[Opinion] Labor Conflicts

Computers and algorithms, big data and analytics, robotics and wearbles.

We are the first generation that might live long enough to watch our technology outstrip our ambition, our needs, our wants and even our good sense.

There is no software—or hardware—solution for human emotions though. And as we transition from being a society and culture based on economic consumption, we will have to develop a new economy based in creation.

We are going to have to monetize the outcomes, the talent, and the voice that emotional labor gives us.

Finally, mothers’ and feminists’ cries about the disenfranchisation of “women’s’ work” will be answered. We will have to place a monetary value on empathy, story, design and artisanal focus, and move away from the precision that machines can give us.

Conflicts will arise that will be unexpected around issues of access rather than race, gender or economics. The “left brained” people aren’t going to just stop analyzing, using logic and developing new ideas.

And the conflicts that have always existed under the surface in the global economy between the arts and the humanities and engineering will be waged on different ground, more favorable to those who can compose and create, rather than those who can defy logic or program a computer.

Trainers, developers, speakers and presenters, will have the unenviable job security of curating and collating the knowledge that exists all across the virtually infinite space of the infinite web.

Mediators, conflict practitioners, facilitators, and arbitrators will have to be great designers, storytellers, visual artists and—at the furthest end—movie makers, in order to train, educate, convince and convert a population who will be frustrated, disintermediated, and staring a seemingly hopeless, jobless future in the face.

We are excited about the future. There will be more opportunities, more adventures, and even more hope.

But not human generated hope.

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

[Advice] The Minstrelry of Conflict

Minstrel shows were three act structures that were about racism, sexism, segregation, mockery and buffoonery.

At a deeper level, they were also about making up the participants’ faces—both Caucasian faces and African American faces—to obscure the lived, experienced pain of racism, sexism segregation, mockery and buffoonery.

Infantilization, stereotyping, vulgarity and defining deviancy as entertainment, were at the core of minstrel shows. Now, most minstrel shows following the American Civil War, declined in popularity among white audiences. Also, many blacks who had been slaves, and performers, in the minstrel shows, moved into the areas of circuses, vaudeville, variety shows and musical comedy.

Why even address this horrible piece of United States history?

For two reasons:

Many of us fail to talk about the issues of face, vanity and pride and how they are drivers for the seemingly never-ending vaudeville of conflicts in our lives—and the lives of other we know.

Many of us respond to conflicts in our lives with methods and choices that parallel the action and deeper message of minstrel shows.

Think about it.

We put on a “face” consisting of the caked on make-up of personal pride and vanity in an effort to avoid addressing conflicts (primarily ones between our values and other people’s values) and then head to work, school or church.

We are activated by people who are also hiding their own pain and we proceed to studiously dance around (another aspect of minstrel shows was dancing) the conflicts at hand around values that matter.

We use rhetorical techniques and communication tactics to accommodate outcomes and commodify results that we know are wrong (similar to the vicious racism and sexism that was applauded by the minstrel who audiences) and to try to walk away and remain feeling good.

When we finally talk about the conflicts in our work lives, but not in our home or family lives, we try to say that we have other’s best intentions in mind, which can sometimes come off to others in the dance of conflict as paternalism.

What’s the way out?

Understand and acknowledge that loving confrontation and healthy assertiveness is not aggression or an attempt to “hurt the feelings” of the other party. Confrontation and assertiveness is sometimes preferable to avoidance and accommodation. However, many of us are uncomfortable because of our own conflict vanity, our image/face management and our lack of courage.
Understand and acknowledge that feelings of shame and guilt are mostly in our heads and are driven by our fear-based responses. When fear kicks in we shame ourselves and others as a defense against the guilt around the knowledge that we “could have done more.” But as we mentioned before, courage has always been in short supply…
Understand and acknowledge that risk and reassurance are an anathema to each other and we must pursue either one or the other, but not both. A person cannot take on the risk of moving forward to confront—in love, mind you—conflicts at home, at work or at church, while also seeking reassurance that the relationship will be saved in forms we are the most comfortable with, and that codifies what we believe, rather than capital “T” truth.

The popularity of minstrel shows with the American public declined after the American Civil War, but its imprint and impression remains everywhere in our entertainment, our music, our movies, and even our TV shows.

