A Distinction With A Difference

The savvy conflict consultant isn’t afraid of the hardship of the “beans and rice” life that has to be lived while building their peace building project.

They aren’t afraid to bootstrap their way to success.

And we’re not talking about millionaire status here, we’re actually talking about making enough money in this economy to pay the mortgage (or rent), keep the lights on and feed themselves and their family regularly.

If the savvy peace builder is bootstrapping, that’s the true difference between them, and the peace builder who bets it all on the market with one big shot—and either takes a loan out to fund their project, or tries to develop a funding scheme involving other parties.

The thing to remember is that bootstrapping your project allows you to waste less psychic, emotional, psychological and even financial energy on the risk that doesn’t matter (the money) to focus all of your energies on the risk that do matter (building peace in a broken world).

-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/

“I Don’t Believe You. This Stuff Can’t Really Work.”

…yes, it actually does.

but you have to want it to work more than you want whatever technique you are currently employing to “resolve” your situation.

And, if you like what you’re getting, then no amount of engagement, active listening, or prompting toward empathy is going to move your needle.

Other people can only take you 99% of the way. Going that last 1% (or first 1%, depending upon where you’re standing) is up to you.

-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/

[Advice] What to Do When You have Issues…

…and you will.

There will be days when no one will take your cold calls, your warm calls, or even a hot call.

There will be days when the family, the children, the house and other distractions will seem to crowd out the endless stream of productive work that you know you have to do.

There will be days when you will get angry/depressed/despondent/melancholy and it will seem to others that are outside of your internal mental circus that you are actually not all that engaged with reality.

There will be days when, no matter how many accolades and “thank yous” you will receive, they will seem to roll off of your back in the face of mounting debts, panic and fear of imminent failure.

On the days that the conflict consultant has these issues, she should push back from the table, take a break and go have coffee with a trusted friend or colleague.

Physical activity also helps, in taking a walk, or going for a run.

Finally, on the days when the committed conflict consultant has issues the most important thing to remember is that this too, shall pass.

-Peace Be With You All-

Conflict Engagement Systems Design: Will You Choose?

Organizations, just like individuals, have a particular conflict style and support a particular conflict response culture.

Since culture eats strategy for breakfast (thanks Peter Drucker), conflict is an inherent part of the cultural process of continual misalignment at many organizations.

Don’t believe me? Well, organizational misalignment between cultures and products can cause problems for people in organizations who are trying to innovate. It also causes problems for customers who experience a confusing product and poor customer service.

With all of that, one of the easiest ways to break a culture and let it grow is to reach inside the culture to the people who are part of the culture, to develop something new. But, this approach is fraught with difficulty and mixed motives, which are why most change management—and conflict development processes—tend to fail.

One easy way to overcome resistance to change and organizational misalignment is to develop a visual model, because people in organizations are more attuned with what they can visually interpret.

However, getting a person who can facilitate, storyboard, capture the visuals, and circulate the story among the gatekeepers and decision makers who often aren’t in the room, requires bringing in an outside presence; which, can be fraught with difficulty, because if the person—or organization—that you choose doesn’t work out, well, then all that investment gets no return.

Of course, you can always accept the alternative in your organization, where continual misalignments create disputes and the conflict process never gets straightened out or successfully engaged with.

[Thanks to the folks at HBR.org for moving my thinking on this.]

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Work – Life Integration

The engaged, consultant maximizes her time, so that she is working on her business, rather than in her business.

This is the difference between a job and an entrepreneurial venture.

Or even, dare I say the difference between golden chains and a golden ticket.

There are spaces between responsibilities to family, meetings, and other gaps in our lives that can be maximized for the greatest level of productivity.

But that’s not work/life balance.

That kind of balance is not attainable.

There’s only maximizing as much productivity and gaps as possible, and then hoping for the best.

The work of an entrepreneur is to minimize the level of risk in her project: To codify and commoditize the process, the product and even the productivity.

Work/life integration is more attainable than work/life balance, which is the Holy Grail of all entrepreneurial ventures.

-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/

[Advice] Gotta Have Faith

An entrepreneurial consultant without faith is a frog without water. She can go on for a while, but eventually the outside of the project becomes hard, crusty and unappealing.

Faith isn’t sexy to talk about, but even the most atheistic entrepreneur has to believe in something—other people, the power of their project—in order to get up, morning after morning and put the work in.

Particularly when it isn’t working.

The savvy entrepreneur builds her project on the basis of analytics, analysis, and raw data; but also, she builds with gut intuition and emotional intelligence.

Faith should not be confused with religion, which even the most successful entrepreneurial consultant, doesn’t talk about out loud.

But, without a good dose of faith, getting up to dig deeper, push harder and take greater risks can only be driven by fear for so long.

-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/

Conflict Engagement Systems Design: Why Its Past Time

In the 21^st century, the innovative difference between organizations that succeed, and organizations that fail, will be in how they address disputes between their employees.

As an employer, are you agnostic on this? Well, consider the following statistics:

So, here’s the question, if employees are increasingly disengaged and losing productivity, but innovation is expected to increase in 2015, where is the breaking point?

We have blogged before about conflict competence, Conflict Resolution-as-a-Service and even how HR can be used to innovate with people. But this is not enough.

The fact of the matter is, it’s time for all of us to get busy, designing new systems and process that exist, both outside and inside current and future, legal and ethical frameworks, that will protect employee self-determination and employer innovation, in a dispute scenario.

Disputes are the natural outcome of a conflict process. Employer responses to those outcomes have been broken for many years. It’s time to innovate a different way in 2015.

-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/

There is A New Year: 365 More Chances to Do It Right

We have a few people that we have worked with this year, here at Human Services Consulting and Training that we would like to thank this year:

To all of those who have worked with HSCT this year, thank you for your time, your efforts and your trust in our collaborative efforts to move toward education and understanding.

To all of those who we will continue to work with in 2015, just remember, January 1, 2015 represents the beginning of 364 continuous days to get it right, in peace, grace and love.

-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/

[Advice] Eating Ramen to Pay the Light Bill

Generating enough revenue to pay the bills is the ultimate goal of making peace as a conflict consultant.

Without revenues, there is no business and without business, there is no opportunity to engage in the hard work of making a dent in the universe and making peace in someone’s life.

So, if the savvy conflict consultant has to eat ramen noodles to sufficiently build up enough revenues to build the business, then she should eat the noodles.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Priorities and Struggles

The struggle of consulting goes beyond setting up a timetable for success and knowing when to pull the plug if it’s failing.

The struggle of consulting is in making generosity a priority when every fiber in the consultant’s body and experiences screams for selfishness, pulling in, pulling back and cutting off.

The priority has to be making generosity a habit, rather than focusing on the struggle to be generous in the first place.

Be warned though: Once the professional consultant shifts from struggling in selfishness to struggling to be generous, that becomes the true work.

-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/
HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com