[Strategy] How to Mediate – Establish Rapport with Disputants

  • The fact is, they both might like the conflict more that they want to get to resolution.
  • The fact is, they both might be feeling alternatively powerful and powerless in the conflict and may not want to break out of that cycle.
  • The fact is, they both might like the relationship that they have built with each other, over time around the conflict.
  • The fact is, they may not see resolution as a way to “win” and instead are focused on just maintaining forward motion in the conflict.
  • The fact is, the conflict may have begun around a material issue, but has now transformed into a conflict around values, using the language of principles, to describe positions.
  • The fact is, they may not understand how resolution as a process works, and may mistrust the process and the person advocating for it.
  • The fact is, they may not be exhausted enough yet to get to resolution—or to try resolving the conflict—and may have enough energy to continue the conflict, but not enough energy to expend on resolving the conflict.
  • The fact is, they may be surrounded by other players, third party individuals and others who are encouraging them, behind the scenes and away from the negotiation table, to continue the conflict.
  • The fact is, they may just not be “ready” for resolution.

When tasked with mediating a conflict, whether between two parties at work, or between two parties at home, many people don’t take into consideration the above list (not exhaustive) of factors that influence the lack of ability by disputants to “get to the table.” Instead, many non-professional mediators spend an inordinate amount of time convincing the conflicting parties that the mediation process is a good idea, rather than doing the other things with each of the parties that allow space for mediation as an option, to grow.

Establishing rapport with parties in conflict involves planning strategically and behaving tactically in three areas:

Building the relationship with both parties—The relationship is everything. If there is a pre-established relationship (for instance, between neighbors, family members, or even work colleagues) the relationship building goes faster, but if there’s no relationship, then empathy, active listening and engaging emotionally are a good beginning.

Establishing trust and credibility—Remember, there’s not a skills problem to resolving conflict, there’s a trust problem. Parties in conflict, for all of the reasons listed above and a laundry list more, trust each other collectively in a conflict scenario, because the other party seems predictable, more than they trust a third party individually. This seems wrong and counterintuitive, but think of how many conflicts you’ve let drag on endlessly, without resolution, and were offered the services of a third party.

Understanding each party, but not being driven by either of them—This last piece is the province of the professional mediator, but many people—from supervisors to pastors to therapists—are called to render a neutral decision on conflict questions, with little pomp and circumstance. The ability to be neutral may be held in suspicion by some parties, but third parties who can behave neutrally through nonverbal and other forms of communication, stand a better chance of building rapport with both parties before an option for resolution is even offered.

The path to resolution is carved through rapport, built on relationship,  cemented through trust and credibility, and “locked-in” through understanding. Without those three areas, all the factors for not getting to table may render more weight with each party than the process of resolution ever will.

-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] Leadership Through Reconciliation

“Our values are our strength.”

“Our people are our greatest resource.”

We could go on, but pointing out the hypocrisy evident in the difference between the words written on the organizational masthead, and the actual organizational action, has been written about to death.

Leadership in many organizations is tricky for a variety of reasons, but the primary one is that organizational values are often seen as a marketing tool for advertising to external and internal stakeholders about how great the organization really is, rather than as a daily, lived ethic in the trenches. For the latest example of this disconnect, see the publication of the most recent “expose” of working conditions at Amazon.com.

There are inertia issues in all organizations, when the culture, much like a child, just begins to grow out of hand.

But leadership requires guiding that growth, especially through conflict situations, disappointments, economic downturns, and other unforeseen troubles. It is in crisis that true values, competencies and strengths are exposed, to say nothing of weaknesses.

Nowhere is this more evident than when an organization has to seek reconciliation with another entity (a person, another organization, etc.) that they have wronged–or who has wronged them.

Leadership—management, supervisors, etc.—in organizations view reconciliation in the same way that many individuals in the general public do:

  • They believe that reconciliation means returning to the status quo of the relationship before the conflict occurred—it doesn’t.
  • They believe that reconciliation provides the other party (who they still think is in the wrong) with the tools and means to hurt them again—it doesn’t.
  • They believe that reconciliation prevents justice, truth and “the real story’ from being known to the public (i.e. other parties not involved directly in the conflict) and thus being unattainable in the future—it doesn’t.