Hiding the pain of conflict under the caked on makeup of our tendency toward avoidance, our lack of courage, and our need for reassurance, and continuing to do the dance as a public and private show to preserve destructive, dysfunctional relationships, will leave imprints on our lives that will only get deeper, not shallower, over time.

-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] Training Day

There is a problem with the way that training is used to develop employees in the workplace.

The problem is not that the employees fail to attend the trainings and workforce development offerings on a regular basis.

The problem is not that employees fail to implement the things that they learn and use those lessons to innovate the organization forward even more.

The problem is more complicated than that:

The most critical employees in organizations (managers, supervisors, division leaders and others) are almost never in the room to add their perspective on the issues in the organization which led to the need for training in the first place.

The employees in the organization attending the training tend not to believe they have the courage, the authority or the power to affect innovations around the dominant issues they were called to train on resolving in the first place.

There’s no easy way out of this two-pronged, organizational trap.

And too often, the people who order, organize and even develop the training for employees also serve as gatekeepers buffering the employees in the training room from the people above them.

The difficult way out of this is twofold:

The managers, supervisors, division leaders and other higher-ups need to be seen in the room, endorsing the training and perspective of the development opportunity, the employees are being told to attend.

The statement “I’m too busy to attend” or “That training time doesn’t fit into my schedule” or “I already know all of this, so why do I need to be there” should be banished from managerial vocabulary and scrubbed from supervisory thinking.

Employees need to be provided with opportunities to innovate, such as the type offered to engineers at Google and other high tech companies, on clock time, rather than relegating the power to change to the venues of canned training or fancy bromides on the walls.

Would courageously implementing these to solutions cause organizations to have to do the hard work of shifting mindsets (both of shareholders and owners) toward a truly new conception of what productivity looks like?

Yes.

Which is why the standard is here to stay, at least for a little while longer.

-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/

[Strategy] The Unfairness of Courage

In a conflict, the courageous don’t always win.

And this is not fair.

Winning can be defined as “getting an outcome beneficial to them and their perspective on the issue.”

Winning can be defined as “making change in the face of opposition.”

Winning can be defined as “seeing my ‘enemies’ defeated and driven into obscurity.”

Winning can be defined as “living long enough to see my values and story become dominant and see other values that I oppose recede into obscurity.”

The courageous are those who seek to do three things well:

Engage with the hard emotional labor of dealing with other people and trying to see the world through their lens.
Establish the boundaries and lines that are non-negotiable for them, but understand that the other party might be flexible.
Energize the other party (or parties) with the ability to become allies and friends (at least for the moment) in the pursuit of a greater goal.

If this all sounds hard, that’s because it is.

If all this sounds impossible, it’s really not.

If all this sounds like the purview of diplomats, generals and politicians, rather than auto mechanics, nurses or office managers, it is both.

But, because we deal with other people, with mixed motives, hidden agendas and other issues, the courageous don’t always win.

And this is the output of emotional labor.

-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] On Courage

The difference between people who “succeed” and people who “fail” in a conflict scenario is individual levels of courage.

Courage is in short supply and always has been since the days of the playground bully and meeting new people once you got off the bus for the first time in the first grade and Mom and Dad weren’t there to hold your hand anymore.

Courage is not about preparation, learning, discipline or even persistence and grit—although all of those skills and internal factors help.

Courage is about not needing external validation from the world—basically, not needing assurances to do the right thing—and just doing the right thing in the first place.

Which is often the hard thing.

In a conflict scenario, it takes courage to confront in a healthy way, prepare for the feedback you will receive about your role in the problem and then integrating that feedback into your worldview, while also giving feedback to the other person about their role in the scenario.

It takes courage to confront a cheating spouse, explain how what they did impacted you and your family and then to listen to them tell you why they made their choice.

It takes courage to address a difficult employee who has little social skills and appears to have even less desire to develop them, and try to find a middle ground to get tasks done in the workplace.

It takes courage to speak up when you think bad decisions are being made in a fraternal, civic, volunteer, or church organization that you disagree with. And it takes courage to hear and accept why those decisions may not be the best for you, but are the best ones for the organization.

Courage is at the bottom of all resolution. Forgiveness is at the bottom of all reconciliation efforts. Labor is at the bottom of all engagement practices, advice and opinions.

