[Strategy] How to Be a Role Model

What I see I repeat.

What I repeat I believe.

What I believe I do.

These three statements reveal the power of role modeling. Role modeling begins when leaders think of themselves as role models.

A famous NBA player was exactly correct in the early 1990’s with his brash statement around role modeling versus parenting. But, the shirking of the responsibility and accountability around making a choice to role model in the first place, is an ethical leadership issue. It is not out of the way to point out that the majority of leadership failings in any organization, or with any individual, are moral failings, under-girded by the avoiding, accommodating, or the surrendering of ethical responsibility.

When followers see a leader ethically fail–even in small ways–they repeat that ethical failure unconsciously. When followers repeat those failings over and over again, they begin to believe those failings, which become a lived reality. When followers believe those failings as lived reality, they act out in ways that may seem small at the outset; but, eventually, become as corrosive to an organization and it’s leadership, as the gradual dripping of acid on metal.

Leaders are role models, whether they personally desire to be or not. The courage to build relationships that affect what followers repeat, believe, and do, is the only courage that matters.

-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] The Difference Between Management and Leadership

Managing is a process—similar to conflict—of implementing, developing, and encouraging employees to accomplish predetermined goals. Much of managing in the modern world represents the fully realized theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and his ideas about productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Leadership is a relationship—similar to engagement, resolution, and communication around conflict—between followers in an organization and their leaders. Much of leadership in modern organizations rests on the concepts of authority, transaction, charisma, or some other mystical, in-borne trait. Modern leadership also doesn’t examine the role of followers in an organization.

Management is not leadership. A competent manager knows the strengths and weaknesses of the overall work team and is diligent in learning strategies and techniques to take that team to the next level in production, efficiency, and effectiveness. And if some of the people following can’t get on board, there is always the option to fire people.

Leadership is not management. A competent leader strives to go beyond merely knowing the relative strengths and weaknesses of their overall work team, and instead seeks to discover—and grow—relationships between followers, as well as between the leaders and the followers. Leadership requires doing things that don’t scale (emotional labor), engaging with conflict (leaving a comfort zone), and initiating changes and innovation (not being afraid of failure).

Leadership requires grit and grows resiliency. It also demands that the person doing the leading avoid seeking assurance and reassurance from followers; but, instead that they be guided by their own internal principles and be able to articulate those to followers. Managing requires keen observation, willingness to follow direction, and the ability to articulate those observations and directions up and down a hierarchical chain.

Too often, too many organizations seek to impose leadership on people who should be managers. Employees look for leadership from people who have attained status, but not skills. And supervisors, and managers, become frustrated, overwhelmed, disheartened, and burnt-out, because they are asked that their reach exceed their grasp, without being asked if there capable of reaching that far anyway.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] Why Don’t We Value Compromise?

Ian Bannen’s words from the 1995 film Braveheart, echo through the collective unconsciousness of many organizations—schools, businesses, churches–when people in them consider compromise: “It is precisely our ability to compromise that makes a man noble.”

Many in the workplace associate compromise, not with negotiation strength, but with weakness around positions and principles. Passion is not associated with compromise, nor is exuberance, excitement, or energy. Compromise is typically roundly mocked and is too often viewed as the last outpost of the deceitful and the conniving.

Why do employees in the workplace, members of religious organizations, or even the staff and students of schools, see compromise as something both shameful and necessary?

How negotiation happens, our views on what constitutes a “win” and a “loss,” and our personal passions around the positions we hold, reveal quite a bit about why compromise gets such lousy marketing, yet is still the way that many negotiations around issues that matter, get done.

How negotiation happens—Many people believe that negotiation is a process in which everyone “wins,” there are no “losers,” and all parties can somehow get along. A few people believe that the process of negotiation is one in which many people “lose,” only a few people can “win,” and the parties who lost deserve what happens to them. Both of these views associate the conditions of having to negotiate in the first place with moral failings, rather than associating the conditions of having to negotiate with a systemic, structural failing. Both of these view associate compromise with moral, political, or ethical failure and look upon the need for compromise as a temporary “defeat” in the pursuit of greater, more transformative goals. There are a very few people who view compromise as necessary, process oriented, and frame the negotiations as “win-win” or “lose-lose” for all parties involved.

