[Opinion] On Emotional Labor

Just the other day at a workshop, after filling out a communication assessment, we heard this:

“I’m an engineer. This is all great stuff, but really hard to quantify.”

And later in the workshop, after we made another point, we responded by saying:

“You can quantify the effects of emotional mismanagement on the bottom line, in terms of lost productivity, health issues, declining quality of production and overall employee disengagement.”

The engineer nodded his head.

Emotional labor is the final frontier. It’s a space that care workers, mothers, therapists and social workers have inhabited for years. And, in an economy where manually (or technically) laboring was once seen as scarce, emotional labor didn’t matter much.

And yet…

40 hours a week, the average person goes to another location, away from their home, and interacts with people that they did not choose
26% of people report that they are disengaged at work and with work, and 13% of those people are actively disengaged at work
44% of companies are outsourcing jobs to other countries, across all sectors, with the vast majority of employers reporting that they are doing so “to control costs.”

What kind of labor matters?

Well, the kind that can’t be outsourced:

The kind that addresses people’s emotional inner lives, where we spend 99% of our time.
The kind that addresses issues of self-awareness, leadership, emotional intelligence, focus, discipline and many other emotional tasks.
The kind that builds resiliency encourages accountability and that develops people to be more than just cogs in the machine.
The kind that develops and encourages interpersonal communication, conflict engagement, and responsibility.

The challenge in this paradigm shift (for every organization), comes when 20% of the people in an organization are doing 80% of the emotional labor.

But, emotional labor, moving forward in a world where more and more will be accomplished by fewer and fewer people , is the only kind of labor that matters.

-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/

[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-

[Strategy] “Yes We Can!”

“Yes we can!”

Boy, isn’t that a catchy phrase.

The word “we” is synonymous with enabling others to act, but there are a couple of other pieces that go along with that word:

There are two kinds of power—Many leaders resort to “power over,” when they lose faith or trust (more on this in a minute) in their followers to accomplish the goals that leaders have articulated. Leaders with bad visions (i.e. Hitler, Stalin, etc.) do this more often than leaders with good visions (i.e. Steve Jobs, Moses, etc.). But “we” creates the second kind of power, “power with.” It empowers followers to see the vision and implement it in their own way.
Trust is always an issue—When leaders “let go” and truly begin trusting “the masses” to move a vision forward, some followers aren’t going to get the message right. Some followers are going to be deceitful and self-serving. And some followers are going to fall away when it gets to be too hard. Martin Luther King, and Gandhi both experienced this, but it did not diminish their faith and trust in their followers.
Carrying capacity increases—A leader who doesn’t have to control the “scope creep” of a spreading vision, is not really a leader. Part of acting on a vision is that when action starts, so do reactions: from friends, enemies, circumstances and opportunities. How does a leader know when to say “yes” and know when to say “no”? Well, when the number of followers increases because of trust and empowerment, then the ability to say “No, I can’t right now…but give it to Sally over there” becomes a statement of collaboration, rather than a principled rejection.

We without empowerment, trust and collaboration is just a word with smoke but no fire and followers can easily become cynical when its overuse transforms from inspiration to cliché.

“Yes we can!”

Ok. How will you?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] It Is Easier…

It is easier to sit and wait for a situation to change because of external circumstances, than it is to do the hard work of failing.

It is easier.

Just like it is easier to ignore conflicts in your midst and act like nothing is going wrong inside of your organization, your family, your neighborhood, or even your country.
Just like it is easier to shrug your shoulders and let “someone else” do the hard work of confronting, challenging and changing your world (in the social sciences we call this the Bystander Effect).
Just like it is easier to put your metaphorical head down, plow forward and only look up when the week is over, the client/customer seems “satisfied” or the “job is done.”

The hard emotionally challenging work of trying and potentially failing is not for the faint of heart. It requires commitment, perseverance, grit, resiliency, accountability and a sense of responsibility to the people, the process, the change and the outcome.

Leaders in organizations that honor this hard, emotional labor flourish. Those in organizations that don’t, falter and eventually quit—quite trying, quit failing, even quit caring.

In our most recent presentation to a corporate group, we encouraged the leaders in the room to lead and to take up the mantle of failure in three ways:

Understand yourself first—We keep going back to it, but from understanding conflict, to understanding leadership, to understanding communication: physician heal thyself.
Care about the process—People don’t lead who don’t care about people, relationships, or processes. This is a tough realization and a man in the presentation came up to us and said “I realize after you said that people don’t lead who don’t care, that I often tell people that I don’t care and that ‘it takes a lot to offend me, so don’t even try.’ Maybe I should change that.”

Yes.

Build relationships—In any organization, whether it’s a family, a neighborhood or a company, we can only successfully lead through building relationships with people, not processes. People change before things.

One last point: Commitment, ethics, integrity and character in challenging the process must be in place before leadership through challenging the process can truly begin. Teach and nurture commitment and leadership will follow.

-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-

[Strategy] This Moment of Clarity

Leadership requires faithfulness to be effective.

It is often to followers that the character of faithfulness is required to be demonstrated: Faithfulness to the leaders’ vision, mission, values and goals.

But rarely is it asked if the person leading the parade has to be faithful to the participants and followers in the parade, and to larger missions, visions and goals.

In order to develop faithfulness from within, leaders must be emotionally and spiritually clear about what their personal values are, as well as how those values either do—or don’t—fit with larger organizational values.

But how does a leader get such clarity?

Engage with self-awareness – Find out about what makes you tick as a leader, and why.
Develop a mentality of stewardship – A steward preserves first, maintains second and manages last. A steward also remembers that people come first, processes come second and money comes third.
Be a follower AND a leader – Earning respect is about honoring the accomplishments of others who came before your leadership; and demurring on the drawbacks and mistakes of those same others.

Leaders who aren’t internally and externally clear about where they are going, and about how their values align with the organizations and the groups that they seek to lead, can’t ever hope to be more than managers of the process to get there.

-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] 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-