inside distributive rules, individuals attempt to remake the world to reflect a different reality and to attain different outcomes.

Individuals attempt to be collaborative and build relationships based on integrative bargaining strategies, collaborative teambuilding and a philosophy that the ends and the means must match.

On rare occasions, individuals scale up those relationships into organizations. Then, the distributive systems embedded in economics, social policy and the law, co-opt their best practices, their language and their approach to develop a “brand image” while losing and abrogating the heart of those individual interactions.

The push and pull that underlies the growth of the Internet—and its future spread to other areas—is that between a distributive world view and economic system, now being forced to operate within a highly integrative system that wasn’t really built for them.

The great benefit of integrative negotiation tactics and strategies is that they serve to build the foundation to be distributive in the future, rather than having to consider proving the benefits of distributive negotiation tactics and strategies by the next quarterly stock report.

Organizations built on an integrative framework inherently will have no trouble operating distributively when its time. And they will reap the benefits long-term for a long time. We’re looking at you, Facebook.

Organizations built on distributive frameworks will perish, or have immense trouble determining when best to operate integratively when it’s most appropriate. We’re looking at you, IBM.

Individuals, however, will continue to interact both distributively and integratively no matter what the system tells them.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] CRaaS for Employees

Online based processes to resolve human disputes have had a long and harried journey.

In some ways, this is because technology and innovation has not caught up to the conceptual framework of the people who envisioned its wide use.

In other ways, the integration of human beings—with the emotional stimulus that human beings bring to conflicts—has proven to be beyond the capacity of such online systems to handle.

In orer to overcome both of these drawbacks, clumsy integration of human beings into the process of online dispute resolution at the beginning point, the midpoint and even the endpoint of systems has become enshrined in ODR procedures and practices.

However, organization of all sizes, can create their own conflict resolution as a service platform, for the benefit of employees, with the help of web based applications, cloud based storage capacity and encrypted and secured servers.

As technology further advances, predictive (rather than reactive) systems based in artificial intilleigence, data storage practices and analytical tracking, could provide the next pieces in the process to integrate humans in a conflict resolution system that serves the needs of both human resources and the employees in conflict.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Janitor and the CEO

In every organization, no matter how great or small, there is a person who is in charge of doing the things that no one else wants to do.

Sometimes, the organization imposes the title of “secretary” or “administrative assistant” on the person occupying this position and being accountable and responsible in it.

But in reality, the person who does the things that no one else wants to do, has the most power in an organization.

There are two positions in any organization that have power: The janitor and the CEO.

Both are invaluable and require that the person occupying those roles be a faithful steward of the position.

But no one else in the organization wants to change places with either one of those people.

This is probably why there is so much conflict over so little mediocrity stacked so deep in the middle.

[T/Y to Darren MacDonald for bringing this to our attention.]

-Peace Be With You All-