[Advice] No More Accidents

Here’s an observable fact:

Many people (though not all) are just fine with the outcomes they are getting from their communication styles.

Many people (though not all) are comfortable with the disagreements, differences of opinion, conflicts, verbal fights, tensions, stresses and other outcomes that result from engaging in dysfunctional—and sometimes damaging—communication on a daily basis.

Many people (though not all) are just fine with letting communication happen by accident, taking a reactive—rather than responsive—stance and not really thinking about the impact that a word, a phrase, or even an idea may have upon another person.

Many people (though not all) are just fine not thinking strategically about how they communicate, rather than focusing obsessively over whether or not what they communicated got across to the other person.

Many people (though not all) find it to be more emotionally, psychologically, psychically, and even physically, comfortable to sort of just “go with the flow” and not to engage intentionally with communication patterns in their own lives—at work, at home, or even at school.

Yesterday, following a training in a local workplace, a woman told a story.

She said: “There was a supervisor working here who left recently. She said that everyone here was mean to her. She told me before she walked out the door, that I needed to ‘think outside the box more.’

I don’t know if she meant the comment to be hurtful or not, but I was hurt by it, and I have been thinking about it ever since. And it’s really hard to change the box you’re in if you can’t even see it.”

Many people (though not all) are ready to change their responses to observable facts, once they become aware of the facts they’re in.

[Opinion] The Bigots Among Us

It is easy to dismiss ideas that we don’t agree with, that we find to be repulsive, or that downright offend us.

It is easy to dismiss ideas that we believe are damaging, could lead to cycles of violence, or that we believe are fearful.

It is easy to dismiss ideas that we think are regressive, oppressive, or not progressive enough for us to engage with based on our worldview.

And increasingly, and even more disturbingly, it is easier for us to dismiss the existence of people in the culture who hold these ideas.

But, as it turns out, the people holding ideas that make us afraid and angry, or that we think are stupid or retrograde, are the ones that work next to us sweeping floors, washing dishes, taking out the trash, and sometimes even counting our change back to us at the grocery store.

This is a real problem, because there’s no way to eliminate all the people who think differently than we do. There’s no real way to completely and categorically scrub every idea that we find offensive from the public square. The only option really, is to socially sanction the people with the ideas enough so that they shut up…and go away.

But…

Those people are still going to have children.

Those people are still going to have houses.

Those people are still going to have to pay the bills.

Those people are still going to want to contribute to society and culture.

Those people are still going to work.

And when a culture links holding a preferred set of ideas to advancing economically, socially, and culturally in that culture; and, when there are some people who just think differently, that culture is not long for freedom, and is approaching a soft form of tyranny.

Which has always hardened in the not-so-distant historical past.

[Advice] Entrepreneurs Disrupted

We are at the end of about a ten to fifteen-year cycle of entrepreneurship being sexy. And now is a good time for disruption.

This is evidenced by current exits, acquisitions, and even the folding of companies. And while some VC dollars are drying up a little bit in traditional geographic locations, other dollars are moving to non-traditional geographic locations.

Like Pittsburgh.

Or Cleveland.

In those places though, where the culture of Silicon Valley (“fail fast, fail hard”) has yet to completely penetrate, two distinct phenomena are going to bump up against each other over the next few years. And this friction will occur even as breathless articles—and blog posts—will be written about the death of entrepreneurship in the major media, political, and social centers of the United States.

The first phenomena will be the mismatch between a traditional VCs perception of what the culture of investment should be, and the perception of culture in places geographically, (and culturally as well as ideologically) removed from that culture of investment. There have been a few businesses built like this in the Midwest (Basecamp, formerly 37 Signals, comes to mind) but there will be more friction in the coming years.

The second phenomena will be the mismatch between a “small business” mentality, and a “entrepreneurs” mentality. This will manifest in all kinds of ways, including work ethic, employee education level, and other localized influences. Many of these are unquestioned and “in the air” in Silicon Valley, and the mismatch is already acute outside of Silicon Valley.

Both of these mismatches can be overcome, managed, or eliminated completely through the effects of numerous, gossamer like transactions, but they all represent disruption.

