[Strategy] CRaaS for HR

Human resource professionals deal in regulation, policy and procedure.

Human resource professionals are often assigned to address conflict issues and determine consequences for participants involved in policy—and even legal and regulatory—violations.

And yet, for all of their necessity, human resource professionals are in an endless quandary of trying to be valuable, yet remaining unseen.

“No one wants to be in HR. Young people don’t even think about going into HR.”

As organizations shrink and change, the human resource professional must begin living up to the name of their industry. Learning to advance, beyond just the quick workshop session must occur in:

Innovation
Social media use
Conflict engagement
Emotional Intelligence

And then, the learning must be embedded into the organization and the HR professional, with software resources based in the cloud.

If not, the human resource profession runs the risk of being yet another industry—or division in an organization—where the question “Why don’t we just have AI powered robots do this work?,” becomes the opening question to disruptive change.

-Peace With You All-

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

[Advice] 3 Steps for Reframing Organizations

Many organizations still prefer to litigate—or lobby for legal changes—to protect their standing in the open market.

This includes not just external protections, such as market access, intellectual property protection and copyrights on branding efforts, but also, internal protections around hiring, recruiting, onboarding, and resolving internal employee disputes.

Organizations and businesses still handle conflict as a product rather than as a process. This comes with the perspective of conflict resolution—however they are resolved—as “the way we do things around here.” This leads to thinking of conflict resolution as just another method of gaining a favorable organizational outcome.

However, by focusing on the design of the architecture of their internal conflict resolution systems, organizations can evolve beyond merely protecting their place in the market and move toward innovating with people.

Here are three steps to accomplishing this:

Creating new design architecture requires unbundling every step in the hiring to firing funnel and reexamining all of the assumptions that are baked into your organization, particularly those around the idea of “who gets to work here.”
Developing new design architecture requires dissecting the culture of an organization and determining what the real purposes of the organization are, not just the purposes displayed on the masthead, or for stakeholders.
Embedding a new design architecture for resolving conflicts requires a transforming of organizational thinking around conflict—shifting from thinking of conflict as an unfortunate by product of another process to be resolved as quickly as possible and in the organization’s favor, to thinking of conflicts as a process to be engaged with as a a natural part of evolution, growth and innovation.

Unbundling, dissecting and transforming will take any organization toward building a conflict resolution system as a service working for employees and other stakeholders, rather than a service working against employees and other stakeholders.

-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/

[Advice] A Positive No

The moment that you are ready to leave the office, complete a project, take a phone call, or meet a deadline, another person walks up.

This person has other priorities, but finding out what those are is not the thing that you are interested in, but that person makes sure to tell you all about their priorities.

The thing about time management is that managing other people is the unsung, unconsidered hardest thing to do.

Other people have their own priorities, and we are too embarrassed, too distracted, or too disinterested to discover what they are.

This is when the positive no, or the sandwich no, becomes the best way to address the energy vampires (or time sucks) that other people can be sometimes.

It goes something like this:

“Thank you for coming to me with [insert whatever the topic is here]. No, I don’t have time to talk about this right now. But, please come back [name a definitive later time here] and I will talk with you then.”

Then, put that time vampire on the calendar, turn around, and walk away firmly. This last part is important, because many people can’t close the conversation.

When using a positive no—or a sandwich no—remember to always be closing.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice]The 3-Fold Path to Self-Awareness

The more work we do through training others to get in touch with themselves, the more and more surprised we are by how few people in organizations are in touch with themselves.

There are three pieces to self-awareness:

The ability to be vulnerable—which is typically translated as “the ability to be wrong,” but that’s a misnomer and faulty definition. Being vulnerable means knowing when to show your heart…and when to keep it hidden.
The ability to be authentic—which is usually confused with being vulnerable, but that’s a surface understanding. Being authentic means being able to let down your emotional guards enough to “make a fool of” yourself, and to be able to accept the consequences of what that means.
The ability to be transparent—which is usually transposed into the question asked most often in our trainings: “Do I really have to tell my [insert name of group I’d rather not be transparent with here] everything that I do?” No. But in order to become self-aware, the first step toward being emotionally literate, a person has to be comfortable with honesty and beyond the crippling effects of shame.

Without attaining those three pieces of self-awareness–vulnerability, authenticity, and transparency–getting to emotional literacy will be impossible for any individual.

And in the organization of today—and the future—emotional literacy, spearheaded with self-awareness, will be the trait of leadership that separates organizations which thrive from those that merely survive.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Container is not the Water

Anger is a secondary emotion, or so we have heard.

It exists below the primary emotions of either fear, frustration, grief, disgust, shame, anxiety and more.

When those underlying emotions are not addressed, they become a problem for other people, and for ourselves.

In the conflict process, where disputes between people are a part of the mix, sometimes anger manifests and parties use that anger as a weapon against each other.

Anger is only used one of two ways: either as a way to manipulate the other party, (in the form of passive aggressive anger) or to overwhelm and emotionally flood the other party (in the form of attacking anger).

The way to defuse all of this in the conflict process is to focus on two basic, immediate tactics:

People have emotions and emotions may influence and direct interests, and serve to harden positions in a conflict process, but people are not their emotions. The container is not the water.
The process of conflict engagement means moving into the anger and through it with the other party. This may mean walling off your own emotions—for a while—but keeping the other party focused on the higher goals of the process, rather than the presence of unresolved anger, can serve to move them away from manipulation and attack.

The long term strategy is to get the other party to agreement. The tactic is to look at people and the process, independently from the situation immediately in front of your face.

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-Peace Be With You All-

‘All right. All right. All right.’

