HIT Piece 1.26.2016

The noise of the world seeks to crowd out the silence of being alone. The modern world eschews being alone as a sign of some sort of pathology, but this is merely more crowding out.

A leader, thinker, or developer of any kind needs to be alone to be effective. In the silence of being alone, one can learn to motivate others and yourself. Schedules, calendars, emails, all of these create background chatter that move, push, and manipulate many people into feeling overwhelmed, overworked, and never done.

I love it when my character evolves, and is challenged, in the sounds of silence, which I seek to make more space for in my work life, even as my responsibilities increase. This silence—and creating and preserving the conditions for such silence to begin and endure—is where all the work is.

-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] A New Mental Model of Trust

The mental model for trust is broken in workplaces.

The old model looked like this: I (an employee) work for you (the employer) loyally for a period of time (X) and, with enough reciprocation, I stay with you for the remainder of my career.

That mental model is one that only works under the specific economic conditions of the 1940’s through the 1970’s in America. However, since there is one thing that America does really well (the marketing of America to every other country in the world) as the mental model rubs up against changing economic reality, there is friction everywhere, between those people who want that model, and those people who are trying to create a new model. Employees at organizations of all kinds are in the midst of a great cultural, economic, philosophical, and social destruction of that old mental model and at the same moment are carving out a new mental model.

This new model (right now) looks like this: I (an employee) work for you (the employer) but not so loyally, and I take my accumulated intellectual capital from your workplace to another workplace, whenever it suits me, because you may not be around in five years.

There’s a lot of talk from employees, organizations, management thought leaders, and others about the virtues of disruption, innovation, and change in Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., and the media centers of Los Angeles and New York City. But if you go to places outside of Madison, Wisconsin, or outside of Peoria, Illinois, or travel four hours north of New York City and talk to employees of organizations still struggling to maintain a semblance of the old model, the virtues of disruption, innovation, and change that get talked about breathlessly in those other places, get addressed in tones of defeatism, regret, and anger.

This tone and its lived reality is also a mental model. And the employees who exist inside the new mental model may out innovate, out disrupt, and out change the employees longing for a return to the old mental model; but, there must be ways to develop every potential employee together, without brutal economic and social Darwinism being the answer.

Here are the three ways to shift organizational mental models:

Access to the means of production is the linchpin: As more and more resources, time, and talent gravitates towards developing digital products, services, and processes there are questions about whether “everyone” can be a computer scientist. This is a red herring argument. Access to the means of production means high speed Internet in a neighborhood, whether you’re 50 miles outside of Overland, Kansas, or in the heart of downtown Miami. Such access shifts the mental model of ‘The-Internet-as-an-Entertainment-Vehicle’ to ‘The Internet- as-a- Economic-Development-Vehicle.’

Valuing and incentivizing emotional labor:I talk about this repeatedly, but it bears writing yet again: The mental model of what constitutes work in the workplace has to shift towards valuing and incentivizing employees who can collaborate, get along, and manage conflict in a competent and healthy fashion in a dynamic, globally competitive environment. This is the core of laboring with mind and emotions, versus laboring with hands and muscles. Both can be rewarded, but the incentives toward the labor which can be repeated until a person is on death’s door must be made infinitely more robust in workplaces.

Hiring for mental models rather than personality traits: As algorithms and computers have entered more and more into the hiring matrix of organizations, more and more creative, innovative, and change oriented people with growth-mindsets are abandoning all hope of being hired in some organizations, and are migrating to large cities where their value can be rewarded. Abandoning all of the hiring tools is not the point. The point is, how people perceive their agency in the world, based on what they’ve accomplished in the past (stuff that’s not listed on the resume and doesn’t get picked up by the algorithm), will matter more and more for discovering and hiring employees of value.

If organizations can shift their own mental models around these three areas, then they will survive and thrive as the century continues to unwind, with employees all over the world, who will be loyal, trustworthy, innovative, and change oriented. This new mental model may share some aspects with the old model, but it will survive future economic, social, technological, and cultural shocks which we can’t see coming.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] An Easy Dismissal…

To dismiss positions, parties, and interests that we’d rather not acknowledge exist in the first place, is a sign of the inability to negotiate deeply.

