[Strategy] The Cultural Bleed

During our time when technology is flattening the formerly meaningful differences between people and systems, and turning—what once used to be a disk that was thicker at the center than the edges, to one where the edges are getting sharper and sharper—culture still matters.

Competency in how to handle the steep decline from the comfortable center of cultural assumptions to the bleeding edge of cultural competency, should be one of the most sought after skills by employers.

But it’s not.

Mainly because employers are people first and positional titles second, and people tend to lack the courage and self-awareness to break their own frames, in order to attain competency.

Any kind of competency.

The distance between the thick comfortable center and the scary bleeding edge (which is as sharp as it sounds) is not a straight line. It’s curved, with switchbacks, dead ends, false starts and bad beginnings.

But the courage to break our frames and skate toward the bleeding edge of cultural competency, is a core leadership trait that any employer should alwasy be in the process of creatively destroying and rebuilding, before looking to develop it—or hire it—in others.

-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/

[Strategy] Leading Through Obligation

If you are a manager in an organization of any size, with any mission or scope of responsibility, it is your obligation to lead.

Now, obligation is a loaded word, filled with the stresses of accountability, responsibility, and eating last in a world where everyone wants to eat first.

Obligation comes along with the word “honor,” which, as a verb, means to “fulfill (an obligation) or keep (an agreement).

There is a tacit agreement between leaders and followers: Leaders set a tone, provide a secure space for initiatives to be implemented and then codify action through words and deeds. Followers implement the initiatives as they are proposed, rally behind the leader in times of stress or conflict and promote the tone of the actions.

At least, in a perfect world.

Unfortunately, we live in a world of imperfection, mixed motives, lies and deception and selfish pursuits.

In this world, leadership is even more critical and, at the core, requires human leaders to sacrifice resources (material, emotional and even spiritual) in order to accomplish a greater good for their followers—even when they believe that the greater good is wrong.

This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between politicians and statesmen.
This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between role models and celebrities.
This ability to sacrifice marks the difference between leaders and followers.

A leader’s responsibility is not to chart a course for the followers and then blindly lead them there, in spite of everything.

A leader’s responsibility is to chart a course for their followers (after actively listening to their followers) and then convince, persuade, cajole and move the followers toward accomplishing those goals.

This process requires an understanding, and an acceptance of, the definitions of obligation, honor, responsibility, accountability, character and honor.

-Peace Be With You All-

[Opinion] Who Will Hire the Bigots: Sigma Alpha Epsilon Edition

In a world where proper outward social conformity is often conflated with the presence of internal, moral character, what’s a young man in a fraternity to do?

Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members, who are students at the University of Oklahoma have been either suspended or removed from school, for creating a chant with racist lyrics, and then having it filmed and plopped on the Internet and TV.

These students are about to have their future employment fortunes changed, because, the Internet neither forgets—nor forgives.

Should we be surprised that students in this fraternity seemingly happily chanted along with lyrics that might not have been above board?

No.

Social pressure to conform to group norming is still more powerful at the human, physical, person-to-person, individual level, than Internet shaming ever will be at a larger societal level. And ignorance of history and facts is not merely the provenance of the young and impressionable.

But, here’s the thing: These students have now been impacted far beyond the actual impact of their words and enthusiastic chanting in the video. Yes, it went viral. Yes, many people have played it, talked about it, linked to it, and written about it (heck, even we are). But has anyone asked the larger culture what the societal impact of such an outburst actually was?

No.

No, we haven’t.

Opinion polls are gradually being replaced by instant reactions through immediate outlets (like Twitter, YouTube comments, etc.) to stimulus events. This rarely commented upon cultural shift has created a “firebombing” mentality that has scorched the personal, business, emotional and financial earths of many people, both public personalities and private individuals. All the way from former Mozilla Firefox CEO Brendan Eich and former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, to the two police officers who were shot in response to the death of Eric Gardner and shooting of Michael Brown.

Forgiveness and grace are gifts to be given out of a sense of compassion and empathy (are the fraternity members at OSU not human? Do they not bleed?). But the larger social desire for lockstep conformity prohibits this. And when proper outward social conformity is linked exclusively to the assumption of character, forgiveness and grace are hard to come by.

We are sure that the OSU students who have been suspended (or removed from school) as a result of this incident, will attain employment in the future and will move on to living as full lives as they possibly can, but what deeper lessons have they learned from this incident, from culture, society and from institutions of higher learning, about race, character, conscience and forgiveness?

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

[Strategy] 20-80-100

80% of the conflicts in your organization will be solved by 20% of the people in your organization.

And, not all of those people will have positional titles, effective job descriptions, or even work in “traditional” departments that “are supposed to” address conflicts.

Pushing the frontier of who gets what, so that the majority gets more value out of the conflict resolution process, should be the goal of all organizations.

But, there’s a ceiling on that value, generated by competing goals and desires, differing value placed on outcomes and the lack of ability for some in an organization to accept the efficacy of pursuing more than one outcome.

As long as 20% of the people in organization are overcoming 80% of the ceilings in 100% of organizations, the ceiling on claiming value will not move effectively.

-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/

[Advice] The Struggle is Real

As Christians, we struggle with two competing forces: The World and The Word of God.

The world celebrates “getting ahead” by ignoring, discounting or even overthrowing earthly authorities that have been set-up in high places, who are gambling with our money and our livelihoods, and then shrug off the consequences of those decision as corporate, governmental and nonprofit “best practices.”

