[Advice] The Dysfunction in Your Workplace

In any discussion of conflict competence in the workplace, damaging communication patterns come up as an issue. Damaging communication is preceded by its forefather, dysfunctional communication. Dysfunction leads to damage as surely as water makes things wet. And at work, dysfunctional communications typically begin through “the grapevine” and come about in five different forms:

Gossip—includes idle talk or rumor, especially about personal or private affairs of other employees, co-workers, customers, etc.

Rumor—involves some kind of a statement whose veracity is not quickly, or ever, confirmed. Depending on the organizational structure and history, and where rumors originate in the hierarchy, rumors spread intentionally can serve as propaganda to manipulate employees or teams.

Innuendo—an innuendo is an insinuation or intimation about a person or thing, especially of a disparaging or a derogatory nature. Most innuendo’s start as “innocent” jokes, and tend to fall in the gap between what people think about other people’s behavior, and the reality of that behavior.

Tall Tales—a tall tale is a story with unbelievable elements, related as if it were true and factual. In the workplace, tall tales almost always involve whispers and can seem like rumor, but usually they are driven by external factors or pressures on the organization.

Myth—a myth is a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind assumed their present form, although, in a very broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story. Myths are at the bottom of many organizational models and serve to explain occurrences that people otherwise think they have no explanation for. The fact is, myths do the most long-term damage to an organization, because of their corrosive nature on innovation and through creating stubborn resistance to change.

When people become engaged in any of the above communication styles at work, they may interfere (innuendo) or damage (rumor, gossip) relationships, stymie innovation (myths) and creating situations ripe for lawsuits (innuendo) without being aware of it. In essence, when employees, managers, and others are unconsciously, unskilled at communicating effectively, they are displaying competency (at the novice level in most cases) at passive-aggressively creating conflict.

There are a few ways out of this:

The way to get out of this is to role model the behavior that you would like to see in other people at work, particularly if you are a boss, manager, or supervisor.
The other way out of this is to monitor your communication style to determine if you’re engaging in any of the five forms.
The last way out of this is to build a culture on open communication, getting information right the first time, and trusting adults to behave in a mature fashion—and removing those who don’t (or can’t) from positions in the organization quickly.

However, if your organization can’t do the steps above, then the only other solution is to train the people that you already have.

H/T to David Burkus on this one.

-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 Decay of Power

Everyone “knows” what “it” is, but we often confuse the outcomes of “it” with the source of “it.”

Everyone “knows” that “it” is shifting geographically, technologically, morally, ethically, physically, mentally and spiritually, but no one “knows” why this shift is happening at this moment in our global historical consciousness.

Everyone “knows” that “it” is what makes “the world go around” but no one can really describe why “it” has so much ability to make things happen.

Everyone “agrees” that “something” must be “done” by people with more of “it” than themselves, but no one can successfully articulate why those with more of “it” would do “something” more with “it” than what they are already doing–or not doing.

Everyone “knows” that corporations, big businesses, governments, nonprofit organizations, parents, school systems, and even banks have too much of “it.”

Everyone also “knows” that the people who operate at the top of those organizational structures feel more and more under siege everyday as they look around and see “it” evaporating away from the siloes they’ve built to protect, use and exploit “it.”

Power is a curious thing. As it decays and moves, from one geographic or generational “space” to another, the fear of losing “it” (or the fear of gaining “it”) drives more conflicts than ever before.

Everyone (the royal “we”) “knows” what to do about that shift and how to resolve that fear, but, apart from talking in coffee shops, writing blog posts, or creating long form journalistic critiques of “it,” no one really has a clue about how—and why—this shift is happening.

But when a state of influence, such as power, which is so often confused with its outcomes (money is an outcome of power, not power itself), is seen to be decaying before everyone’s very eyes, the fear of loss—and the accompanying panic—generates a focus on escape and hiding.

Which is why, in conflict scenarios, whether between a husband and a wife or between a student loan holder and a bank lender, the energy that should be expended on getting to resolution, is instead expended on getting to escape, using power as a weapon, and/or hiding from the consequences of bad/poor behavior.

Which, of course, “everyone” can see…

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Perceptions of Power

There are conflicts everywhere.

From wars to rumors of wars, people, nation-states, corporations, organizations and many other individual and corporatized entities, are locked in conflicts, rooted in two factors: perceptions of reality and perceptions of power.

