Loose Lips Sink Workplace Ships

Loose talk is everywhere at work, and it doesn’t matter whether you work in

an open office space
a coworking space
a “traditional” cubical environment

a widely geographically distributed, online, team space,

gossip, rumor, innuendo, and storytelling remain ingrained social traits of human beings.

They appear whenever two or more human beings gather together, and because they are such effective tools for passing information, maintaining the status quo and determining who’s in and who’s out, they are here to stay.

And not just for a minute or a day.

So, in workspaces of the future, expect that the gossip that used to happen face-to-face, to happen much more often via social media, messaging apps and wearable technologies.

Of course, with this change, there will be policy changes and consequences, and more opportunities for those of us who offer the tools to manage and reduce this storytelling and rumor mongering.

Particularly if it comes with a 140 character limit.

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

When Isn’t It About YOU!

This isn’t about me. It’s about YOU.

But then again, when ISN’T it about YOU!

Look, you see yourself one way. The world sees you another way. Very rarely do you have an opportunity to look at yourself through the eyes of the world.

It starts with YOU. It ends with YOU.

Intrigued yet?

Branding expert and leading authority on the science of fascination, Sally Hogshead (@SallyHogshead), is launching her new book How the World Sees You on July 1.

To celebrate all of the new insights she’s learned over the past decade of research, she has started Project Fascination, with a goal to show 100,000 people how their personalities add value.

To do this, she’s given me a special code BL-JSorrells79 to give the first 100 people who use it her Fascination Advantage® assessment for free! This has never been done before, and will only last until July 25!

And the best part is – they want this to be a chain reaction. So when you take the assessment using BL-JSorrells79, you’ll receive 100 assessments to share with your circle for free too! That’s $3700 of free market research at your fingertips!

So how do you take the assessment? Simple.

Go to www.HowTheWorldSeesYou.com/You and use code BL-JSorrells79.
Once you’ve taken the assessment, Sally’s team will load 100 assessments into your new account. Rinse and repeat.

That’s it.

Now you’re ready to discover how your personality is custom built for certain situations, and which situations you should learn to avoid.

And it only takes 5 minutes (you can even do it on your phone).

28 questions. 5 minutes. A whole new way to communicate.

Remember, the best way to empower someone is to show them their own highest value.

Our goal together is to show people the very best of themselves – the qualities that makes them more successful, more authentic, and more fascinating.

Remember that your code will expire July 25. Don’t let this $3700 value go to waste. Take the assessment today and encourage your friends and followers to do the same to do the same.

Your Fascination Advantage Report is the first big step into knowing how your personality can be heard and remembered in an overcrowded market. And sharing the assessment will help others do the same. Find everything you need to put this knowledge into practice with your co-workers, close friends and significant other in Sally’s new book, How the World Sees You.

-Peace Be With You All-

Why I’m Fascinated with Sally Hogshead

We’re FASCINATED by Sally Hogshead.

Ever since we heard her on the Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation podcast, we have connected with her at every opportunity.

She is a consummate speaker and trainer who has unlocked a new way for YOU to look at YOURSELF!

Now, we’ve taken a lot of assessments during our time in higher education—Strengthsquest, MBTI, DiSC, etc.—but this is the first assessment that cuts to the heart of how we are perceived by the world.

And it’s really accurate…and really, really great…

So great, in fact that we have a special code BL-JSorrells79 to give the first 100 people who use it her Fascination Advantage® assessment for free! This has never been done before, and will only last until July 25!

So how do you take the assessment? Simple.

Go to www.HowTheWorldSeesYou.com/You and use code BL-JSorrells79.
Once you’ve taken the assessment, Sally’s team will load 100 assessments into your new account. Rinse and repeat.

That’s it. Now your ready to discover how your personality is custom built for certain situations, and which situations you should learn to avoid. And it only takes 5 minutes (you can even do it on your phone).

28 questions. 5 minutes. A whole new way to communicate.

-Peace Be With You All-

Top 3 Tactics for Avoiding Performance Improvement

We are sure that we aren’t the first corporate training firm working in the area of conflict resolution to hear either one–or all three–of the following statements:

Multiple Symbols

“The people who really need this information to have better approaches, won’t be attending these sessions.”

“The people who are causing all the problems and could use this workshop to improve aren’t going to come.”

“The people who could support us up the chain in changing our approaches, can’t come to the workshops due to scheduling issues.”

Just in case you’ve ever said any one—or any combination of the three—above statements, we here at HSCT have a few suggestions to get “buy-in” from the people who aren’t showing up, learning, or otherwise growing in your organization.

For the people occupying positions above your position, find out if they like to look good. Attending a conflict resolution workshop will make them look good to their bosses. It will also help them save money on recruiting and retention.
For the people occupying position parallel to your position, find out if they want to get promoted. Attending a conflict resolution workshop will make them promotable. Which means more money for them.
For the people in conflict with you, or those creating conflict in your organization, find out how they view the organization and their place in it. Once you do that, then you can tap into their inner work based ego.

Which we’ll cover the work based ego in another blog post later this year, but we have covered emotional illiteracy, workplace anger, being concerned about employees, and the depth of the “conflict question” all of which relate directly to using these tricks.

Employ the above tactics and the next time we’re invited into your organization, you’ll come up with a different statement for us.