These three wrong assumptions haunt the ability for leaders to step out of their protective, organizational shells and do the hard work of forgiveness (another thing that’s not often talked about), provide apologies (something rare to even hear) and seek reconciliation (name the last time this happened with a public or private organization).

For leaders to break the culture of the organization and to seek reconciliation, they must first break the culture of themselves, and be willing to dance with vulnerability and fear, and focus on long-term growth rather than short-term stock prices. There are three places to start this process:

The culture must be reorganized philosophically around the long game—this is the hardest step, which is why we put it first. Organizational philosophy begins with the founders or owners and filters down to everybody else in the organization. Leaders below the founder/owner level are either told directly what the philosophy or are left to figure it out themselves from nonverbal cueing and behavioral tics exhibited by other leaders. Articulating the principles of the long game and the philosophy behind it has to come from the owners/founders. If it doesn’t, the leaders will organize around their own short games which can damage the organization in the long term.

The culture must be articulated—Having a meeting is not always the best way to do this. We heard a story from a high producing sales employee in an organization that reflects this. The story focused on some conflict scenarios going on in the hierarchical structure that the employee didn’t understand. The employee stated that the only reason she was still at the company in the midst of all of the conflict, was that a leader she respected (instead of calling a meeting) actually came out the sales field and talked to her directly. That’s a leader articulating culture through action rather than through a meeting.

The leaders must be humble internally and externally—many leaders believe that humility is best left to the marketing department and that brash, arrogant, or out of whack pronouncements are the way to create and manage change, push employees to do their best, and to get innovations out the door. But here’s the dichotomy: Humility is a character trait, arrogance is a marketing tool and the public (and internal and external stakeholders) are not always going to know the difference.

To build a culture where apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation with another party in a conflict is even possible, first there must be the environment for such things to even happen in the first place. The core of much of designing a system for resolving conflicts internally and externally that leaders can advocate for, followers can believe in, and external parties can trust in, begins with philosophy and continues with internal humility.

Such developments transform past the masthead proclamations and get to the core of what organizations really are, what their leaders really believe, and what their teams can really accomplish.

Download the new FREE eBook courtesy of Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT), on Forgiveness and Reconciliation by clicking the link here

-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] Leadership Through Risk

A results driven organization is typically led by managers and supervisors out to minimize downside risk, maximize upside shareholder value and drain all the unique out of the pond called their product.

Consequences, results if you will, are inherently unknowable, and many organizational leaders, cognizant of that fact, seek to either avoid or accommodate employee disputes. They typically do this by handing off the responsibility to professionals in the human resources department, but then they do not empower these individuals to make real changes.

Because, that would be risky.

The paradox of risk in conflict is that if an organizational leader does nothing, it might get worse, or it might “go away;” and, if an organizational leader does something—anything—it might get worse and not go away.

This perception of leadership as a spot to squat was never an okay position to take, but many leaders are encultured and trained through looking and role modeling, and if organizational leaders have never done more than avoid or accommodate risk, future leaders will do the same.

The inability to take on a risky conversation, a risky conflict scenario, or even a risky business decision, defines many organizational environments and outcomes. There are two solutions to this:

Recognize that what’s underneath all of that risk is fear—fear is a powerful drive of conflict, but it’s also a powerful driver of attacking, accommodating or avoiding conflict. Most of the time, directness in communication is associated with courage because there is so little organizational courage. It’s not courageous to engage in a high-risk, highly emotional, conflict conversation, if you as an organizational leader are not “built” to handle it. It’s more courageous to say “I can’t handle it” and hand it off to someone in the organization who can.

Build an antifragile culture in your organization—antifragility builds on accepting the idea that there will be organizational conflict wherever there are two or more people. After that’s accepted, then comes the material fact of acknowledging that the culture has to build around, not managing the conflict through avoiding, accommodating or attacking, but through addressing, engaging and communicating assertively about the material facts and emotional content of conflicts. The last part of developing an atifragile ethic in an organization involves engaging with emotional labor in a meaningful way and figuring out how to recognize and reward that labor in an organization, beyond a once-a-year, alcohol-fueled bash.

Ultimately, the question that leaders both avoiding, accommodating and attacking risky conflict scenarios, and engaging with them effectively, is the same question:

What kind of conflicts do we want to have in our organization?

-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/

[Opinion] The 4 Areas of Organizational Conflict

In many organizations, the anticipated fear of doing something that might not work when resolving a conflict outweighs the anticipated benefits of taking a risk and resolving a conflict in a new way.