So then the question becomes: How much do you really want to grow as a person before you leave this life?

-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/

[Advice] 3 Steps to Eliminating Hurry

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry in your life.

Many time management seminars and productivity hacks, mobile applications, in-person trainings and coaching sessions, skirt around the core problem at the heart of modernity: There are only 24 hours in the day.

The problem is not that people have too many tasks in their adult lives (we do); the problem is not that people are constantly busy with priorities that don’t really matter to them (we are); the problem is not that people are stressed out, frazzled, feeling like they are browsing through life, and deeply emotionally and spiritually unhealthy (we are).

The problem is that most of what we read, absorb and try to put into practice focuses around moving around the priorities we don’t like, and trying to squeeze one more ounce out of the 24 hours we do have—so that we can do more things we don’t like.

All while telling ourselves the story (in this case, the lie) that “Well, if I just do THIS thing, I’ll have more time to do what I want to do.”

Really, the issue comes down to patience. In our American culture (and if you’re reading this another country, or from another cultural background, this statement may or may not apply to your experience) we value impatience, hurry, and idolize the cult of busyness, over many other areas.

We resent people who appear to have more time than they know what to do with. And we envy in our hearts people with wealth, who at least outwardly, appear to have no worries about time at all, and appear to have boundless energy.

Then, we read the articles on productivity, time management, wealth creation, the “1%” and on doing more with less, searching for assurances that we are right and “they” who appear to have more than us, are wrong.

But, what if we tried three other things rather than just moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic one more time?

Say “no” more…and mean it—“no” to promotions that we don’t really need and that take more time from priorities we said were “non-negotiable,” “no” to obligations that come packaged as opportunities and “no” to productivity and time management “hacks” that don’t get at the core of what we really need. Which is the courage to say “no” in the first place.
Eliminate hurry—don’t hurry. That’s it. Just slow down to a crawl. Take time to talk to people in front of us, rather than the people on Twitter (we are deeply guilty of this one, so we are are talking to ourselves here as well). Take time to drive in the slow lane for a month at the posted speed limit. Do the old things (like writing and reading) that require us to put aside the things that don’t matter (like work) and put in front of us the things that do matter (like self-improvement).
Get active—55% of mobile phone users go online through their phones. Most of this is browsing, shopping and in general, watching what other people are doing. Television used to be the driver for passivity, but we now have a TV/computer/radio in our pocket all the time. But getting active in our own lives requires us to stop watching the escapades of people who are already active in their lives.

Difficulty in balancing seemingly competing demands is the first stop on the road to conflict. For many people, difficulties begin with the management of their perception of hurry, patience, stress, and other people. When we have the courage to ruthlessly eliminate hurry, stress is reduced and difficulties become manageable, rather than events that can derail an entire day with anger, stress, and impatience.

-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/

[ICYMI] Organizational Climate Change – Part 2

Anthropogenic is a big word that basically means, “the fault of human beings.”

When we look at organizations built by human beings, from families to governments, there are a lot areas where anthropogenic issues combine to create a negative, toxic conflict climate.

And since conflict is a process that never really ends, there are only two kinds of environments that it can happen in, nurturing or harmful.

We all know what a harmful environment looks like, but a supportive, cooperative environment, where conflicts can happen and not leave traumatic scars that carry over into other aspects of our lives—well that’s the Holy Grail isn’t it?

Anthropogenic conflict climate change starts with disrupting the internal focus around an ancient resource that many people lust for deep in their hearts, but no one knows how to define.

Innovations around power tend to focus on redistributing the detritus that arises from the resource—such as wealth, social control or political influence—without ever really addressing the power itself.

There’s gotta be a better way…

Originally published on January 27, 2015.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today!

[ICYMI] Organizational Climate Change – Part 1

The presence of climate change is real. And the climate is heating up the planet.

Everywhere on earth there are objects expelling hot air, and other gases, that serve to create a harmful climate.

And the climate that’s being created is the opposite of creative, nurturing and balanced.