-Peace Be With You All-

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-

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

3 Ways to Work on Your “Infinite Game”

We here at Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT) love the old school E.F. Hutton commercials (link here http://youtu.be/sc2GpmLx82k).

The tagline, which our parents always used on us, of “when EF Hutton talks, people listen,” seems not to apply in the noisy media world in which we live.

But, when you’re developing a business with the anticipation of long-term equity, how do you cut through the noise so that at the key moment, as in the iconic commercials, people immediately stop—and listen.

Now there are three strategies that can help you work toward attaining your own voice:

Be consistent—even in a world of social media, the “Impermanent Web,” and Snapchat for business, nothing beats creating a voice by showing up, day after day, on a blog, on Twitter or on your website. Nothing.
Be bold—there are so many ways to spin a phrase that boldness in speaking, delivery and tone can be achieved through the use of a thesaurus, a dictionary and by molding an idea. And, really, if you’re controversial, what are “they” gonna do? Snoop on your emails?
Be quality—it’s hard to be a noun so often used as an adjective, but the fact is, quality counts. When developing a voice, quality is a hard target to hit, seeing as how people are often playing the “short game,” rarely ever playing the “long game” and almost never playing the “infinite game.”

In a world of impermanency, untrustworthiness and fly by night claims, implementing consistent, bold, quality strategies to develop your voice is the only pathway to success.

[Thanks to Seth Godin for bringing these distinctions to our attention.]

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 06.17.2014

I’ve noticed a bystander effect related to work and entrepreneurship.

The demarcation line of the 21^st century will be the one that separates those who put in effort (not work, effort), energy and have the desire to advance—from those who do not.

To borrow from Jerry Seinfeld in a recent article from Esquire magazine, those who will be successful in the 21^st century will be those who just want it more than other people.

Being a bystander (a person who looks on as an event occurs) to someone else’s success, energy and effort does not entitle the bystander to a portion of the fruits of that successful person’s success.

Being a bystander to someone else’s entrepreneurial effort is the other side of the demarcation line.

Being a bystander to someone else’s effort is the least productive choice (other than applauding from the crowd) that anybody can make moving forward into the 21^st century.

The future 1% will consist of those who hustled and were rewarded, and the 99% will be defined as those who watched the 1% hustle, silently and publicly applauded, and believed that somehow that applause correlates to receiving a percentage of the success.

-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 Raindrop Delusion

Conflicts come about from differences people have about what matters and what doesn’t.

What matters and what doesn’t can cover areas such as:

Resources
Emotions
Situations with other people

When people work 40-80 hours a week with people that they did not pick, hire or choose to associate with, there are going to be conflicts and disagreements circling around the three above areas.

By the way, we recently heard this statement:

“I worked for 35 years in the corporate world and I never had any of the problems with other people that you talk about solving.”

This statement, while one which we here commonly, is a sign that either:

The person making the statement causes most conflict in their lives and is unaware of it,

The person making the statement tends to avoid or accommodate others in conflict situations and is therefore unaware of conflict,

The person is hopelessly delusional.

Now, the great Zig Ziglar once noted that “no one raindrop blames itself for the flood.” We here at HSCT would add that conflicts tend to arise after a deluge of raindrops has fallen.

In the workplace, the deluge can seem overwhelming to those trapped in conflicts in employment situations not of their making.

-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

Friday the 13th

Friday the 13th is sandwiched between Thursday the 12th and Saturday the 14th.

Friday the 13th

There is nothing more mystical about the date than that.

However, like most arbitrary dates in the modern world, there seems to have been no issue with the date before the 19th century.

Friggatriskaidekaphobia is “fear of Friday the 13th” so, it does have the benefit of having a long, complicated sounding name attached to it.

We here at Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT) take the long view however, and wonder, what Thursday the 12th must feel like.

Or, Saturday the 14th.

-Peace Be With You All-

Too Clever For Our Own Good: How The Third Person Effect Makes Us Vulnerable To Persuasion Techniques

This guest post is written by David James Bawden. David James is an up and coming Marketing Assistant at SPL International. His ideas on content marketing and perspectives are his own and do not necessarily represent those of SPL International. Follow him on Twitter and read his blog at http://doingthingsdigitally.com/

How easily do you find yourself persuaded by adverts? When lynx tells you that their new deodorant will have women flocking to you do you feel a sudden need to rush out to buy lynx? Or do you find yourself wondering who these obvious sales techniques actually work on? Insulted that the company running the advert thinks so little of your intelligence?

This reaction, thinking that adverts influence the intangible ‘other’ more than they influence yourself is known as the third person principal and it actually makes you dangerously susceptible to persuasion techniques.

Psychological studies have shown that when watching an advert proven to be highly persuasive to them, people have dismissed the effect on themselves but said they believe that the advert would be persuasive to ‘other people’.

This effect is amplified when the person sees the subject as being of little or no relevance to themselves meaning you are more likely to be influenced when forced to think about something you previously had no interest in.

Clearly there is a danger here. By dismissing an adverts power to persuade out of hand we are making ourselves more open to the message that advert is trying to get across. Instead of looking down on the none existent ‘others’ we should be more aware of how marketing messages affect us and understand exactly what power they have to influence us.

David James Bawden

-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