[Opinion] Symbols Matter

Mattering and meaning are more important to the accomplishment of work tasks—and the avoidance of work conflicts— now than ever before.

But not if you talk to managers, supervisors, executives and others.

The people who are bosses still believe the Industrial Revolution idea that the work is the only thing that matters, that shows dedication, service and loyalty to the cause, the company and the future.

For employees though, symbols in the workplace have been cheapened because of the deeply held beliefs that bosses sometimes have, exemplified by human resource policies, time away, manifestos, and quotes on the wall. When asked, many employees (particularly those who have been in an organization more than six months) report that they “don’t even pay attention to that stuff anymore.”

This is because the symbolism behind the policies and procedures no longer matters to an employee, when the lived out, organizational substance doesn’t match.

In the world before Google based transparency, where rumors, tall tales and other misinformation could spread about an employer, the work was the substance and the symbols didn’t matter to anybody.

However, institutional lethargy and fear of change has caused many organizations to cling to the past, even as the waves around them swirl, demonstrating that symbols bring mattering to the workplace. And even more than that, symbols backed up by substance, history, and truthful stories told truthfully, are the only things that can give employee work meaning.

Otherwise, thrashing about work-life balance versus integration, time away versus time at work when away, and all of the other human resource based arguments that have arisen over the last forty years, don’t really matter much in the larger scheme of reducing workplace stress and conflict.

-Peace 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] Innovation and Change

The problem stopping most workplace innovation and change strategies, is that too many people–founders, funders, entrepreneurs, owners, and starters–have thought too little about how they personally and professionally respond and react to a culture built on change and innovation.

We’ve addressed this before:

You get up and go to work every morning and work with people whom you have developed third level relationships. You are tasked with accomplishing goals that may have little to no meaning for you. And in exchange, you are compensated with pieces of paper with the pictures of deceased leaders on them.

Then, changes happen (or innovation arrives), both internal and external and you are required to manage the change, manage the disruption you feel about the change and manage the responses and reactions of the other people who are impacted by the change.

In exchange for expending the emotional labor required to do this successfully, sometimes you are recognized and rewarded in ways that matter to you. Sometimes you aren’t. Too many organizations are still led by managers, teams and supervisors at the middle management level who think “Well, you got a paycheck this week. So that’s good enough.” Even worse, many of those same organizations were founded, funded and continued by people with the same Industrial Revolution, Henry Ford mindset.

Some of this is mindset is changing, no doubt.

With the work that human resource researchers, behavioral psychologists and organizational experts are doing throughout the world, the workplace is gradually shifting. As we noted in a workshop that we facilitated the other day, we are all collectively exiting the hangover remaining from the Industrial Revolution.

Innovation for people and organizations, true innovation, will require founders, funders, entrepreneurs, owners, and starters, to turn the corner on two corrosive mindsets that remain, leading to all kinds of conflicts, both internal and external:

We have to stop thinking of innovation as an imposition.

People, whether employees, supervisors, managers or executives, are not prone to behaving in change-oriented ways. Because of our biology, reinforced through work, social and personal cultures, we are inclined to favor the least amount of resistance (or friction) possible. This response, of course comes from the flight and fight parts of our brains. We rationalize these responses in many different ways, but for the most part, people tend to view innovation they did not initiate as an imposition, rather than as an improvement.

We have to stop making change a “value container” for our personal issues.

People make judgements and rationalize their responses to changes in many different ways, but the biggest way is that people determine that change is really a verdict on past decisions. Specifically, an indictment. This pre-conceived judgement comes from the idea that “what came before must have been bad.” This type of thinking paralyzes people in endless meaningless arguments about the validity of past decisions, closes people off to determining how the material fact of change can be integrated into the present circumstances, and blinds people with fear about what other changes the future may hold.

Innovation and change are merely stories, told by people desiring a new narrative.

Innovation and change always comes with conflict and conflict is an incubator of change.

Without founders, funders, entrepreneurs, owners, and starters doing the hard work of laying the groundwork of wellbeing, strengths based leadership, emotional intelligence, and conflict engagement skills training in their cultures from the beginning, organizations will continue to find it difficult to innovate.

Even as the waves of external changes, buffet them back and forth across the blue ocean of business.

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

[Opinion] The Psychology of WellBeing

Conflict in the workplace doesn’t have to reduce overall career wellbeing.

But we think that it does for three reasons:

We think that work (and by extension careers) should be utilitarian pursuits, focused on drudgery, repetition and boredom. Which is an attitude remaining in the Western Culture from our agriculture and industrial past.
We don’t really believe that work (and by extensions careers) can change. We have thoroughly accepted the idea (pushed by industrialists, politicians, and the media) that “that’s just the way that it is.” And we are so trammeled in our cages of fear of being fired, that we will do anything not to make changes that will affect our wellbeing positively.
We frame material promotions and financial advancements, in the workplace as metrics of approval and signs that we are accomplishing good work. Partly this is because of the way that we think work should be. It is also partly because the value of work relationships cannot yet be monetized.

So, we believe these three things about work at varying levels in varying positions in the organizational hierarchies we find ourselves, and then we are surprised, disappointed and frustrated when difficulties, confrontations and conflicts arise.

What’s the way out?

We have to let go and stop thinking of ourselves as hostages to the workplace.

We have to do the dance with fear, increasing the tension between difficulty, confrontation and conflict, in order to accomplish material changes that will bring about the career wellbeing we crave—and that will change the cultures of the organizations we currently inhabit.