What constitutes a “win” and a “loss”—Many people misuse terms “winning” and “losing” and project their own desires, thoughts, and collectively accumulated wisdom onto the negotiation process. And when the process fails, the failure is a reflection on them as people, rather than on the process itself. There are very few people who can “lose and laugh.” The vast majority of us inject our personal views and beliefs on fairness, right and wrong, and who has power and who doesn’t into determining which party has “won,” “lost,” or compromised unneccessarily in a negotiation.

Our personal passions—This has been noted before, but it bears repeating that principles are based in values, traditions, and narratives that give meaning to each party in a conflict. Principles spring directly from deeply held passions, but too often we use the language of positions to express (or to obfuscate) our passions. Many individuals and organizations confuse their interests for their principles. What follows form such confusion is social shaming, public bullying, and even emotional, legal and cultural efforts to engage in destruction of the character of the other party in the negotiation.

Ian Bannen’s other line from Braveheart also rings true: “Uncompromising men are easy to admire.”

How difficult is it to be uncompromising in your own conflicts in your own life?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] A New Mental Model of Trust

The mental model for trust is broken in workplaces.

The old model looked like this: I (an employee) work for you (the employer) loyally for a period of time (X) and, with enough reciprocation, I stay with you for the remainder of my career.

That mental model is one that only works under the specific economic conditions of the 1940’s through the 1970’s in America. However, since there is one thing that America does really well (the marketing of America to every other country in the world) as the mental model rubs up against changing economic reality, there is friction everywhere, between those people who want that model, and those people who are trying to create a new model. Employees at organizations of all kinds are in the midst of a great cultural, economic, philosophical, and social destruction of that old mental model and at the same moment are carving out a new mental model.

This new model (right now) looks like this: I (an employee) work for you (the employer) but not so loyally, and I take my accumulated intellectual capital from your workplace to another workplace, whenever it suits me, because you may not be around in five years.

There’s a lot of talk from employees, organizations, management thought leaders, and others about the virtues of disruption, innovation, and change in Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., and the media centers of Los Angeles and New York City. But if you go to places outside of Madison, Wisconsin, or outside of Peoria, Illinois, or travel four hours north of New York City and talk to employees of organizations still struggling to maintain a semblance of the old model, the virtues of disruption, innovation, and change that get talked about breathlessly in those other places, get addressed in tones of defeatism, regret, and anger.

This tone and its lived reality is also a mental model. And the employees who exist inside the new mental model may out innovate, out disrupt, and out change the employees longing for a return to the old mental model; but, there must be ways to develop every potential employee together, without brutal economic and social Darwinism being the answer.

Here are the three ways to shift organizational mental models:

Access to the means of production is the linchpin: As more and more resources, time, and talent gravitates towards developing digital products, services, and processes there are questions about whether “everyone” can be a computer scientist. This is a red herring argument. Access to the means of production means high speed Internet in a neighborhood, whether you’re 50 miles outside of Overland, Kansas, or in the heart of downtown Miami. Such access shifts the mental model of ‘The-Internet-as-an-Entertainment-Vehicle’ to ‘The Internet- as-a- Economic-Development-Vehicle.’

Valuing and incentivizing emotional labor:I talk about this repeatedly, but it bears writing yet again: The mental model of what constitutes work in the workplace has to shift towards valuing and incentivizing employees who can collaborate, get along, and manage conflict in a competent and healthy fashion in a dynamic, globally competitive environment. This is the core of laboring with mind and emotions, versus laboring with hands and muscles. Both can be rewarded, but the incentives toward the labor which can be repeated until a person is on death’s door must be made infinitely more robust in workplaces.

