[Advice] Temps, Interns & Others

For the average consultant in the area of peace building—or any other area—the temptation to choose yourself to do the work that is required is too easy to pass up.

Unfortunately, then the solopreneur-consultant spends valuable time on projects that could well be outsourced to someone else.

At the other end of the pincer is the consideration of what happens if there are not enough revenues in the project yet to hire another person?

Enter the idea of hiring temporary, contract based help or even interns, or outsourcing some white collar work to some place overseas.

There are different considerations with each of these paths:

Temps: based upon the state that you’re building your project in, temporary employees may be more of a headache to have, tax wise, than hiring a full-time (or part-time) employee. In addition, the freedom to hire temporary workers on a contract basis does not mean, philosophically, that you have scaled. Because when the contract ends, so does the involvement with the temporary worker.
Interns: This is another sticky classification of individual. Many states are now cracking down on organizations for using interns to perform work that used to be done by a full or part time worker. The legal and tax headaches may not be worth it. Plus, depending upon the state that you’re in and the higher education institution that you are working with, hiring an intern to work on a project may not be your best bet.
Overseas Outsourcing: There has been a rise in the last few years of web-based personnel companies that promise to connect the solopreneur to overseas help with white collar business functions, such as accounting, sales tracking or even receipt handling. They promise to do this for a low hourly—or weekly—rate and promise results. The problem with this solution is the element of risk. As in, how much do you really want some “bonded” company hiring people overseas to look at your receipts at 4 am?

There are no easy answers to the hiring questions that many solopreneurs, freelancers, solo consultants and others face in the realm of peace building.

Perhaps a combination of things will work best for an individual.

Perhaps not.

But once you start choosing yourself, the bigger question to ask is “When is it more appropriate to choose someone else?”

-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/

Trust Me

“Trust me. I got this.”

If there is any other phrase that precedes a sense of oncoming dread and mistrust, it’s this one.

If there is a statement that preceded eventual conflict more than any other, we aren’t aware of it.

Trust, when freely given, often operates as a noun, describing a person, place, thing or an animal. In such a context, trust transforms a relationship from one level and moves it into a far more intimate level.

However, in the above statement, trust transforms from a noun to a verb, requiring the giver to transform into a passive actor in their own drama. In such a context, trust transfers control from an active actor, engaged with their own outcomes, to another active actor whose motives may not be—well—trustworthy.

The sender of the phrase is looking to reassure the receiver and, typically, this sentence means that the reassurance is not working.

The professional peacebuilder should probably avoid the transformation of trust from an active noun to a passive verb, unless the relationship that she is building is long-term enough to warrant such a change.

Otherwise, she’s just asking for trouble.

-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/

[Opinion] 10 Year Overnight Success-Vol. 2

10,000 hours is a long time to persevere and continue without gaining competence, much less mastery.

The human mind seeks shortcuts, quick answers and easy solutions, because it likes the status quo and seeks to maintain equanimity and order in a world of chaos and conflict.

Yet, without those hours, every single one of them, there can be no catharsis. There can be no learning.

When we were still actively engaged in the visual arts, we used to hear, “Every artist has 2,000 bad pieces of art inside of them.” This statement was met with incredulity at the time, but it turned out to be absolutely true.

And here’s the other thing about those 2,000 bad pages, by the time the artist gets to page 1,999, he—or she—doesn’t care about what other people think about all the pages that came before.

10,000 hours does more than pound the path toward competence and mastery. It forges the will of iron to continue in the face of rejection, dismissiveness, ignorance and misunderstanding.

So that, at the end of those 10,000 hours, the human mind has become used to the very things that it feared.

-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/

This Too Shall Pass

Black Friday is a creation of marketers.

Almost specifically designed to get the average person to buy more stuff, it is a conflict resolution practitioners’ dream fake social “holiday.”

People engage in shopping rituals, while also engaging in conflict with each other, over the acquiring of stuff.

People fall for the commercialism (advertisements) that subtly intimate that choosing not to make purchases, or too engage in the ritual, that somehow a person is a Scrooge.

People report an uptick in feelings of depression, dissatisfaction and other mental health issues.

This comes about due to a falsely generated feeling of collective belonging around this season, tipped off by the false shopping ritual of Black Friday.

During this day, the words attributed to either an Eastern monarch, or King Solomon, should ring in our ears, both as a blessing and as a curse.

Because, the sun is going to rise tomorrow and the rituals of one, man created day, have little to do with the vicissitudes of the future, or even the inevitability of conflict.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Cranberry Sauce Has Stuffing In It

On Thanksgiving Day in America, it’s tempting to look at the whole thing as merely a set-up for the coming commercialization and endless marketing of Christmas.

However, the first Pilgrims didn’t look at it that way and neither did the Native Peoples who helped them celebrate the day.

Individually, Thanksgiving is wrapped up in visiting family, traveling to the table and avoiding conversations about things that matter, in favor of things that don’t.

You know…to keep the peace.

Papering over conflict in life didn’t work for the Pilgrims (they transitioned from a commune based system of economics and social ordering to a market based system after a hard winter of near starvation where no one worked) and it won’t work for you in 2014.

Acknowledging differences with respect, maintaining traditions and honoring symbols are at the core of the Thanksgiving tradition.

Let us also remember, that the triumvirate of holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years’—are positioned on the calendar to remind us that thankfulness, redemption and new beginnings are due to everybody, not just those who are part of our immediate tribe.