Changing the climate of the planet is hard, but changing the conflict climate of an organization, filled with people with their own ideas, has to be focused on disrupting four areas:

Power abuse and threats
Unhealthy competition
Endemic distrust
Defensive behaviors

And the conflict climate where the psychological atmosphere is balanced in favor of these four areas (rather than in another direction) is bound to experience negative change.

This is particularly true when the conflict management tools used regularly in an organization, are focused in areas that support power, competition, distrust, and defensiveness, such as litigation and policy regulation.

This is also true when the conflict continuum is focused on escalation, and continuing comfortable levels of dysfunction, without seeking to break apart the underlying psychological processes.

Global climate change didn’t happen in a vacuum, and neither does changing the conflict climate of an organization.

Originally published on January 26, 2015.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today!

[ICYMI] No

The word “no” is so compelling because it serves as both a positive and a negative.

We’ve written about this before, here and here, and it never fails to amaze us how much more there is to cover. This is because the crowning question that we asked, from clients to casual observers of our blog and social feeds is: “How do I say ‘no’?”

Saying “no” to an opportunity, a person or a situation is hard for three reasons:

It requires us to articulate the values that we hold dear.
It requires us to make judgment about those values in relation to another persons’ desires and requests.
It requires us to place a potential future best, above a present tangible good.

It is hard for people to say “no” (positively or otherwise) because we feel as though we are letting down other people. And being the social animals that we are, reciprocity and social norming exert a powerful pull upon our psyches, our hearts and even our souls.

The word “no” places a delineating marker between people, ideas, projects and purposes. It segregates, and closes off, even as it opens up other possibilities. This is why rejection is such a hard thing to overcome for sales professionals, marketers and others who engage in the business of persuasion.

“No” ultimately can feel like a rejection of persuasion, rather than a statement of preference:

Preferring the safety of nostalgia over the danger of the new
Preferring the comfort of the present over the uncertainty of the next moment over
Preferring the status quo over a change

What are you saying “yes” to by saying “no”?

Originally published on March 19, 2015.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today!

[ICYMI] Moving Around Deck Chairs on the Titanic

The corollary question to, “Does any of this stuff really work?” is “Does anybody really change?”

The writer and marketer Seth Godin, in his most recent audio production, Leap First, talked about how people often need to hear assurances. Assurances that everything is going to be alright in spite of organizational layoffs or familial changes, or assurances that the future (of work, life, the economy, etc.) is going to be just the same as the past, but slightly better.

He stated that the reason people need to hear assurances is that the human lizard brain turns on a jabbering, sabotaging, klaxon of alarm bells when assurances are not wrapped around threatening information. This is a defense mechanism, long developed and honed to a point that sabotages needed changes in organizations.

In relation to conflict, we see evidence of such a need in the training and teaching that we do. In the mediations that we no longer do, we used to see that clients needed assurances that there would be safety, autonomy and self-determination at the mediation table; before they even sat down to do the scary work of confronting their former partners, husbands or wives.

In the effort to educate people in how to approach conflicts, difficulties and even confrontation in better ways in their organizations, we have struggled with the practical fact of having to provides assurances to “grease the runway”—while also having to provide challenging information that will encourage audience members and clients to stretch past their comfort zones.

Comfort zones are the geographic location where the “expert” lives (whether in a person’s head or a person’s organization). The “expert” employs the whispers of the lizard brain, assuring us, even as we are stretched by new knowledge that “only minor changes need to be made,” or “that’ll never happen here, the organization is too big,” or “we’ve always done it one way. Don’t worry. That guy will be gone tomorrow and you can get back to doing what you were doing the way that you were doing it.”

The phrase “moving around deck chairs on the Titanic” indicates a person (or organization) choosing to act in a futile manner to solve a minor problem (the arrangement of the deck chairs) while a major problem (the looming iceberg) goes unaddressed.

Does anybody really change? We don’t know.

We hope (and yes, we know that “hope” is not a scalable strategy–we measure and assess outcomes as well) that every person who attends a workshop, a seminar, a corporate training, or a keynote chooses to exit their comfort zones in some small way to do the work that matters around conflict, confrontation and difficulty in their organizations.

But moving deck chairs around is the mental, emotional and spiritual activity of an organization deep in their comfort zone, being soothed with assurances, which lap upon the sides of the organizational body, even as changes loom in the distance.

Originally published on April 24, 2015.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today!