Hiring for mental models rather than personality traits: As algorithms and computers have entered more and more into the hiring matrix of organizations, more and more creative, innovative, and change oriented people with growth-mindsets are abandoning all hope of being hired in some organizations, and are migrating to large cities where their value can be rewarded. Abandoning all of the hiring tools is not the point. The point is, how people perceive their agency in the world, based on what they’ve accomplished in the past (stuff that’s not listed on the resume and doesn’t get picked up by the algorithm), will matter more and more for discovering and hiring employees of value.

If organizations can shift their own mental models around these three areas, then they will survive and thrive as the century continues to unwind, with employees all over the world, who will be loyal, trustworthy, innovative, and change oriented. This new mental model may share some aspects with the old model, but it will survive future economic, social, technological, and cultural shocks which we can’t see coming.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] An Easy Dismissal…

To dismiss positions, parties, and interests that we’d rather not acknowledge exist in the first place, is a sign of the inability to negotiate deeply.

The terms that are used to dismiss those positions, parties, and interests that we’d rather not acknowledge exist in the first place, include (but aren’t limited to) “Well, the consensus is…,” or “The conventional wisdom says…,” or my personal favorite “Everybody knows that…”

When a dismissal is preceded by any of these three statements, it reveals a lack of empathy, curiosity, or even ability, to get inside another party’s mental model of how “the world” works. Such dismissals also reveal a deeper fear: That maybe our own position really isn’t as black and white as we think that it is; and, that disagreement, dispute, or dismissal of our own position by the other party, might be on the horizon.

A dismissal in a negotiation, indicates that we have made the negotiation less about accomplishing goals, getting to agreement around interests, and establishing common ground. Instead, a dismissal shows that we have made the negotiation content personal, the desire for a favorable outcome for us paramount, and that there is emotional residue that we must address on our own part.

Hiding behind conventional wisdom, making appeals to “what everybody knows” to be “true,” or drawing on consensus to persuade, is not a sign of confidence in our own position. Instead, it’s a rallying cry for someone to come and support our right position and to negate the other party’s wrong position.

In negotiations around value based interests, the ability to empathize (but not agree) with the other party, and to do so using language that elevates supporters and reassures detractors, is the sign of a true statesman.

How many statesmen are in your workplace?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] The Dysfunction in Your Workplace

In any discussion of conflict competence in the workplace, damaging communication patterns come up as an issue. Damaging communication is preceded by its forefather, dysfunctional communication. Dysfunction leads to damage as surely as water makes things wet. And at work, dysfunctional communications typically begin through “the grapevine” and come about in five different forms:

Gossip—includes idle talk or rumor, especially about personal or private affairs of other employees, co-workers, customers, etc.

Rumor—involves some kind of a statement whose veracity is not quickly, or ever, confirmed. Depending on the organizational structure and history, and where rumors originate in the hierarchy, rumors spread intentionally can serve as propaganda to manipulate employees or teams.

Innuendo—an innuendo is an insinuation or intimation about a person or thing, especially of a disparaging or a derogatory nature. Most innuendo’s start as “innocent” jokes, and tend to fall in the gap between what people think about other people’s behavior, and the reality of that behavior.

Tall Tales—a tall tale is a story with unbelievable elements, related as if it were true and factual. In the workplace, tall tales almost always involve whispers and can seem like rumor, but usually they are driven by external factors or pressures on the organization.

Myth—a myth is a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind assumed their present form, although, in a very broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story. Myths are at the bottom of many organizational models and serve to explain occurrences that people otherwise think they have no explanation for. The fact is, myths do the most long-term damage to an organization, because of their corrosive nature on innovation and through creating stubborn resistance to change.

When people become engaged in any of the above communication styles at work, they may interfere (innuendo) or damage (rumor, gossip) relationships, stymie innovation (myths) and creating situations ripe for lawsuits (innuendo) without being aware of it. In essence, when employees, managers, and others are unconsciously, unskilled at communicating effectively, they are displaying competency (at the novice level in most cases) at passive-aggressively creating conflict.

