[Strategy] Top 4 Outcomes of Emotional Intelligence

In a negotiation, absolute emotional intelligence corrupts certain outcomes.

Outcomes where one party feels as though they were take advantage of
Outcomes where both parties feel as though the negotiation was a waste of time and effort.
Outcomes where one party isn’t sure that the other party dealt with their needs in “good faith”
Outcomes where both parties feel as though they are handcuffed to each other by virtue of the way in which agreement was concluded

Absolute emotion intelligence feels unattainable for many negotiators, because caring about someone else’s motivations and emotions, opens the door to cooperative—rather than coercive—power.

And, let’s admit, coercion sometimes feels good. But isn’t it our higher calling, to put aside what feels good in the moment, to do what is good for the long-term?

Even if the long-term is defined by the parameters of the contract language…

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

HIT Piece 02.24.2015

I was sitting in a room the other day and heard someone in the room next door talking about launching a “buy-now” button.

They are doing it for their business to continue to remain relevant in the 21^st century with a population of buyers for their products and services, whose perspective has changed on how to buy.

Turns out, that people, and industries, can change.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] 3 Steps for Reframing Organizations

Many organizations still prefer to litigate—or lobby for legal changes—to protect their standing in the open market.

This includes not just external protections, such as market access, intellectual property protection and copyrights on branding efforts, but also, internal protections around hiring, recruiting, onboarding, and resolving internal employee disputes.

Organizations and businesses still handle conflict as a product rather than as a process. This comes with the perspective of conflict resolution—however they are resolved—as “the way we do things around here.” This leads to thinking of conflict resolution as just another method of gaining a favorable organizational outcome.

However, by focusing on the design of the architecture of their internal conflict resolution systems, organizations can evolve beyond merely protecting their place in the market and move toward innovating with people.

Here are three steps to accomplishing this:

Creating new design architecture requires unbundling every step in the hiring to firing funnel and reexamining all of the assumptions that are baked into your organization, particularly those around the idea of “who gets to work here.”
Developing new design architecture requires dissecting the culture of an organization and determining what the real purposes of the organization are, not just the purposes displayed on the masthead, or for stakeholders.
Embedding a new design architecture for resolving conflicts requires a transforming of organizational thinking around conflict—shifting from thinking of conflict as an unfortunate by product of another process to be resolved as quickly as possible and in the organization’s favor, to thinking of conflicts as a process to be engaged with as a a natural part of evolution, growth and innovation.

Unbundling, dissecting and transforming will take any organization toward building a conflict resolution system as a service working for employees and other stakeholders, rather than a service working against employees and other stakeholders.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Infographic] A Guide to Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence has been a researched concept for many years, but with the authoring of books like Mindsight by Daniel J. Siegel and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, E/I has been reintroduced for a new generation.

Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence served as the basis for a lot of the information in this infographic. And with the advent of advances in nueroscience, more and more of what he talked about in he 1990’s has been proven to be true. We would encourage you to check out his book and add it to your personal—and organizational—conflict library.

(c) 2015, Human Services Consultign andTraining, All Rights Reserved

To join our email list (and get more of these snazzy infographics), head on over to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/hsct-offers page and sign up today.

After you do that, download our two FREE offers: Fear White Paper and Forgiveness White Paper.

-Peace 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/

[Advice] A Positive No

The moment that you are ready to leave the office, complete a project, take a phone call, or meet a deadline, another person walks up.

This person has other priorities, but finding out what those are is not the thing that you are interested in, but that person makes sure to tell you all about their priorities.

The thing about time management is that managing other people is the unsung, unconsidered hardest thing to do.

Other people have their own priorities, and we are too embarrassed, too distracted, or too disinterested to discover what they are.

This is when the positive no, or the sandwich no, becomes the best way to address the energy vampires (or time sucks) that other people can be sometimes.

It 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.”

Then, put that time vampire on the calendar, turn around, and walk away firmly. This last part is important, because many people can’t close the conversation.

When using a positive no—or a sandwich no—remember to always be closing.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice]The 3-Fold Path to Self-Awareness

The more work we do through training others to get in touch with themselves, the more and more surprised we are by how few people in organizations are in touch with themselves.