This anticipated fear shows up in four areas.

  • Customer service interactions—these are the ones that involve poor or miscommunication, bad service, a dissatisfied customer, or even a service that doesn’t do what the end-user (i.e. the customer) thought that it would. Conflicts in these areas tend to be the ones who’s outcomes are used to define the organization by its external supporters and detractors. They are usually resolved through speed and immediacy flooding the point of contention, followed by organizational silence.
  • Product recall incidents—these are incidents where a product is created, developed, produced, distributed and marketed in “good faith” but then proves to be defective in some way. Conflicts in these areas tend to focus around a material loss of some kind and are rarely resolved with an apology. They are resolved through litigation, regulation and in some cases, destruction of the organization.
  • Process innovation failures—this is when a product or service changes in some way and the changes are dissatisfying to the end user, the seller of the product or service, or the creator of the original product or service. Conflicts in these areas tend to take a long time to manifest and usually begin in the customer service area. They are usually resolved through changing cultures at two steps below the surface level (i.e. firing and hiring) but are rarely resolved thoroughly.
  • Employee disputes and conflicts—these are the most common internal conflicts and occur when visions, values and goals rubu up against each other. They are usually responded to internally through either avoidance, accommodation or attacking and are rarely resolved thoroughly until employees “move on.”

Many organizations assume that immediacy of response in all four of these “dispute” areas equals resolution. The problem “goes away” and then there is silence—from the press, from the customer, from the stakeholders, and from the employees.

This assumption exists because organizations operate at scale. Scale creates degrees of separation between the person impacted by the outcome of the interaction, the incident, the innovation or the conflict, and the person who is “at the top” of the hierarchy in the organization.

As human beings, from the age of tribes to the age of multinational organizations, we have outsourced the resolution of conflicts to third parties—chiefs, in essence—with the expectation that with distance comes freedom from emotional entanglement and rationality in decision making.

When the chief knew everyone in the tribe, this might have been—and may continue to be—true. But when Dunbar’s Number kicks in at scale, and organizations begin to grow, more and more resolution is outsourced to fewer and fewer people who are called to sit in judgment, render a verdict and not consider the consequences.

The unspooling of the Industrial Revolution and its outcomes and consequences, at scale, has put to lie, the myth promulgated throughout mass media, mass advertising, mass unionization, and even mass government for the majority of the last century: The individual, whether employee, customer, neighbor or advocate, can get resolution to conflict, disagreement, or disappointment at scale from an organization.

All conflicts, interactions, incidents, disturbances, and any other synonyms humans use to describe conflicts and disputes are always interpersonal, and thus can only be resolved at the interpersonal level. But many organizations—schools, nonprofits, businesses, corporations—only function well and “change the world” at scale, rather than in interacting with one person, employee, customer, neighbor or advocate, at a time.

The solution for this is not to prevent organizations from scaling. This is as impossible as canceling biological maturation or natural growth. The deep solution is for the chief to purposefully change attitudes and minds at the individual level through coaching, training, and leading, and then leaving a culture in an organization behind that repeats the vision, mission, values and goals that they want to see.

This is the real innovation that requires courage at the beginning, the middle and the end to execute. But many organizations would rather put out burning fires than build a better house in the first place.

-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] KPIs For Managing Workplace Conflict

There are typically three methods employed to manage workplace conflicts:

  • Avoid the issue and let the employees involved know that the work is what matters, not the conflict. Avoidance looks like censure, a write-up, a conversation in private or in public, or a mandated training.
  • Accommodate each employee and try to negotiate with each party to get them to return to work, not the conflict. Accommodation looks like supervisory silence, employees teaming up and deciding what’s going to happen in the conflict situation, or not actually doing the work at all.
  • Attack each employee and make sure that any other employees know that the work is what matters, not the conflict. Attack looks like threatening to fire employees, a write-up, a “disciplinary warning,” a mandated training, or even actually firing somebody.

None of these methods is effective at preventing, addressing and resolving employee conflicts. All the methods represent a hybrid of personalized conflict management styles, poor, little or no organizational training, and deeply ingrained organizational cultures that resist shifting for a variety of reasons.

There is, of course, another choice.

The goals for managing conflict in the workplace should go beyond merely the metric of “Is the work getting done in spite of what’s going on?” and should shift to “Is the productivity of the people being impacted because of a conflict fueled work environment?”