-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/

Conflict in Your Organization

Have you ever heard the one about the consultant who mediated their own divorce?

No?

Neither have we.

We’ve just heard the story many times before and wondered how much of that could have been avoided with some conversations.

As a professional consultant though, in the area of conflict, or in any other area, you are going to face conflicts in your organization.

There are going to be people who disagree, dissemble and even will attempt to deceive you. Some of these people you will hire and it will amaze you the number of ways that they can harm your organization.

All of this can be avoided by having open, honest conversations about your organization, your motives, your dreams and—most importantly—your goals for their involvement in your project.

You know, the same kinds of conversations that you would have with an intimate partner, so that you don’t wind up mediating your own divorce.

Or, negotiating a firing.

Conflict is inevitable, but the responses to it—and preparation in advance of it—does not have to be.

-Peace Be With You All-

A Fundamental Breakdown

Depending upon who you talk to, the social contract is either breaking down, or being renegotiated, with terms that favor the disaffected, the previously ignored and perennially held back.

Fundamental Attribution Error, correspondence bias and the attribution affect—all cornerstones of modern social psychology—describe the contemporary social contract in two basic ways:

External: If something goes wrong, other people are to blame and should have controlled their situations better.
Internal: If something goes wrong, I am not to blame because situations happen that are beyond my control all the time.

When we seek to blame others—or blame circumstances—for our misfortunes, disputes and conflicts, we shift the social contract in subtle and profound ways.And, depending upon whom you talk to, personal responsibility, or powerful institutionalized forces, are to blame.

But, when there’s no one to attribute cause and error to, and when there’s no set of circumstances that can be forgiven, how is conflict to be resolved?

-Peace Be With You All-

We Built This

There’s been a trend that has advanced as our electronic tools have outstripped our good sense, our common decency and our impulse control.

The trend can be heard in phrases such as “my Twitter feed blew up” or “Facebook melted down.”

When the popular media narrative drives emotional responses to hot button issues, surrounding topics such justice, identity, legal decisions or social depredations to push up ratings and gather attention, the population in the United States now has the tools and know how, to take to Twitter and Facebook and express displeasure, disgust or even to “poke the bear.”

The social contract is breaking down, not because people have the tools to express opinions from the peanut gallery, but because every peanut in the gallery has access to the tools in the first place.

But, we in the field of ADR shouldn’t get mad at the Internet or social media. After all, we either actively or passively, participated in building the media that we have right now.

We shouldn’t throw up our hands in disgust and walk away, tune out, turn off and drop off the “map.” We also probably shouldn’t engage, foment and otherwise stir the pot more, with anything but affirmations of peace and solutions to complicated issues.

We have taken the words of the Declaration of Independence, and the admonitions and arguments of dead 18th, 19th and 20th century white male philosophers to heart, but unfortunately, we have taken them to heart—and to task—using tools and social spaces that weren’t really designed for nuanced observation, conversation and peacebuilding.

The popular narrative is exactly that—a story—and we as individuals are under no obligation to spread the story, comment on the story, or even to believe the story.

We are under obligation, as peacemakers, to point out alternatives to the dominate narrative, no matter from whom—the majority or the minority—it may spring, and offer a path toward the Truth.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Firing Your BFF

If you hire your friends because you don’t know who else to hire, and they’re the only ones in your circle that you trust, then you are well on your way to actually having to fire one of them someday.

And, before the successful consultant scales up to employing the person that they used to share ice cream cones with on the playground at age six, there are about three things to consider:

Does the friend that you’re going to hire have the expertise needed to serve your company well, or are they just a warm body filling a space in your organization?
Does the friend want a position because they can actually add value, or are they just there to ride your coattails?
Does the friend have friends that are going to be a headache, or an asset, to your organization if it comes down to having to hire more people?

After the successful, scaled up consultant takes these three things into consideration, no amount of connections, collaboration or previous commitments should encourage a “friendly” hire.

As Michael Corleone once infamously said “Friends and money – oil and water.”

Think about hiring someone other than your BFF, so that you don’t have to hack that relationship to make it work again.

-Peace Be With You All-

How to Really Break the Internet

The reason why there is so much meaningless content in your Facebook feed is that the platform has developed into an advertising platform, rather than a connection building platform.

If you are building a business as a conflict communication consultant, mediator, arbitrator or another type of practitioner, we can discuss the viability of paying for advertising in your connections’ Facebook feeds.

But this is about the conflict evident in the tension between what Facebook—and other platforms—used to be versus what they are now. The marketer Seth Godin made the point in a recent blog post that when a company goes public, it’s purpose ceases to be about changing the world and begins to be about ticking up the share price point for investors.

That creates tension.

The other factor that creates tension is the difference between what users expect from the platform based on past experiences versus what users are experiencing everyday. This is a tension evident in the fact that the users who engage with the platform the most have the greatest chance of getting their content in your feed.

Which means, Aunt Ida who only uses Facebook once every month won’t know that you aren’t seeing her content as often as you are seeing the content being shared and reposted by good ‘ol Trent who is unemployed and has been on Facebook everyday of the week for the last four months.

That creates tension.

Eventually, when another, viable, connection platform (and no, Ello isn’t it) comes along (as it will) Facebook will go the way of TV and become just another luxury advertising platform that charges more and more to push content to an ever more fractured and shrinking audience base that will be paying less and less attention.

That creates tension.

-Peace Be With You All-