Actively Listening Past TL;DR

Relationships between humans become complicated in face-to-face communication when there is little use of emotional intelligence, little cognitive understanding of what is going on in a conversation and little ability to engage positively in conflict with another person.

So, in the digital space, tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) becomes a shorthand way of not listening to arguments we’d rather not hear.

Avoiding bad news and curating a social media feed becomes a way of limiting information that we feel is unpleasant and likely to lead to internal conflicts—or external ones.

And emotional intelligence goes out the window with flame wars, spam commentary and useless “noise.”

So, what’s the average person to do to combat all of this?

The way to actively listen online is too do the things that aren’t sexy:

Read the long, laboriously written article that lays out an argument that you can’t follow.
Watch a YouTube video—or better yet a TED Talk—covering an area where you have no knowledge.
Develop a sense of that which is “noise” and that which is “valuable” rather than throwing up your hands in the air and resorting to the old trope of “what’s the world coming too.”

Do these things successfully and you will find that actively listening through the digital noise is the same skill set that you have to engage with to actively listen through the face-to-face noise.

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

The Top 3 Hard Things

The hard things are the very things that appear easy.

Active listening seems easy. It’s easy to be engaged, totally focused on the content of a conversation or an interaction. It’s easy to pay close attention to what another person is saying, or doing, in the moment.
Active engagement is the easiest thing in the world. It’s easy to be engaged with a situation, a conversation, or a person whom we love and care about.
Active participation with your life, with another person’s life or with a critical situation is the easiest thing in the world.

But, it turns out, in a world of fractured attention spans, media distractions and fancy technical tools, attention, engagement and activity come at an embarrassingly high premium.

And we all make private choices (reflected publicly in our social media posting choices) about what events, people and places we give the most precious resource that we have–our attention–and then, when the world “explodes” the first question we ask is “Why didn’t I know about this?”

Well, we could have paid attention and could have known, if we had really wanted to…right….?

-Peace Be With You All-

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

Scarcity is a Lie

Human beings have trouble engaging with conflict effectively, from the schoolhouse to the workhouse.

Well, the “workhouse” doesn’t exist anymore, but you get my meaning.

In a world of scarcity, conflict engagement is incredibly difficult, primarily because we tend to view our resources (i.e. time, emotions, money, etc., etc., etc.) as limited.

We tend to approach conflicts in our lives from an inadequacy fueled, poverty based mindset that views the future as scary, the past as dominant and today as a mere distraction.

This leads to people avoiding conflicts regularly.
This leads to people confronting conflicts badly and ineffectively.
This leads to people being confounded by conflicts genuinely.

This also creates a reality for people in conflict that causes them to believe that they solve conflicts well (they don’t) or that they don’t have any conflicts in their lives (they do).

The other side effect of a poverty based mindset around conflicts involves being pushed– through experiencing repeated conflict situations–toward trauma and dysfunction, before seeking professional help.

Trauma. Dysfunction. Poverty. Scarcity.

Engaging with conflict effectively requires a shift in psychology, designed to view resources as abundant, other people as partners and conflict situations as temporary moments in time, rather than permanent states of being.

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

“I’m Worried About My Bottom Line.”

Really?

Well, let’s be honest:

Bottom line concerns tend to only appear when “getting by” and making the quarterly numbers, no longer works and when competitive pressure, employee choice and other market conditions begin to appear.

Employers will not always be blessed with an “employer’s market” and ignoring, or minimizing, the training and educating, of those demoralized, traumatized employees who have been long-term unemployed, could cost in the billions in lost revenues, time and profits.

Worried about the “bottom line” around conflicts in your workplace?

You should be.

-Peace Be 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: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/
HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

The Reason for Workplace Pathologies

There are conflicts everywhere, but the ones at work leave some of the deepest marks, because we spend, on average 40 to 60 hours a week with people we did not choose.

The common response to most work conflicts—from uninvolved employees to supervisors—sometimes ranges from “It’s not my problem,” to “I don’t care. It doesn’t affect me.”

There’s also a version of the Bystander Effect—where everyone stands around waiting for someone else to take a stand against a situation rather than themselves doing anything.

When conflict occurs between co-workers, apathy and fear of reprisal or negative consequences resulting from taking an action, paralyze fellow coworkers in the escalation cycle of conflict.

In contrast, when conflict occurs between supervisors and employees, grumbling, gossip, and other expressions of powerlessness become evident.

The escalation cycle continues, but is slows down, sometimes allowing the conflict to fester for years and transform into other cultural workplace pathologies.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA

3 Ways to Address Anger in the Workplace

Don’t drive angry.

Don’t tweet angry.

But going to work angry…well…that’s just the way of the world.

Fear of Unemployment

Right?

With the number of “disengaged” employees in the workplace at 26%, according to a recent Dale Carnegie study, it’s no wonder that people may occasionally show up to work:

Pissed off
Peeved
Slightly miffed

Or any of the other amorphous euphemisms that we use to say “angry.”

The key to creating and retaining engaged employees is to actually engage with them.

And, according to the same study, “the number one factor [] cited influencing engagement and disengagement was “relationship with immediate supervisor.”

We wrote a couple of weeks ago about emotional intelligence and emotional illiteracy.

Too many organizations still prefer to have disengaged staff and team members who are coming to work to grind through their eight to twelve hour days and then go home. Underneath the watchful eyes of supervisors and managers that they do not respect, appreciate or even remotely like.

What’s the solution?

Training supervisors, managers and others in how to engage in empathy, even when it appears to be immediately unproductive;

Developing organizational cultures that truly allow caring and inclusion to be active values, not just ones that appear on the masthead or at the company party;

Encouraging C-suite and above individuals who set the corporate tone to seek out developmental coaching and therapy to understand why they tick.

Otherwise, coming to work angry will keep happening.

And it’s not that hard to imagine a future where violence mars the workplace in the same ways that it does our schools.

-Peace Be With You All-