Here are some alternate metrics to consider:

Measure the resolution of conflict as a value that is offered as a customer service to internal stakeholders (i.e. employees). This metric can be tied to specific benchmarks with consequences attached to missing the benchmark—or attaining it.

Develop the process of conflict resolution through creating systems as a series of steps that are antifragile in nature—flexible and sturdy at the same time. Most systems in organizations cannot withstand external shocks (i.e. economic downturns) or internal shocks (i.e. a sexual harassment lawsuit) well. This is why any resolution system based in mediation, arbitration or even litigation must be flexible based on the nature, type and intensity of conflicts.

Implement training that focuses on three levels: knowledge gain, skill set gain, and emotional gain. Most corporate training is mandatory, meaningless and ultimately not absorbed or used by the employees who need to absorb and use it. This is primarily because most employee training in conflict resolution focuses on skill attainment and some knowledge gain, but there is little attention paid to emotional content. Mindfulness training, de-escalation tactics and active listening strategies are the first step in this direction, but in reality, after 100 years of psychology and therapeutic methods, there are many, many more.

Coach managers, supervisors and others higher in the hierarchical chain to attend trainings and get involved in the conversation around conflict in the workplace and what can be done about it. Many employees are elevated to supervisor or managerial status without fully understanding how they can motivate and encourage people, what their own conflict management styles are, and how to develop competing styles in a work environment that is perceived as resource deficient. This reality seems easy to overcome (“We’ll just bring in an outside trainer!”) but without follow-up, support and coaching from their supervisors, the training is just as useless for them as it is for the employees they supervise.

Elevate departments, divisions and even employee positions that were previously viewed as “hand slapping” or “regulatory” into change agents, charged with supporting the development and maintenance of new systems after the training is over and the consultant is gone. Raising the profile and status of human resources from a regulatory/litigation prevention arm of an organization to the status that it deserves as a change agent takes time, training and trust. It also requires a shift in the cultural thinking of C-suite executives about how their organizational culture can change its approach to change.

When organizations complain about the establishing of these metrics and relegate them to the province of HR, they surrender the ability to create workplaces that employees desire to be productive inside of.

Establishing a new management style, developing training and following up with it through coaching and implementation of outcomes, and means testing resolution strategies is not just “fluff.” Taking such actions represents the only way forward for many organizations. Past short terms wins that appeal to shareholders and the media and toward long term gains that create genuine, long lasting cultures.

Saying to employees in conflict “Just get back to work,” just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Download the new FREE eBook courtesy of Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT), on Forgiveness and Reconciliation by clicking the link here

-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] Don’t Wallow in the Gap

Our heads are the most dangerous place to be in conflict.

Falling in the Ditch

We tell ourselves a story about the nature of the conflict, who’s at fault (and who isn’t) and what the solution should be (preferably one that benefits us and makes the other person the enemy).

We then plunge forward, tackling the conflict with the tools that got us into the conflict in the first place: we don’t actively listen, we don’t engage emotionally with the other person’s content around and within the conflict, and we engage (happily or miserably) in the gamification of the conflict process.

We temporarily pause the conflict (sometimes for hours, days, weeks, months, years or decades) and call that pause resolution—when in reality that pause represents a “lull” in the conflict conversation, where more content floods the gap.

And after all of those steps, we look around an wonder why our workplaces, our families, our schools and our churches are not “doing what they should be doing.”

This is not a condemnation, or castigation. We have engaged in all of these steps as well, with conflicts between us and other people in our own life. We engage in some of these ways even still.

But there is a way out of the narrative trap:

  • Break the language: Language = Thought and thought = language. Take a pause and review the words that you use to talk about yourself, about the other party in conflict and about the content of the conflict scenario. Words give meaning and set up paradigms for future behavior and decisions.
  • Break the trap of decisions: What got you here to conflict isn’t going to get you there to resolution. The decisions, patterns, and behaviors that got you into the conflict you’re in today (and the ones you’ll be in tomorrow) have to be broken through self-examination.
  • Break the gap: Being intentional about the outcomes you want to achieve through avoidance, accommodation, assertive confrontation, or any of the other choices for responses that you have in a conflict, is critical to avoiding the gap. That temporary pause, or “lull” in the conflict flow.