Perceptions of reality:

This one is the hardest to address, because from every person to every organization, perception is based on past experiences, contextual clues, and even the psychological and emotional make-up of people. No one agrees on the nature of reality, because, very few can agree (with 100% certain) on the nature of objective truth and facts. Both of which are mixed up with emotions when defining reality. Which lead to differences in perceptions, and ultimately create the spark that causes conflicts to rage like wildfires.

Perceptions of power:

Power is an interesting phenomenon, because everyone “knows” what “it” is—the ability to influence others to do your will—but no one can put a finger on where “it” shows up in the world. People, organizations and even nation-states, equate all kinds of material, psychological and even emotional “goods” with power. They make the same correlation with the trappings of power, or even the results of wielding power. But, no one can tell anyone what power actually is.

Perceptions of power and perceptions of reality both spring from the seeds of fear. Fear as an emotional driver motivates and animates most conflict scenarios. Whether a person is an employee at work, or the Pope in Rome, everyone fears something (an outcome) or someone (a person) and this fear drives the lust for power, the inability to establish a shared reality structure, and the desire for conflict.

On this Veterans’ Day in the United States of America (and Armistice Day, everywhere else in the world), we think on the ramifications of the impacts of reality and power and reflect on how much blood (both literal and metaphorical) has been spilled, in how much mud (both literal and metaphorical), since the dawn of mankind.

And how much blood (both literal and metaphorical) has yet to be spilled.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Pivot to a Stalemate from a Checkmate

There’s a bind for supervisors in the workplace, when they act as mediators, inserting themselves into conflicts between their employees, whether they want to insert themselves, or they are compelled to insert themselves.

When one employee won’t move, shift or change their approach to conflicts with their co-workers in any meaningful way and the mediator, acting as the supervisor, that party may try to maneuver the supervisor into a stalemate. This maneuvering could appear in three forms:

Game playing the mediation/supervision process through telling the supervisor one story, and then telling the other employees another story.
Gossiping by telling the mediation/supervisor nothing at all—or actively avoiding the interaction with the mediator/supervisor (or any other passive aggressive acts)—and then passing around a story about the other party in conflict.
Harassing the other party in the conflict and, sometimes harassing (or intimidating) the mediator/supervisor into making a decision favorable to them in resolving the conflict.

Stalemate makes the mediator/supervisor as the third party feel powerless, impotent and feel as if they have no chance to affect change in the outcomes of the conflict process.

But stalemate is really a checkmate—imposed upon the instigating party who won’t move—initiated by the mediator/supervisor, sometimes not consciously and based on the stories that the mediator/supervisor is telling themselves about the conflict process.

Which means the power really lies with the mediator/supervisor and not the party who thinks they have the power, the instigator of the conflict process, and the other party in the process who may be looking to escalate the conflict to satisfy their own motives.

Other mediator/supervisors in the past may have given up their power, to the two parties in conflict before, but that doesn’t mean that the current person has to continue those patterns of behaviors.

Checkmate.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Leadership Through Doing “Things That Don’t Scale”

There are “things that don’t scale” many organizations avoid doing (or abandon outright), when they reach a certain size.

Leaders in those organizations (who may have begun bravely desiring to commit to doing those things) abandon the “things that don’t scale” as other interests begin to attract their attention (see Google’s recent troubles here) and as other constituencies demand attention (see Twitter’s recent issues with investors here). Then there’s the issue of organizational gravity and 747’s.

The human touch is always one-to-one RT @sorrells79: Leadership Through Doing “Things That Don’t Scale” https://t.co/0OehLo17i5

— Liz Kislik (@LizKislik) October 29, 2015

There are three areas organizational leaders begin with enthusiasm and personalization, but then abandon later when the organization scales:

Customer service: Many organizations say that the end user, the customer, the audience member, the fan, the follower, the client, is the one that they serve, and when they are small enough and scrappy enough, they do exactly that. But at scale (and as they transition into being an incumbent in the market), the customer gets lost in the shuffle and it becomes harder and harder for an organizational leader to make the decision about whom they serve, and then to serve them in the same way they used to.

Conflict management: At scale, conflict management becomes a rote, human resource department driven process, separated from the people who are impacted by the conflicts, disputes and disagreements, and the leaders who can successfully resolve them. This is why human resource departments don’t exist in small businesses, start-ups and other organizations smaller than 50 or so individuals. There, the leader does the resolution, as a chieftain of old would, but above that, the effects of Dunbar’s Number kick in and the organizational leader doesn’t have the attention, time or energy (read “bandwidth”) to address or manage all conflict scenarios all the time.