The terms that are used to dismiss those positions, parties, and interests that we’d rather not acknowledge exist in the first place, include (but aren’t limited to) “Well, the consensus is…,” or “The conventional wisdom says…,” or my personal favorite “Everybody knows that…”

When a dismissal is preceded by any of these three statements, it reveals a lack of empathy, curiosity, or even ability, to get inside another party’s mental model of how “the world” works. Such dismissals also reveal a deeper fear: That maybe our own position really isn’t as black and white as we think that it is; and, that disagreement, dispute, or dismissal of our own position by the other party, might be on the horizon.

A dismissal in a negotiation, indicates that we have made the negotiation less about accomplishing goals, getting to agreement around interests, and establishing common ground. Instead, a dismissal shows that we have made the negotiation content personal, the desire for a favorable outcome for us paramount, and that there is emotional residue that we must address on our own part.

Hiding behind conventional wisdom, making appeals to “what everybody knows” to be “true,” or drawing on consensus to persuade, is not a sign of confidence in our own position. Instead, it’s a rallying cry for someone to come and support our right position and to negate the other party’s wrong position.

In negotiations around value based interests, the ability to empathize (but not agree) with the other party, and to do so using language that elevates supporters and reassures detractors, is the sign of a true statesman.

How many statesmen are in your workplace?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] “It’s Too Hard”

“It’s too hard.”

Yep.

It’s supposed to be.

At work, it’s difficult to start becoming competent at a new way of approaching conflict (say switching from avoiding to engaging) and to have success at it immediately. When employees, managers, and supervisors are challenged to switch approaches (either through feedback, evaluation, or training) they respond by rejecting the premise of the challenge entirely and returning to their old ways.

When we consciously realize that we are unskilled, we have the opportunity to go toward initial ineptness, and forge a new path toward competency. However, many of us at work, when faced with conflict scenarios, challenges, disagreements, fights, and other disputes, default to what we know rather than pursuing new knowledge. This tendency is based in fear and the overwhelming human need for reassurance in the face of risk.

In our post-industrialized work culture, reassurance, avoidance of risk, hiding from outcomes, and fear of taking a chance to make a change in the ways that we respond to each other when we don’t, can’t or won’t get along will have fewer and fewer outsized rewards attached to it. Being consciously emotionally uncomfortable to gain competencies in a different way is the emotional labor of the 21^st century. In an organizational context, the way to ensure that employees, managers, and supervisors follow through on their challenges is to provide three consistent supports: encouragement, positive feedback, and monitoring of implementation of the new way.

The worst part of the hangover that organizations are suffering from the end of the heady days of the Industrial Revolution, is that the inner, emotional, response that we believed did not matter that much, matter now more than ever. And empowering, encouraging, and developing consciously skilled employees, managers, and supervisors in their approach to conflicts in organizations, is the only way to end the hangover.

-Peace Be With You All-

[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-

HIT Piece 1.19.2015

When I’m blogging, I’m working.

When I’m recording a podcast interview, I’m working.

When I’m in a pitch meeting with a potential client, I’m working.

When I’m facilitating a training, I’m working.

When I’m designing a training for a client until 1am in the morning, I’m working.

When I’m surfing the Internet researching a business idea, I’m working.

When I’m on Skype talking with a potential client in another space, I’m working.

When I’m answering your email, I’m working.

When I’m making a follow-up phone call, I’m working.

When I’m at a networking event talking to you, I’m working.

When I’m reading a blog post, news article, or insight on my phone and it looks like I’m ignoring you, I’m working.

When I’m Tweeting, Facebook-ing, or otherwise engaging on social media, I’m working.

I’m not working when I’m at the movie theatre with my kids. Or, sitting on the couch with my wife. Or, when I’m cooking dinner and listening to jazz music. Or, when I’m reading a book.

I only actually get paid for one of those things on that list above. But without all the other things on the list, I can’t do the one thing well enough to add value to your organization so that you pay me.

Trust me…I’m working…

-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 Future Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We have nothing to fear but, fear itself.”

“I have a dream.”

“We do these things because they are hard.”

One of the more terrible losses in our contemporary age is the loss of soaring rhetoric, with allusions to classical Western literature (e.g. Shakespeare, Greek and Roman texts, the Bible, etc.), appeals to the common good, and an unwavering belief that Americans, together, can just “do” things.