These tips seem obvious and easy, but if they were, we would be collectively performing them all the time, rather than stumbling through the narratives we’ve built. Ultimately, the way out of the narrative trap of conflict, takes having courage to take the steps in the first place.

-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] Managing Muscular Development

Here’s a simple calculation:

Managing yourself + managing other people = a full time job.

Dont_Let_People_Fool_You

Don’t let people fool you. There’s plenty of full-time work out there. But there’s no pay. And the cost for failing at it is high.

We underestimate the power of disputes (as a part of the conflict process) to go viral, through the stories that we tell other people about the conflicts we are embroiled in.

Conflict engagement requires that we understand our own inner lives, and move from being selfish (inwardly focused) to being self-aware (knowing what’s going on with us internally, without becoming overwhelmed and focused on it). This is the core of the first part of the equation.

Conflict management requires that we understand (or at least acknowledge) the presence of emotions and the depth of their impact, on other people in with whom we are in dispute. This is the core of the second part of the equation.

Conflict as a full time job is requires us to recognize that conflict sometimes serves the other person and their motives, sometimes it serves us and our motives, and sometimes it serves nobody at all. Conflict will never go away, and sometimes the management of the process requires us to be tuned in (almost to have a sixth sense) about how power, story and emotions wind around issues of advocacy, policy and process.

There’s plenty of full time work out here. But too many people would rather defer the hard work of figuring out the parts of the above equation today, in the hope that tomorrow will just be a slightly better version of the past they just left.

This is neither engagement, nor management. It is mere avoidance.

And mere avoidance atrophies our emotional muscles as surely as a lack of exercise atrophies the physical muscles.

-Peace Be With You All-

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

The Percieved Urgency of the Actual Urgency of Mindfulness

There’s actual urgency and perceived urgency.

watna-batna

Actual urgency is a chemical spill on the shop floor. Or a heart attack that a midlevel manager has on a Friday afternoon.

Perceived urgency is everything else.

One of the main struggles that people have with time management is balancing perceived urgency versus actual urgency and a big part of the issue focuses around being here. Now.

Thinks about that.

Being here now is the essence of mindfulness.

Deeply integrated and linked to meditation, mindfulness requires individuals in an organization to really balance the priorities of someone else’s actual perceived urgency, with the demands of the moment.

And the next moment.

And the next.

Mindfulness seems like a new wave thing, in all of the business journels and on LinkedIn, but it has long been the purview of people of a spiritual bent.

But, to be realistic, we must admit that if an individual works forty to eighty hours a week with other people, there better be a way to decompress and unbundle actual urgency versus perceived urgency.

-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/

On Leads, Or How to Sell What Clients and Organizations Don’t Think They Need

No one needs help resolving conflicts.

#NoOneNeedsConflictResolved

People need help communicating. People need help leading and figuring out leadership. People need help managing other people. People need help with figuring out “how to talk to annoying Aunt Janet and Uncle Mike.”

But no one needs help resolving conflicts.

When put on the spot, 9 times out of 10, people will be unable to identify a conflict they are having in their life, that is impacting them at a level where they may need conflict engagement skills services.

However, the person standing next to them—wife, husband, friend, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, niece, nephew—will be able to zero in on where the person is deficient in their approach to a conflict.

But, it’s not the person standing next to the person who can’t think of a conflict they need help with that’s the problem: The problem is that the dysfunction of unresolved conflicts is so normalized that it’s no longer seen as a problem.

Case in point:

Him: “So, what’s your business?”

Me: “I’m a professional conflict engagement consultant. I help small businesses, higher education organizations and churches engage with the conflicts in their lives.”

Him: “So, can I get your card?”

Me: “Sure.”

Him: “So, I guess I would bring you in say if I had problems managing the 40 or so staff members that work for me?”

Me: “That’s precisely where I would be the most help for you.”

Wife: “Hey!” “He could help you out with the argument you had with your daughter this morning!”

Him: “What am I gonna do, huh!? She’s gotta come into work at least once a week. I understand that she’s got an issue, but c’mon already!”

They both laugh. The wife rolls her eyes. They walk back into the restaurant.

No one needs conflict resolved in their lives. Until they actually do.

-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/

[Guest Blogger] Larry Wolverton: So you want to be an entrepreneur? Are you sure? Are you really sure?

