[Opinion] The Candy Coated World

There is a lot of advice floating around about how to build a better world. Most of the advice though, is similar to that one M&M candy in every bag which when bitten into, collapses revealing nothing underneath the candy-coated shell.

The leaning on symbolism—the candy-coated shell—rather than focusing on the hard work of developing substance—the stuff inside of the M&M—creates confusion, frustration, miscommunication, and more conflict rather than less.

By leaning on symbolism rather than substance, authors direct audiences to bite into the candy-coated shell of nutrition less advice, based in rules and religion, rather than relationship and doing the hard work.

This can be frustrating and unsatisfying, particularly when audiences are looking for advice about how to address a conflict in their lives.

-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] Work + Job = Labor

68.5% of employees in American workplaces are either actively disengaged or not engaged with the work that they are doing at all.

This is due to many issues and factors, including the absence of support from other people in doing the labor that matters most. Managers, supervisors, and business leaders, don’t often think that emotional labor has much value because it’s not easily measureable, quantifiable, or knowable.

The other factor that causes employees to either actively disengage or just not engage, is a lack of understanding about the difference between work, a job, and labor. For far too long we have confused those three terms. So let’s get some clarity:

Work is passion. It’s the thing that lights up an engaged employee in the morning. Some employees are engaged by tracking numbers on spread sheets, and some employees are engaged by dealing with difficult people. The vast majority of employees are disengaged with work that they didn’t start being passionate about in the morning, and will forget the second they get home.

A job is series of tasks for which employees get paid. But then again, maybe not. Employee’s jobs are often confused with the term work. However, tasks rarely get employees engaged in the workplace due to gaming of the internal organizational reward and promotion system, strong at the workplace social sanctioning, and continual conflicts between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for accomplishing tasks.

Labor is the combination of work (passion) plus a series of tasks (job) that spool out across the overall life of an employee. The term “labor” is often only used in the economic sense to describe a series of discreet outputs. But, for the not engaged or actively disengaged employee, labor is a continual drudgery, full of disappointment, stress, conflict, and confusion. Labor is something to be abandoned as soon as the workday ends, and dreaded as soon as the weekend closes, to be put down with relief at retirement.

Managers, supervisors, and business leaders, as well as organizations on the whole, have a social responsibility that goes beyond sharing profits, engaging in wage transparency, or working collaboratively within a local, national, or international context. They have the responsibility to their current and future employees, to create opportunities for engaging in work that will dovetail with individual passions, in the pursuit of a lifetime of long-term emotional labor.

Otherwise, social conflict, organizational collapses, and fewer and fewer outsized rewards accruing to an ever shrinking pool of employees, is one of many possible, conflict-filled futures.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Strategy] Different Mediums

The medium is not the message.

Or so it is said.

And if the most important thing is sending a message, what do you do when no one is using the same medium that you are, in order to hear the message, you want to send in the first place?

This is the trouble that leads to polarization in modern communication scenarios, as well as increases rates of conflicts, and escalations in the course of conflicts. It’s not about everybody speaking the same language (which we often think is the solution, either through training or codifying language in general); it’s about everybody communicating using different mediums.

And when my medium of choice for delivering (or receiving) a message of choice, is not your medium of choice for receiving (or delivering) a message you think that I need to hear, then conflicts, confusion, and escalation are bound to increase, not decrease.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] A Common Confusion

Competency is often confused with expertise.

This is an issue common in management settings, where assumptions about people’s skills are often made in lieu of continued education and consistent means-testing against real world scenarios.

Competency in creating resolutions to conflicts is rare. Expertise in creating conflicts and letting them grow to the point of needing to be resolved by outside forces, is not rare.

In the workplace, there exists the assumption that employees will attain competencies in many areas, and that these competencies will reveal themselves as expertise “just-in-time.” The only problem with that thinking when it comes to conflicts in the workplace, is that “just-in-time” expertise arrives often too late, when there should have been more focus on following up and developing competency in peace making.

-Peace Be With You All-

[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-

[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-

[Opinion] The Work You’re Doing

In the workplace, affective (heart-based) work generates less quantifiable outcomes than cognitive (head-based) work.

Affective work is about emotional labor and connecting with people through the long-game of relationship building.

Cognitive work is about intellectual labor and creating and maintaining the planned obsolescence of connections as commodities to be used and then discarded.

One kind of work leads to conflicts, dead-ends, starting over, and working through difficulty. One kind of work leads to outcomes that can be replicated all the way to the point at which they can’t be replicated—by a human being—and then the human being who’s doing them gets laid off.

One is about the future and one is about the past.

Which outcomes are you trying to generate?

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] The Heart of Innovation

Leading other people through conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments is the most important leadership labor that many of us will ever do.

But there are a few things working against us:

We are told that anyone can lead, anytime anywhere. This is a unique tick of an American business culture built at the intersection of the myth of rugged individualism and the reality of having to compromise to get along. Many employees believe this idea, but when they are asked, challenged, or offered the opportunity to lead others through uncertainty—without reassurances—many employees fail to even take up the challenge in the first place.

We don’t believe that other people’s conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments, have anything to do with us. Sometimes leading other people through their conflicts requires active listening, engaging in the moment, and caring actively about the other person. This requires leaders to set aside the noise inside of their own head, and to get inside the noise of someone else’s head. Empathy is hard to develop when we are consumed with winning, avoiding, or confronting the chess game of conflicts that we are involved in ourselves.

We don’t see an immediate reward/outcome for engaging, but we do see an immediate reward/outcome for maintain the “status quo.” Conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments sometimes are harbingers that something needs to change in an organization. When they serve as those harbingers, they are a clarion call to disrupt the status quo. But there’s no immediate reward for such behavior in many organizations. As a matter of fact, usually, there is a sanction or unstated penalty. Instead, what gets rewarded with titles, status, and a corner office is going along with the crowd, staying silent, keeping your head down, and avoiding too much responsibility.

The future will be shaped by people who engage courageously in the emotional labor required to lead other people through conflicts, disagreements, tantrums, fights, confrontations, difficulties, and disappointments. The future will be owned by the people (and organizations) who have the courage to go to the other side of the horizon.

That’s innovation.

-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-