-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] Why We Start But Don’t Finish

There’s no penalty for starting in our overall work culture.

If you start an initiative, a process or even start a project at work, there’s no conflict.

Sure, someone might come along (an employee, a colleague, a co-worker, a boss, a supervisor, a manager) and may make your life “difficult” by muddying up the process of starting. But even with such actions, it may feel like there’s a penalty, but there really isn’t.

Seth Godin in The Dip points this out. This is partially because there are parades and applause for starting throughout our overall culture: starting school, starting a volunteer project, starting a business.

But the cutural opportunity for penalty rises as the expectations of others (and yourself) rise (or fall) in relation to the success (or failure) of the process, initiation or project as it moves forward.

Penalties are reinforced for failure at work and then quitting is quietly proposed, with no fanfare or applause.

Think about the overall cultural language and phrases around quitting: “No one likes a quitter.” Or, “quitters never win.” Or, a more insidious one we have heard in some circles in the past “AA is for quitters.”

There’s a public penalty for quitting and it comes from a toxic combination of other people’s expectations, jealousies and assumptions, our own desires and assumptions about how the project, process or initiative should work, and the ways in which reality rarely dovetails with both of these.

And then, we are shamed for failing and subtly, socially encouraged, to never try again, to shut up our voices and to go along with whatever “the crowd” decides is good.

The way out of this is to begin publicly applauding quitting, quietly acknowledging starting (but not lauding it, or praising it) and having the courage to ignore the crowd, who are often blind, prejudiced, or biased.

-Peace Be With You All-

[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/

[ICYMI] CRaaS for Your Organization

Conflict resolution skills are not just for human resource professionals.

As our workplaces shift away from being industrial based to being intellectually based, workplace locations are shifting from being physical to being ephemeral.

But as we’ve noted in this space before, conflict stays the same because, while the jury may be out on whether or not Google is making us stupid, our brains as biological organisms still engage in conflict with other brains.

Human resource professionals in organizations are more burdened than ever before with dealing with regulatory changes, endless legal issues and addressing perceived “soft skills” based issues such as bullying and harassment.

Conflict resolution skills become more critical in this type of environment, but who has time to develop the “human resources” in their intellectually based organizations doing intellectually based, customer service oriented work?

The answer is, much like the offering of Software-as-a-Service most recently, to take the learning of conflict resolution skills outside, off-site and “to the cloud.”

Conflict Resolution-as-a-Service becomes the only viable option in this shifting landscape of workplace evolution.

Originally published on July 9, 2014.

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 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] Bullying

There are all kinds of personalities operating in the world today.

There are the “weird” outliers who enjoy collecting odd, unusual items off of Ebay.

There are the “bosses” and the “employees.”

There are even the “nice” “normal” people who turn on their television and fall asleep in front of the Tonight Show and reality TV after putting in a hard day at work.

Then there are the people who are never talked about or mentioned.

These people are the ones who don’t get along well with other folks.

These are the people who don’t have multi-million dollar executive bonuses that serve to hide their evil ways.

These are the people who spam your inbox and send you unwanted junk mail through what’s left of the mail system.

We used to call these people “flim-flam” men (although they were also sometimes women) and matchstick men (from which the film takes its name).

There is also a more common name for them, which everyone uses now, particularly in the workplace and in the school system:

Bullies.

We all know the conventional wisdom about bullies:

Bullies are dangerous.

Bullies are angry.

Bullies are socially inept.

Bullies are misunderstood.

Bullies are just victims of other bullies.

Bullies are people who have to be taught that “that kind of behavior” is “unacceptable.”

Except…except…

Bullies have to pay the rent.

Bullies are going to continue to have children.

Bullies are going to drive cars and go to nice restaurants.Bullies vote in elections.

So the question becomes, in a world where the outlier is ever more trumpeted and celebrated and the weird is the new “normal,” how do we as a society give bullies jobs?

How do we co-opt and enfranchise bullies?

Not bullying behavior, that’s enough of a problem in and of itself, but how do we get a bully a job that will allow them to progressively be transformed into someone that is compliant, complacent and cooperative?

As you ponder this question, take this parallel into consideration:

Jerry Sandusky is widely considered to be a monster.He molested and took advantage of the system in which he was ensconced for almost 40+ years to steal innocence and trust from children and young adults. The English Tops of the Pops host, Jimmy Savile did the exact same thing in the exact same way.

However, while Jimmy is dead, Jerry is very much alive and buried in a prison where we as a society would like to forget him.But, someone is going to have to go into that cell with Jerry to talk with him, examine him and take him apart, so that his crimes against children can never take place again and so that we can ID predators early and do what we can to stop them before they become what they will ultimately be.

And that’s the parallel.

We will have to give bullies jobs in a world of niches and the “weird” so that we can gradually, societally, say, with some confidence that “Bullying doesn’t happen here.”

Originally published on July 30, 2013.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!

[ICYMI] Does All This Stuff Really Work?

Yes.

But it requires you to engage and be active, rather than passive.

How many people do you know that are passive participants in their own lives?

How many of them are in conflict with others?

Stuff doesn’t just “happen”(no matter what the bumper sticker may tell you) and active participation in choosing to be empathetic, to be a listener or to be positive is tough.

The family won’t save a person in conflict.
The workplace won’t save a person in conflict.
The school won’t save a person in conflict.
The church won’t save a person in conflict.
The society won’t save a person in conflict.

The only person who can save a person in conflict is themselves.

Originally published on November 24, 2014.

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