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vidal Sassoon
If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals.” – Brian Tracy
We here at Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT) are committed to helping each one of our clients (and our potential future clients) to ethically attain peace in their lives through the real-world application of Christian ethical principles.
We are also committed to collaboration and collaborative learning from other professionals, not only in our field, but in fields that interest us and can provide us insight, such as the arts, engineering, medicine, and so on.
With that in mind, we are launching our Guest Blogger series.
For the remainder of April and May, as the leaves begin to pop out and spring visits our country, we will be featuring the thoughts, opinions and commentary of professionals in the field of mediation and conflict engagement.
We hope that these writings will inspire and engage YOU to ethically attain PEACE in YOUR life.
Our first guest blogger is Larry Wolverton, Change Maker & Chief Connector at Top Tier Liaison & Conflict Resolution Services in Arizona.
Connect with them through their website at http://www.toptierlcrservices.com/
Top Tier focuses on developing communication around change in businesses and organizations through the use of analyses, methodology and a multidisciplinary approach to communication between employees and management.
 Larry has multiple years of experience in education and with healthcare start-ups as well as international experience that he brings to the conflict engagement and communication table.

Today I am thinking about the “Entrepreneurial Spirit” and those traits that I feel make for a contented, happy, self-employed person. I will also explore what it means to be an entrepreneur, both in your own business or as a valued employee of another company.
Most people I have met had, at one time or another, “toyed” with the idea of starting their own business, so the idea is attractive for several reasons; potential unlimited income only constrained by our own efforts, freedom to make our own schedule, and doing things “our own way” are just a few advantages that we see successful entrepreneurs sharing with us in their highly visible life styles.
Not mentioned are the 60-100 or more hours per week required during the start-up phase (up to five years on average), or the stress of development of an idea for public consumption, the work required to create a clear business plan and company direction, and of course the ever high hurdle of financing a new business or business idea.
I would like to point out that to be a successful entrepreneur failure is a necessary ingredient in the mix of experiences required on the path to success. There is a very fine line between failure and success.
Learning how to manage failure and learn those lessons from “fantastic failure” is just one of those dues required to understand how to succeed in business.
I have paid those dues, however I feel the impact of those past failures has been tempered by lessons learned as an employee for others who paid to train me in production, operations, management, and other areas where transferrable skills are learned.
And for those with “great ideas”, there is the ever present negative feedback from those who “care about you.” Critical review of a new idea, product, or business plan is essential to remaining grounded. However the choice of who reviews these critical aspects of your business must be undertaken seriously so that a neutral, knowledgeable opinion is obtained.
I find the mindset shift from employee to owner/manager a natural one that also allows me to understand some of the business decisions my employer has made during my tenure at my “weekend” job, too.
So the question is more appropriate when we ask, “Do you want to be an entrepreneur, right now?” The desire to be self-employed is one that drives creativity and builds the traits necessary to actually be a business owner.
However, the learning process can and often is obtained by taking ownership of our current “day or weekend” jobs, and acting responsibly and creatively in performing above and beyond our employer’s expectations.
Today, right now, is the time to start building and demonstrating those traits that are commonly accepted as entrepreneurial and necessary to success.
Those traits include: humility, willingness to accept the need to change, a willingness to delegate and allow others to help grow the business, sharing the spotlight, listening to our industry experts and mentors, perseverance in face of “insurmountable” challenges, and a solid belief that what we are doing is right for us and our families, among many others.
And lastly, staying in the workforce and working for a company that demonstrates your personal values and goals, and that supports your efforts to be creative and a partner in growth, might be the best way to be an entrepreneur for you.
Not everyone has the luxury of taking the risks of starting their own business, and must forego that “dream” for the sake of their young family, or other reasons not highlighted here.
Taking that entrepreneurial spirit and applying it to your current job or seeking a new job more suited to your interests can be rewarding and just as fun and challenging without the stress.
Would I encourage you to go out into the world and build a business of your own? Yes, absolutely, but only if it is something you crave enough and have passion for that will drive you to follow through during challenging times.
Larry Wolverton,
Employee and Entrepreneur
Change Maker & Chief Connector
Top Tier Liaison &Conflict Resolution Services
Are you a business owner striving to bring the entrepreneurial traits of your employees out in their current jobs?
Top Tier Liaison & Conflict Resolution Services, will help you do just that through top tier, evolutionary communication.
Please see how here.

 -Peace Be With You All-Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
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