[Advice] The Productivity of White Space

The human eye is a powerful bundle of tissues, nerves and liquid.

As the most complicated mechanism (short of the brain) in the human body, the human eye can see, take in information and transmit that information for interpretation in the brain.

One of the first things that a practicing artist must learn while still a student, is the value of white space: Those places in the piece of art where there is “nothing,” instead of “something.” The artist must dismiss her natural tendecy to trust what her eyes—that confuse the crowded appearance of the world, with meaning—see is “there,” and search diligently for what is not.

There are a lot articles on the Internet, which fall into the genre of the “new self-help.” These articles focus around “hacking” your life to become more “productive.” Some of them offer valuable information in the form of listicles, without much explanatory content, research based findings, or even a really good argument about how to implement all of the tips at a practical level. This species of article has become so rampant in parts of the Internet, that they are approaching the level of pornography in their ubiquity.

But what do the human eye, seeing, art production, and the “new self-help” all have in common?

The lack of—or the crowding out of—white space in the world.

The human mind has a limited attention span.

And the messages from various signal bearers (i.e. family members, neighbors, co-workers, etc.) tend to “crowd into” the human mind, creating distractions that cause a loss of focus, a loss of clarity, and sometimes, a loss of personal purpose. The solution to this limited attention span problem (or limited bandwidth problem) is not to read another productivity hack article on the Internet and then to vainly attempt to apply its proscriptions.

The solution is to focus ruthlessly on carving out more white space.

More absence of messages that don’t matter, in order to catch the signal of messages that do matter. In principle, this just reads like another “new self-help” proscription with no basis in practical fact, so here are three initial questions to ask yourself before carving out more white space in your personal interactions, your personal productivity, and even in your personal perspective on the world:

Is this action I’m taking right now (or think about taking later) going to give me the highest value beyond just this moment (or the next)?

Am I providing value to someone else by having this interaction with them, or am I not?

Am I playing the long game, the short game, or not playing a “game” at all by having/not having this interaction, taking on this task, or engaging with this person?

Through discipline and with an understanding of the power of absence, your human attention span can focus on the things that matter, and be more productive.

-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] 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-

Earbud_U Season Two, Episode #6 – Ben Giordano

Earbud_U, Season Two, Episode #6 – Ben Giordano, Owner- Freshy Sites, Web Developer, Entrepreneur, All Around Good Guy!

Sometimes…some days…podcasting just doesn’t work.

A guest isn’t prepared, the audio doesn’t work, or the host is not prepared.

Sometimes, no matter how prepared the host, the audio, the equipment and the guest are, everything goes right, but there still isn’t enough there!

Our guest today is Ben Giordano, of FreshySites, a local website building business, based in Binghamton, NY but expanding exponentially up and down the East Coast.

Look, I’ll be honest, the interview with Ben was fraught with problems “from the git-go”…as Kramer would have said back in the day.

I managed to get together with Ben after a year of chasing each other and when it was finally go time, the audio equipment failed, the computer (almost) failed, the Internet failed and the signal dropped in the call…everything failed except for us talking.

Which, of course, does no good for the host or the listener and does even less good for the guest.

And, I’m not throwing anybody under the bus here, other than myself…

Anyway, this is the shortest interview to date that I’ve ever had.

It was also the most stressful to date, again, not because of anything that Ben and I did, but because the audio/Internet gods decided to slam down the ban hammer that day.

What are you gonna do…

But, we managed to pull it out and redeem it by the end, and the audio gods left enough over for us to have an interview.

Connect with Ben (and FreshySites) via all the ways you can below, and have him build a website for you:

Ben on twitter: https://twitter.com/bengiordano

FreshySites on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FreshySites

Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bengiordano

FreshySites on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreshySites/

The FreshySites website: http://freshysites.com/

HIT Piece 10.20.2015 – On Coming Out of The Dip

No one tells you when you’ve come out of the dip.

No one tells you when “the worst is over.”

When a storm passes of epic (or sub-epic) proportions, human beings poke their collective heads out of their collective homes, caves, hovels and shells, and collectively sigh a sigh of collective relief.

Then they repair the damage, pick up the pieces of their lives, their homes, their communities and move on.

Or not.

But the moving on has to come from an internal source. When an external voice tells a person to “move on” or “just get over it,” or “this will all seem better at the end” human beings tend to reject those statements because they feel to the hearer as facile as they sound coming from the speaker.

I’ve said those statements to other people in the dip, in crisis moments, and in the aftermath of trauma. I have said them after searching my heart and my mind for something profound to say that would sum up the feelings surrounding the surviving of a moment, a dip or “when the worst is over.”

I’ve failed miserably and repeatedly said those words to other people.

And now, that I’m coming out of my own year and a half long dip with my business, I feel that those sentiments are just as fruitless for me to say to myself in my own head, on repeat as they are for me to say to others.

No one tells you when you’ve come out of the dip.

No one tells you when “the worst is over.”

You have to hope that telling yourself is good enough to prepare you psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually (not to mention materially) for the next dip.

-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-

[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-