[Opinion] The Future Martin Luther King, Jr.

This Image Does Not Belong to Us

This contemporary loss due to three things:

Americans no longer share a common language around problems because of the fracturing of the media environment, with a million tiny voices crowding out one large voice. There is no longer a single voice of authority, such as a Cronkite, a Vidal, or a Buckley. Instead there are multiple voices whose sources believe they are competing for authority, but in reality they are competing for attention.
Americans are no longer commonly educated in the writings of the past, partially because the Western literature canon has fallen to the wiles of multiculturalism, social engineering, and the desire to see education as a technical good, rather than as a way to link current generations to past meaning. In our efforts to replace the technical efficiency that used to be valued when we were a manufacturing country, we have moved to making education serve technology rather than wisdom.
Americans have blown up the tendency that we always had, toward being independent individualists (“get in your Conestoga Wagon and go West”), and have fetishized it to a degree never before attained by a population in human history. Since the Myth of the West has collapsed, we see this tendency most visibly in the retreat to individualized, mobile experiences, the popularity of streaming shows on Netflix, complaints about Academy Award film selections, and the overwhelming silence from populations in the center of the country who are never questioned except once every four years during elections.

The reason I’m bringing all of this up today, on Martin Luther King day, is that from Franklin Roosevelt (and earlier) all the way through Ronald Reagan, presidents, statesmen, politicians, and social leaders at least shared a common education, language, and a tendency toward a collective sense of commonality with the American people they were looking to persuade. They used that sense to make appeals to a higher good, all the while acknowledging that not everybody, including them, would make it to the end, but the journey would be glorious anyway.

This is not to say that there wasn’t separation, there wasn’t strife, and that there weren’t two views of America. If you think that the current age of fracturing is new, then take a look at newspaper headlines, political advertisements and rhetoric from the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th century. There was far blunter commentary, outright conflict, and rhetorical viciousness than would be allowed today in our tamped down rhetorical climate.

What is new is the lack of common language and the results of that lack have served to create deeper political, social, and cultural fault lines, all the while, playing on the natural American tendency toward liberation, freedom, and autonomy.

Appeals of “We’re gonna’ go get ‘em,” or “Hope and change,” or whatever the catch phrase was of the eight years of the Clinton Administration (“I did not have sex with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky”) don’t ring out quite as commonly. They don’t appeal to the better nature of our common American experiences. They are not as fluid, nor will they be remembered by history when certain proscriptive policies and efforts fail (or succeed), except as punchlines in YouTube videos, with a trail of bitter comments in the threads below the video.

On this day, I wonder what Martin Luther King, Jr., a preacher who read Greek, studied the Bible closely, and who knew all about the moving power of common rhetoric designed to unite people (both white and black), would think about the current restless mire America is in?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] None of You Seem to Understand….

…sometimes, it’s not about the money, or the prestige, or the status, or any of the external, ego-driven reasons that people give when asked “Why did you get into that fight?”

Sometimes, it’s about sending a message to all the other parties involved (and standing on the sidelines) in a conflict, because something is wrong, something needs to change, or something needs to be fixed.

The core questions when it’s about sending the message are:

What do you do in a conflict, if the person (or persons) you’re sending the message to, refuse to hear it, can’t understand, or outright disagree with it?

At what point does escalation do more damage and create more problems than it solves?

Is it worth the energy to get to resolution?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] What Collaboration Would Look Like in Your Organization

In the workplace, employees, managers, and supervisor all say they desire more collaboration overall, but in particular when conflicts arise. The desire for greater collaboration is often conflated with more teamwork, or strong team bonding, or building better teams at work, but collaboration is not any of these things. And, much of this stated desire is based in generating more productivity per person in order to generate larger bottom line profits.

The other drawback to collaboration is that the rewards for engaging in it (in the majority of organizations) are not outsized, but the losses in the event of failure are. Collaboration is still viewed by many organizations as The Alamo; that is, the place to make an organizational “last stand” when the resources run out.

However, when what matters is internal (employee) and external (customer) organizational trust, workplaces would be well advised to consider collaboration as a key metric of moving an organization forward and past conflicts and disagreements. This metric becomes even more of the platinum standard when an organization is in an industry space of rapid change and uncertain outcomes. Both of these factors create stressors on internal and external constituents and can lead to conflicts—places where collaboration actually is a useful tool.