Marketing efforts: At scale, marketing falls into the same trap as conflict management does. More for less becomes the credo, and what used to be innovative, connecting marketing efforts, becomes bogged down in micromanaging, preening and office egos. What used to be sounding boards become echo chambers and marketing efforts are viewed increasingly as a “nice-to-have” rather than as an integral part of the organizational message.

The way to resolve issues in all of these areas is not to ask the question “Well, do we grow or not?” and then try to either stifle growth or to just let growth happen.

The way to resolve issues in these three areas is to have a steady, continuously reinforced sense of organizational culture, organizational focus, and organizational energy.

Then, the leader has only one question to answer in each area every single day, and the question has “yes” or a “no” answer: Does the action I am about to lead on for this organization match up with our culture, focus and energies?

Acting on “things that don’t scale” by answering that question with either a “yes” or a “no”, opens the door to delight organizational customers, end users, clients, advocates, fans, followers and so many others. Make no mistake: it requires leadership courage to stick to performing in the areas that don’t scale, to keep doing them well, and to keep the employees and others performing them, reigned in.

Otherwise, the “things that don’t scale,” but do delight, are the very things that, when abandoned, will surely lead to organizational death.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Leadership Through Pitching and Presenting

There are two times a leader has to be persuasive, has to pitch and present and leaders are typically good at one and poor at the other:

In a small group: Small groups (anywhere between 2 people and 10 people) are groups where leaders can either shine or fail based upon their own personal hang-ups, tics, and character traits. If a leader connects warmly with a handshake (increasing cooperation) and makes eye contact (in the Western world at least) they tend to be able to navigate the small group interactions and can easily dominate the conversation.

[Advice] Leadership Through Pitching and Presenting: https://t.co/ygcyx6OMxZ via @Sorrells79

— Donya Zimmerman (@FACMBC) October 22, 2015

In a small group though, the delicate balance is between speaking too much (pitching) and not listening enough. This is a discipline that bears out its presence in the ultimate small group presentation, the meeting. Most meetings represent a poor use of organizational resources because the same traits that guided the leader in even smaller groups, fail when the group grows larger.

In a large group: Large groups (anywhere between 10 people up to massive stadiums of people) are the places where leaders (like many other folks) sometimes try to “scale up” the skills that make them formidable in a one-on-one environment and they fail. This is also the place where leaders lean in on using tools to mask their inexperience, their nervousness, or their lack of knowledge/interest/passion about a subject. The reason that political leaders do well at presenting to large groups and many corporate leaders don’t is that political leaders are naturally able to “fake it until they make it” and project that passion onto the crow. Whereas hard charging, revenue-generating executives are secretly wondering why they have to do this “presenting thing” at all in the first place.

In a large group, the delicate balance is between presenting with passion and rambling on about a point. Presenting with passion is a discipline that can be coached, but the real problem is getting the leader’s ego out of the way, getting the leader into a stance of learning and then preparing the leader to succeed. And letting the props, the slides, and the crutches fall by the way side.

Ever manager, supervisor, and even employee should be taught how to connect in a small group to other people, by using the skills of active listening, active engaging, eye contact, and paraphrasing. Every manager and supervisor and even employee should be taught how to connect with a much larger group (either a meeting sized group or a larger group) by using the skills of tapping into their passion and energy, knowing their subject inside and out and using tools like Powerpoint as aids, not crutches.

But too many organizational leaders don’t spend time preparing for presentations, don’t think that such preparation is necessary (except at the point of actually having to present) and many organizational leaders look at such training as another “nice to have” but not a “critical to succeed.”

In a world of instant information (and sometimes instant wrong information about organizations) leaders need to change their thinking, or someone else will change the audience’s thinking about their organization, for them first.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Leadership Through Influence

Leadership is hard enough without understanding the power of influence over others. There are seven areas of psychology that effectively “lock in” to each other in a hierarchical, top down structure governing human relationships. They create the context where persuasion and influence can be effective between a leader and their followers.

Many organizational leaders default to wielding titles, degrees, certifications and other forms of authority that they instinctively know followers respond to, but they don’t know the “why.” When leaders default to the stance of authority, instead of beginning at the top of the hierarchy with reciprocation; they leave their followers flying blind. This creates three problems:

People respond to authority figures without reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof and liking in the same way that a child responds to a parent the first time that they are disciplined. Not well. Good leaders know that the top of the funnel has to be filled with relationship, not titles.

People lose trust in leaders because they instinctively know that leadership is abundant (look at the number of volumes about it on the Amazon.com website) but that statesmanship is scarce. Good leaders strive to link and connect all the forms of persuasion through the funnel, rather than leapfrogging over the ones that they aren’t personally comfortable with to get to the area that they are. When they do this, they rise in esteem in their followers’ eyes.