The Word of God celebrates “getting ahead” by acknowledging that an omniscient, omnipresent, God can’t be placed in a box, that authority is endowed upon men–not by or through men, but by and through that all knowing God–and that faithful service—particularly to people, and institutions, we do not agree with (or even personally like) is the way ahead.

Now, this last part of the Word of God, is demonstrated throughout the Old Testament in multiple books, but most prominently in the book of Daniel. Daniel served four kings (Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius and Cyrus) as well as he could; but, he never abandoned his faithfulness to God, nor did he abandon telling any of the kings the truth about their rule, even when it lead to uncomfortable and life threatening consequences.

This last part is important.

In a conflict, or dispute, in the Church and elsewhere, Christians often begin any conversation with us around conflict resolution or engagement with, “How do we tell the Truth to each other in love?” This is the wrong question for many reasons, but the primary reason is that the question assumes that Christian love and Biblical Truth are somehow mutually exclusive. It also presumes that faithful service can either be rendered with one, but not the other.

Most conflicts in the church won’t result in Believers being thrown into the lion’s den, threatened with death, separated from their families, or even being outright killed. Most unresolved contemporary church conflicts, will result in loss of position, hurt feelings, loss of face and general uncomfortability.

But, this is far below the cost of telling the Truth in love. But this cost can only be paid, if the truth teller is operating in the Holy Spirit and is serving with faithfulness, with their focus on God, rather than having their focus on earthly representation of that authority.

And by the way, if the Christian is serving a secular authority, in an organization, or business, this goes double for them.

The Truth is the Truth. But let’s not mix up the truth of the world around “getting ahead” with the Truth of God’s Word, around being in service to authority.

-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/

[Strategy] Change Frames

When two parties negotiate around things that matter, changing frames is the ultimate collaborative goal.

People are stimulated by various outside forces, and then parties go ahead and begin to construct impenetrable frames.

In a negotiation, those frames are subjective, particularly when based on stimuli that come from their emotions. And emotions can distort parties’ predispositions based upon needs, desires, motivations and personal experiences.

The hard work between two parties comes in holding hands across the negotiation table, with parties that we don’t like, and breaking frames focused around:

Objectives
Expectations and
Preferences

Because remember, in a negotiation the problem will always be there tomorrow, but the relationship with the other party, may not be.

-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/

[Infographic] Negotiation 101 – Part One

The process of negotiation is one of the few areas of life about which much has been written that people pull apart and examine the least.

Military historians, economists, psychologists, management “gurus” and many, many others, have all written books and reams and reams of paper about the path to negotiating.

Three books that pull the process and challenge assumptions which we would recommend are:

The first book served as the basis of a lot of the information in the below infographic. We would encourage you to read it, mark it up, and pass the information in it along to others.

They’ll be glad you did.

To join our email list (and get more of these snazzy infographics), head on over to our OFFERS page http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/hsct-offers and sign up today.

After you do that, download our two FREE offers: Fear White Paper and Forgiveness White Paper.

-Peace With You All-

[Opinion] The “Willy Loman” Mentality

A “Willy Loman” mentality is slowly growing out there, even as the era of the door-to-door salesman is really about to kick off in a big way.

The mobile phone, and the immediacy with which that piece of hardware allows products and ideas to come to consumers, is the new house door.

Attention spans wane and doors close much, much quicker in the mobile world now, than they did in the physical world of the actual door closing in the Fuller Brush Salesman’s face.

We understand that the dynamism of having to be interesting in seven seconds or less seems daunting, but the same dynamism that depresses, can also allow the savvy, the entertaining and the persistent to scale at or below cost.

That last part is important to remember for those who are daunted, just like it was important to remember when selling vacuums door-to-door.

Persistence in the face of 4.5 billion doors closing in seven seconds or less can be either a deterrent to trying in the first place.

Or, it can be the lifeblood of the salesman that Willy Loman could have been.

-Peace With You All-

[Strategy] Top 4 Outcomes of Emotional Intelligence

In a negotiation, absolute emotional intelligence corrupts certain outcomes.

Outcomes where one party feels as though they were take advantage of
Outcomes where both parties feel as though the negotiation was a waste of time and effort.
Outcomes where one party isn’t sure that the other party dealt with their needs in “good faith”
Outcomes where both parties feel as though they are handcuffed to each other by virtue of the way in which agreement was concluded

Absolute emotion intelligence feels unattainable for many negotiators, because caring about someone else’s motivations and emotions, opens the door to cooperative—rather than coercive—power.

And, let’s admit, coercion sometimes feels good. But isn’t it our higher calling, to put aside what feels good in the moment, to do what is good for the long-term?

Even if the long-term is defined by the parameters of the contract language…

-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/

[Advice] A Positive No

The moment that you are ready to leave the office, complete a project, take a phone call, or meet a deadline, another person walks up.

This person has other priorities, but finding out what those are is not the thing that you are interested in, but that person makes sure to tell you all about their priorities.

The thing about time management is that managing other people is the unsung, unconsidered hardest thing to do.

Other people have their own priorities, and we are too embarrassed, too distracted, or too disinterested to discover what they are.

This is when the positive no, or the sandwich no, becomes the best way to address the energy vampires (or time sucks) that other people can be sometimes.

It goes something like this:

“Thank you for coming to me with [insert whatever the topic is here]. No, I don’t have time to talk about this right now. But, please come back [name a definitive later time here] and I will talk with you then.”

Then, put that time vampire on the calendar, turn around, and walk away firmly. This last part is important, because many people can’t close the conversation.

When using a positive no—or a sandwich no—remember to always be closing.

-Peace Be With You All-