We laugh at movies featuring the 35 or 40 year old who won’t leave the parents’ house and get a life.

We believe that the current Best Actor recipient once starred in a movie centering around such an animating theme.

But failing to launch (or even failing to recognize the oncoming signs of failing to launch) is not just the provenance of Hollywood scriptwriters and actors, it is a real occurrence in the real world of corporate boardrooms and small business back rooms.

Typically, this failure coalesces around an idea, an innovation or a project that doesn’t get enough organizational political support, organizational money or organizational time. This most obvious failure to launch shows up on the cover of the industry magazine, or as a hit piece on a blog or social media.

But failure to launch also happens quietly, under the radar, lurking like a submarine beneath the conflicts between people in the workplace. And it’s a moment that is so fleeting—so ephemeral—that it’s missed almost all the time.

The failure goes something like this:

Sharon and Bill have a disagreement about a project in which they are both invested. Sharon can’t see Bill’s point of view. Bill thinks Sharon is being obstructionist on purpose. But before Sharon and Bill can really get into it, they both pause—maybe at the water cooler in a conversation with another person, maybe in traffic on the way home—and they have a moment where the thought “Maybe I’m wrong here,” flits across their minds.

Like gossamer.

And just like that, it’s gone. Along with the twinge of regret and disappointment—as well as an oncoming sigh—accompanied by each parties’ resolve, hardening to “Do what is right. For the company.”

The question that makes consultants uncomfortable to ask—and employees and employers uncomfortable to ponder—is the question that on the face seems confrontational and too direct, but underneath is probing. Aiming at the dark heart of what happens in—and out—of the cubicle:

“Have you ever failed personally at resolving a business conflict?”

Or put another way, “When was the last time you failed to launch?”

-Peace Be With You All-

Organizational Climate Change – Part 3

There are veiled threats, open threats, unspoken threats and curbed threats.

Threats come about when people are frustrated, feel as though they are powerless, or when they know that they have the power.

Power, of course, is influence and control of events. But the weird thing about power is that it works two ways, kind of like nuclear forces. There is strong power and weak power.

Strong power controls resources, affects goal achievement and creates dependency.

Weak power releases resources, impacts goal achievement and creates independence.

The presence of strong power creates consequences, as does the presence of weak power.

Threats link power to outcomes that are perceived as negative based upon the perception of the receiver of the threat, not the sender of the threat.

The receiver mistakenly believes that they are rendered powerless by the threat. And in a harmful conflict environment, more disputes arise when a receiver believes that they have no agency or autonomy.

When was the last time you felt the strength of weak power in your organization?

-Peace Be With You All-

Negotiating Innovation

There are all kinds of competencies that a leader has to have in order to be successful in an organization.

Unfortunately, we tend to focus on the flashy ones that look good on the resume, in the job description, or that can show up on the company masthead or in an article in an industry publication.

But the competencies that matter the most are those that don’t show up as prominently.

Conflict engagement and effective conflict management tend to be focused on developing the competencies that will maintain the organizational culture and reinforce the status quo.

Developing these competencies and reinforcing them inside an organizational culture, is the innovator’s dilemma and has been for many years.

Creating a culture focused on developing and nurturing effective, developmental conflict engagement practices—as part of a set of innovative, overarching leadership competencies—can seem like climbing up hill with a spoon.

But is there really any other way?

-Peace Be With You All-

Conflict Engagement Systems Design: Will You Choose?

Organizations, just like individuals, have a particular conflict style and support a particular conflict response culture.

Since culture eats strategy for breakfast (thanks Peter Drucker), conflict is an inherent part of the cultural process of continual misalignment at many organizations.

Don’t believe me? Well, organizational misalignment between cultures and products can cause problems for people in organizations who are trying to innovate. It also causes problems for customers who experience a confusing product and poor customer service.

With all of that, one of the easiest ways to break a culture and let it grow is to reach inside the culture to the people who are part of the culture, to develop something new. But, this approach is fraught with difficulty and mixed motives, which are why most change management—and conflict development processes—tend to fail.

One easy way to overcome resistance to change and organizational misalignment is to develop a visual model, because people in organizations are more attuned with what they can visually interpret.

However, getting a person who can facilitate, storyboard, capture the visuals, and circulate the story among the gatekeepers and decision makers who often aren’t in the room, requires bringing in an outside presence; which, can be fraught with difficulty, because if the person—or organization—that you choose doesn’t work out, well, then all that investment gets no return.

Of course, you can always accept the alternative in your organization, where continual misalignments create disputes and the conflict process never gets straightened out or successfully engaged with.

[Thanks to the folks at HBR.org for moving my thinking on this.]

-Peace Be With You All-

Emotions in the Machine

At a neurobiological level, the facts and triggers for emotions in the human mind are complicated and diaphanous.

If human societies create functioning, artificial intelligence, the chance of human level emotions evolving within those machines, will be slim to none.

Machines, even intelligent machines, can’t rise any higher than their creators.

The emotions that we have as human beings are too complex to be codified into streams of code—with the results streaming out as observable, quantifiable data points.

Data comes about as a result of an action; emotions come about as the evolutionarily developed responses to external stimuli.

One is external (data) the other internal (emotions).

Jealousy, hatred, envy, wrath, lust, love, appreciation, gratitude, respect, duty, honor, sacrifice and on and on, come from the result of constant, human-on-human conflict and rigorous A/B testing, from birth to death.

How, exactly, are we planning on codifying that into mathematically based code, so that adaptive learning, long-term evolution and short-term development can happen?

Powering down an intelligent machine won’t be murder—unless human beings decide that it is.

-Peace Be With You All-