There are three pieces to self-awareness:

The ability to be vulnerable—which is typically translated as “the ability to be wrong,” but that’s a misnomer and faulty definition. Being vulnerable means knowing when to show your heart…and when to keep it hidden.
The ability to be authentic—which is usually confused with being vulnerable, but that’s a surface understanding. Being authentic means being able to let down your emotional guards enough to “make a fool of” yourself, and to be able to accept the consequences of what that means.
The ability to be transparent—which is usually transposed into the question asked most often in our trainings: “Do I really have to tell my [insert name of group I’d rather not be transparent with here] everything that I do?” No. But in order to become self-aware, the first step toward being emotionally literate, a person has to be comfortable with honesty and beyond the crippling effects of shame.

Without attaining those three pieces of self-awareness–vulnerability, authenticity, and transparency–getting to emotional literacy will be impossible for any individual.

And in the organization of today—and the future—emotional literacy, spearheaded with self-awareness, will be the trait of leadership that separates organizations which thrive from those that merely survive.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Hard Thing About Now Its Too Late

The savvy peace builder is either all in—or not.

But, at a certain point, financial realities take over and the rent must be paid, or the electric bill, and the savvy peace builder must make the choice to make making peace a side hustle.

Now, typically the word hustle comes with negative connotations, but mostly it should be associated with little sleep and much success.

But, when the main work (the 40 hour grind) takes over more and more time and energy from the hustle that matters (the peacemaking pursuit) the savvy peace builder will sometimes kill the side hustle by dividing time away from it even further.

This is how many entrepreneurial ventures end, dissected and subdivided under the scalpel of the 40 to 60 hour work week and the “sure” thing that brings security, a steady paycheck and fewer uncomfortable conversations with spouses and children.

The tough decision—the hard thing about this hard thing—is that diversification of focus and talents leads to more work not less; but making the decision to keep it to one-and-a-half hustles makes all the difference between “man I’m glad I lost sleep to build this project” and “man, I wish I’d taken the time when I had it to build this project. But now it’s too late.”

Now, it’s too late.

-Peace Be With You All-

The Percieved Urgency of the Actual Urgency of Mindfulness

There’s actual urgency and perceived urgency.

Actual urgency is a chemical spill on the shop floor. Or a heart attack that a midlevel manager has on a Friday afternoon.

Perceived urgency is everything else.

One of the main struggles that people have with time management is balancing perceived urgency versus actual urgency and a big part of the issue focuses around being here. Now.

Thinks about that.

Being here now is the essence of mindfulness.

Deeply integrated and linked to meditation, mindfulness requires individuals in an organization to really balance the priorities of someone else’s actual perceived urgency, with the demands of the moment.

And the next moment.

And the next.

Mindfulness seems like a new wave thing, in all of the business journels and on LinkedIn, but it has long been the purview of people of a spiritual bent.

But, to be realistic, we must admit that if an individual works forty to eighty hours a week with other people, there better be a way to decompress and unbundle actual urgency versus perceived urgency.

-Peace Be With You All-

Seduced by the ZMOT

There is a zero moment of truth.

Google researched this a few years ago, and the upshot of the idea is, that, due to the amount of content we are consuming on a daily basis, the modern Western consumer has so many more options to try and research before they buy.

There are other elements that tie into this, including the brand being what customers says that it is and advice to brands on how to avoid interruptive advertising, but the idea remains relevant for us in the conflict fields.

For practitioners and participants in the process of conflict, the nature of change and attaining the skills to be successful at managing conflict and change, there is a zero moment of truth as well.

We talked a little bit about that in this post here, but it remains indicative of our modern day that the zero moment of truth—the moment at which we decide to pre-shop our notions, read and get advice from others, watch a conflict video on line, or ask questions of other individuals—for conflict practitioners, is a moment of great impact.

But for participants in conflict, there seems to be a dearth of materials and resources, leading to the ultimate moment of truth, where conflict participants attempt resolution themselves, and may succeed, fail or just surrender.

-Peace Be With You All-

HIT Piece 02.17.2015

Making a mistake is not that hard.

As a matter of fact, we do it all the time as human beings.

But the importance of mistakes, failures, or only accomplishing part of our goals, is not always acknowledged positively because, we fear vulnerability as adults.

In the business and corporate world, we still give lip service to the idea of the importance of failing, but the majority of us still work in systems, dedicated to the process—and following it to never fail.

I fail all the time.

I am also struggling to be vulnerable and authentic in this blog, when I present and facilitate and when I work through interviews with guests on my podcast.

But I’m not there yet.

And yet, like many of you out there, I am still making mistakes.

-Peace Be With You All-