There are a few ways out of this:

The way to get out of this is to role model the behavior that you would like to see in other people at work, particularly if you are a boss, manager, or supervisor.
The other way out of this is to monitor your communication style to determine if you’re engaging in any of the five forms.
The last way out of this is to build a culture on open communication, getting information right the first time, and trusting adults to behave in a mature fashion—and removing those who don’t (or can’t) from positions in the organization quickly.

However, if your organization can’t do the steps above, then the only other solution is to train the people that you already have.

H/T to David Burkus on this one.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] None of You Seem to Understand….

…sometimes, it’s not about the money, or the prestige, or the status, or any of the external, ego-driven reasons that people give when asked “Why did you get into that fight?”

Sometimes, it’s about sending a message to all the other parties involved (and standing on the sidelines) in a conflict, because something is wrong, something needs to change, or something needs to be fixed.

The core questions when it’s about sending the message are:

What do you do in a conflict, if the person (or persons) you’re sending the message to, refuse to hear it, can’t understand, or outright disagree with it?

At what point does escalation do more damage and create more problems than it solves?

Is it worth the energy to get to resolution?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Advice] What Collaboration Would Look Like in Your Organization

In the workplace, employees, managers, and supervisor all say they desire more collaboration overall, but in particular when conflicts arise. The desire for greater collaboration is often conflated with more teamwork, or strong team bonding, or building better teams at work, but collaboration is not any of these things. And, much of this stated desire is based in generating more productivity per person in order to generate larger bottom line profits.

The other drawback to collaboration is that the rewards for engaging in it (in the majority of organizations) are not outsized, but the losses in the event of failure are. Collaboration is still viewed by many organizations as The Alamo; that is, the place to make an organizational “last stand” when the resources run out.

However, when what matters is internal (employee) and external (customer) organizational trust, workplaces would be well advised to consider collaboration as a key metric of moving an organization forward and past conflicts and disagreements. This metric becomes even more of the platinum standard when an organization is in an industry space of rapid change and uncertain outcomes. Both of these factors create stressors on internal and external constituents and can lead to conflicts—places where collaboration actually is a useful tool.

We have an idea of what the collaboration mode should look like in actual practice, but as a behavioral choice in conflict, here are some high points:

The novice collaboration mode is marked by initial mistrust of other parties in the conflict (based on past relationships, current secondary conflict issues, the nature and content of the conflict at hand, etc.); but, is also based in the strong desire to work with the other party to get to resolution for the self, rather than the organization.
The advanced beginner collaboration mode is marked by growing trust and belief in the efficacy of individual personal emotional strengths in addressing the conflict scenario. This mode is also marked by growing resiliency and confidence in the resolution process itself (negotiation, mediation, arbitration, etc.).
The competent collaboration mode is marked by a desire to grow other parties in the conflict to the level of collaboration that this mode has already achieved. This mode of competency is also marked by frustration when parties refuse (or are incapable) of growing out of their own modes and toward collaboration.
The proficient performer collaboration mode is marked by a determination to allow other parties in conflict the autonomy to choose whatever mode they would like to choose to get to resolution (e.g. assertiveness, avoidance, accommodation, competing/controlling, etc.) but to not get “caught up” in those modes. Other party self-determination (and preserving that self-determination) becomes key at the proficiency stage.
The expert collaboration mode is marked by open communication, authenticity, honesty, as well as positivity and patience. This mode allows for other parties in the conflict to determine their own path through the conflict, but also advocates for collaboration as the ultimate mode of addressing issues.

In the workplace, collaboration is rarely seen, and is mostly associated with individuals who have attained emeritus status in an organization. Freed from the daily competition based in an organizational cultural perception of resource lack, those individuals become organizational ambassadors and diplomates in this mode.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] A New Model For Conflict Competency

There are few subjects more boring to read about online than how to attain competentcy in any area, from leadership to instructions on plumbing. And it doesn’t matter if that reading is directly from an organizational HR manual, or from the very informative HBR.org website.