People link consensus to leadership, only if the leadership is credible. Does anybody wonder why the last landslide election in the United States for President was 30 years ago? Consensus is hard to get, hard to maintain and not a natural state of affairs. Leaders in organizations often conflate organizational silence with organizational consensus and miss the disgruntled 49% who they never wooed anyway. Sometimes leaders don’t need those followers (particularly if leaders rig the game, as in politics) but most of the time, a leader with 49% of the people in her organization who dislike her first, will never build consensus with those same followers later on in the funnel, when it matters.

When leaders default to what is easy (rigging the consensus game or wielding authority) rather than working on developing what is hard (reciprocity consistency and commitment), they do their followers a disservice. They also miss an opportunity to rise above the pedestrian conflicts that predominate most organizations and become something more than merely managers.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Leadership Through a Positive “No”

Strategic, thoughtful leadership is all about saying “no.”

Most leaders don’t do this well and they don’t because they view the word “no” through multiple lenses:

They view “no” as a word of power, giving them control over a situation, a person, or an outcome.
They view “no” as a word of separation, giving them emotional distance and feeding into their fears about the outcomes, or consequences about a situation, or a person.
They view “no” as a word of delineation (which it is) and as a word of escape (which it isn’t).

Most leaders don’t focus on the positives behind the word no. Instead, they tend to focus on the negatives, leading to more conflicts, not fewer.

The positive version of “no 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.”

Most leaders end the “no” process here (hoping that the other party will take the hint and just go away). Then, they never perform the necessary follow-up. Without the follow-up, a cascade of psychological and organizational issues arise. Plus, the leader’s commitment and consistency (mostly the latter) gets questioned by the person who brought them the request in the first place and the likelihood of another request coming to that leader to meet a potential “no” decreases exponentially, drip-by-drip.

People leave bosses and leaders, but they work for organizations and cultures. In a leadership scenario, where time is of the essence and where a “no” is the only way out, leaders must grapple with their own perceptions of the word, other’s perceptions of the word, and the outcomes that a “no” produces.

Otherwise, when it’s time to say “yes” to something else (either explicitly or implicitly) the leadership might look around and not see anyone following them.

-Peace Be With You All-

[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-

[Strategy] Leadership Through Failure

If you look for it, failure is heralded in many, many corners of the Internet.

However, outside of specific areas on the web that focus on entrepreneurial ventures, start-up culture, or high tech, hard charging companies, the failure of organizational leaders is almost never heralded.

This is because failure is often personalized in ways that success is generalized. In many sectors of the economy, employees may feel as though they are punished in light of company failures with lowered salaries, delayed promotions, no raises and being treated as if their work productivity and years of effort are worthless. And, with all of the political talk about income inequality, CEO compensation rates and escalating corporate profits and stock buy backs, they can be forgiven for thinking that something is amiss with failure.

But, for organizational leaders at the managerial level and above, failure is not seen as a leadership competency, because, much like when NASA decided to go to the moon, failure is not an option.

What’s the way around this?

Realize that failure is an option—the issue with many leaders is that the same confidence that allows them to lead, also blinds them to the potential for a project, a company, an idea or an innovation to fail. This state of “confidence as a blinder” can lead to hubris and perceptions of arrogance, which are really shields for the great fear—that of failure. For organizational leaders, the realization is that fear should be danced with, not avoided, accommodated or ignored.

Get help dancing with fear—fear is at the core of many responses that organization leaders take to conflict scenarios. Many organizational leaders choose to avoid, attack or accommodate rather than to figure out ways to advance engagement in healthy ways. Choosing those alternate paths would go a long way to building and maintaining healthy organizational cultures that will be antifragile, courageous and inspiring in developing their leaders and their leadership. Getting outside help through training and consulting is a must in this area.

Talk about failures, but don’t embellish them—instead of running away from failures when they happen, organizational leaders should be trained to embrace those failures as part of the business development curve and as the growth curve. Embellishing failures leads to the rampant pornography of failure stories that abound across the Internet. Talking about failures while also draining the emotion from their consequences is tricky, but changing the conversation around them is the first step in that direction.

Failure at scale is an organizational bad dream for many leaders.

But, the reality is that failure will happen. But failures are not to be confused with organizational dips and setbacks. For many leaders though, knowing the difference is critical to developing, training and advancing new leaders.

-Peace Be With You All-