We have an idea of what the collaboration mode should look like in actual practice, but as a behavioral choice in conflict, here are some high points:

The novice collaboration mode is marked by initial mistrust of other parties in the conflict (based on past relationships, current secondary conflict issues, the nature and content of the conflict at hand, etc.); but, is also based in the strong desire to work with the other party to get to resolution for the self, rather than the organization.
The advanced beginner collaboration mode is marked by growing trust and belief in the efficacy of individual personal emotional strengths in addressing the conflict scenario. This mode is also marked by growing resiliency and confidence in the resolution process itself (negotiation, mediation, arbitration, etc.).
The competent collaboration mode is marked by a desire to grow other parties in the conflict to the level of collaboration that this mode has already achieved. This mode of competency is also marked by frustration when parties refuse (or are incapable) of growing out of their own modes and toward collaboration.
The proficient performer collaboration mode is marked by a determination to allow other parties in conflict the autonomy to choose whatever mode they would like to choose to get to resolution (e.g. assertiveness, avoidance, accommodation, competing/controlling, etc.) but to not get “caught up” in those modes. Other party self-determination (and preserving that self-determination) becomes key at the proficiency stage.
The expert collaboration mode is marked by open communication, authenticity, honesty, as well as positivity and patience. This mode allows for other parties in the conflict to determine their own path through the conflict, but also advocates for collaboration as the ultimate mode of addressing issues.

In the workplace, collaboration is rarely seen, and is mostly associated with individuals who have attained emeritus status in an organization. Freed from the daily competition based in an organizational cultural perception of resource lack, those individuals become organizational ambassadors and diplomates in this mode.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] What Competing-Controlling Looks Like in Your Organization

The entire history of humanity shows that responding to a complex conflict environment with the competition/controlling mode generates outsized rewards, and little downside, to the individuals who choose it as a mode of addressing conflict.

Wars, battles, fights, riots, pogroms, demonstrations, marches—all are forms, shades, and methods of competing with other people and groups and “winning” control over resources that may have been scarce in the past, but may be more abundant now.

In workplaces, competency at controlling other people, the space of conflicts, and even the resources that go into conflicts, generates outsized rewards in status, money, and position for individuals. In workplaces, competition is fostered (either through overt messaging or through covert cultural conditioning) as a way to separate “winners” from “losers” or “A” players from “everyone else.” The rewards for engaging in these types of competitions are outsized, as are the losses—of face, reputation, authority, and status.

Many of the other responses to conflict scenarios that people are competent at—including accommodating, passive-aggressiveness, assertiveness, and avoiding—are, at their root, responses to organizational work cultures that value competition and controlling in a conflict scenario over other potential responses. Those other responses are deemed organizationally useful as downsides, for situations where “everyone else” fights over the leftovers from the “A” players’ tables.

We all know what competency at controlling and competing looks like, but here are some behavioral high points:

The novice competitor/controller mode focuses on hiding competitive desires and manipulates behind the scenes. Sometimes this behavior will be confused with passive-aggressiveness, or hostility.
The advanced beginner competitor/controller mode focuses on developing elaborate plans to deceive other parties in conflict, and even to involve other people who have little to nothing to do with the actual conflict itself, but who have access to outsized resources.
The competent competitor/controller mode manipulates parties in conflict at a high level, and can also mask intentions through avoiding direct confrontation, using others to accomplish goals, and spread gossip and rumors without accountability.
The proficient performer competitor/controller mode advances through an organization by engaging in ignoring and minimizing past mistakes when confronted with them and removing people from positions that could report previous poor performance, bad judgment, or choices.
The expert competitor/controller mode attains outsized rewards, (i.e. personal, financial, organizational, etc.) but role models this behavior as a cultural response to conflicts in the organization, thus setting the table for future repeating of the same behavior.

If this all reads like the HBO show Game of Thrones to you (or a description of the political process in many contemporary countries) you would be correct. However over time, many organizations have developed crisis and resource poverty mindset-based cultures, focused around varied degrees of competition/controlling when faced with conflict scenarios, and many more will be focused in that way in the future, as communication and information increases transparency globally.

-Peace Be With You All-