Reading about watching paint dry might rank higher.

Typically, such articles are drily written and are rarely brought to life in any way that’s going to help you in a “real life” scenario.

Or, the advice contained in them comes off as “pie in the sky.”

Part of that is the way that these articles are written.

The other part is that you make a choice about what to remember and what to forget after about 8 seconds when you skim an online article or blog post.

So do I. So does that guy over there.

The real issue with such writing is not lack of reader understanding about the levels of competency or the modes of conflict. It’s not even the epidemiology of conflict, the fact that your boss may be a conflict incompetent, or even that there are really very few tangible KPI’s for reducing conflict in the workplace, other than emotional ones (and emotion in the workplace is a “no-no” as “everybody” knows).

The real issue is that there is very little robust measuring or tracking of the links from competency in any given situation to addressing how people actually behave when placed in a situation they find to be uncomfortable, distracting, irrelevant to accomplishing their goals, or that they have no interest in. There’s also very little robust descriptions of such situations to buoy the writing along.

Competency is the combination of observable and measurable knowledge, skills, abilities and personal attributes. Competencies are demonstrated by real people, who are able to recognize hazards associated with a particular task, and have the ability to mitigate those hazards witin a set of defined standards, consistently and over time in an organizational setting, from their home to their workplace.

This definition is so narrow and specific (and dry), that OSHA requires jobsites to designate a person on the site as the individual who is competent enough to perform safety tasks in a suitably repetitive manner. And by the way, merely appearing to be competent isn’t good enough when OSHA shows up on a jobsite.

Imagine if such thing were required in every workplace?

There are five levels of competency: the novices, the advanced beginners, the competent practitioners, the proficient performers and the experts. Competency used to be sexy and interesting in an Industrial Era focused on the metric of maximum production out of the maximum number of people, but that has shifted as fewer people can do more work. And in the Information Economy, even at the highest levels of many industries, competency (whether HR defined or emotional) is still confused with expertise—and rewarded.

So, it seems as though it is time to propose a new model for the workplace; or at the very least, initiate a mash-up of several research areas and to explain why a new direction is needed.

Who’s the “designated competent person” in your workplace?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Manipulation, Deceit and Disagreement in the Digital Age

When most information can be known about other people via the swipe of a finger, the click of an Internet search, or through scrolling through a social media feed, how is it that so many people can still be deceived?

This is not really an information based question, this is a question about one of the key components of persuasion in the digital age, the dark side of it, if you will, deception and manipulation.

When only a few people and organizations used to hold the keys to both Truth and Power, it was hard to find out facts that disagreed with whatever the dominant narrative happened to be. Speaking truth to power was not an exercise for the faint of heart, either in a family, a community, or even in a municipality.

But, after over 25 years of commercialized Internet access to the masses, information (about people, ideas, processes, services, and on and on) seems hard to come by, rendering many people suspicious that they are being deceived but no quite knowing how. This feeling leads to the creation of various digital “tribes” that do battle to “correct the record” and “make the facts known.” But, at the end of the conflict, everything seems murkier than when the disagreement initially began and the residue of mistrust and anger lingers in the air.

Are we more deceived, or more informed?
Are we more oblivious, or more “tuned in?”
Are we more selective (“owning our own facts”) or are we more open to hearing and contemplating the “other side.”
Do disagreements and disputes have more weight online than they do in “real life” and if so, why?
Does anonymity and privacy lead to manipulation and deceit, or are they the only tools the powerless have to call the powerful to task?
What is the middle ground?

There are no easy, quick, or definitive answers to these questions. And after 150 years of “The Industrialization of everything” from education to social services, we in the Western world have been inculcated to believe that quick and definitive is the “new normal,” rather than being aware that, for many questions, there is more ambiguity than there are answers.

-Peace Be With You All-