That is, disruption for both the end of entrepreneurship being “sexy”, and the beginning of something else, even greater taking root in unexpected places.

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 4 – Halelly Azulay

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 4 – Halelly Azulay, Leadership Coach, Facilitator, Consultant, Speaker and Upgrader of Sustainable Leader Development

podcast-earbud_u-season-four-episode-4-halelly-azulay

[powerpress]

So, I talk and write about this stuff all the time.

Growing talent in the workplace cannot happen with considering work in a different way.

Talent is something that everyone believes that they have, but very few people can target and develop in a meaningful and demonstrative way.

Trust, follow-through, belief, and a standard of work and an understanding of labor, is changing in the world of work.

But this should be nothing new for you, because you’re listening to this podcast on your way home from work, on your way to work, or while you’re sitting in your cubicle, trying to avoid doing work.

Our guest today Hallely Azulay knows about all of this and is going beyond just exploring the changing world of work, she is actively trying to mold it into something better for everybody.

So what’s the solution?

Well, I argue for more training, as you would assume. I also argue for more transparency and authenticity around emotional labor. But I know that could be something that you may not be comfortable with.

But what about your manager?

The chasm between our comfort zones at work and the growth that we need to do at work to remain relevant is staggering. We need guidance, shepherding, diligence, and respect to cross that chasm successfully.

Without this, we won’t cross the chasm and truly develop our talents, skills and abilities in ways that allow us to become true stewards of the workplace.

Such guidance can come from the outside of your organization from folks like myself and Hallely. But more often than not, it’s going to have to come from the manager or supervisor who you actively do work to avoid during the day.

To paraphrase from Juvenal: Who trains the watchmen to watch in the first place?

Listen to Halelly and take the time to connect with her via the links below:

The Talent Grow Podcast: http://www.talentgrow.com/podcast

Talent Grow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TalentGrowLLC

Talent Grow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talentgrow

Talent Grow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HalellyAzulay

The Talent Grow website: http://www.talentgrow.com/

[Opinion] On Crossing the Chasm

The biggest gap in organizational culture today is the chasm between the ideals and values on the wall and the actual lived reality of hourly work life.

This gap used to not matter at the height of the Industrial Revolution, but as the papering over of the gap has become less and less effective over time, the presence of the gap has become more and more evident.

Unfortunately, many organizational leaders are deciding to expand that gap through behaviors and conflict choices that reflect a nostalgia for a command and control past, rather than seeking to cross the chasm with a bridge to the future.

Either an employee is on one side of the chasm—or the gap—or they are on another.

Unfortunately, the inherent conflicts based in organizational identity fester and grow (they go fungal, rather than viral) in the darkness of that chasm.

Crossing the chasm of conflict between the ideals on the wall, and the daily workplace reality, is the hardest confrontation for leaders, founders, managers, and supervisors to engage in.

But the journey across that chasm is the only journey that matters.

[Strategy] The Deep End

The deep end of the swimming pool is the best place to be in order to change through conflict.

The deep end is where no one wants to go. It’s at the edge of the conflict universe, far away from the shallow center and a place for pioneers, adventurers and a place where safety is not a primary concern.

The deep end as an idiom describes all the ways that people used to respond emotionally to being put in situations that didn’t conform to the status quo, and that required a level of rebellion and non-conformity to confront and overcome. The idiom comes directly out of the last century, a time when personally, professionally, academically, and in every other way that mattered, challenging the safe, right, and easy path wasn’t as profitable as it is now.

We use the phrase “off the deep end” to mean that we have been involved in a situation, or trapped in a behavior, that we have no previous experience in handling, and that we feel so uncomfortable in, that it feels like death.

Of course, out on the edge of the universe, out in the deep end of the pool, we might drown. Or we might just decide to suck it up and persevere, gaining grit and resilience in the end.

Bringing up the importance of swimming in the deep end is somewhat problematic these days, in a public culture that’s built around filing down the rough edges and hammering down the nails that insist on not being hammered down. This is an interesting phenomenon, because there have never been more opportunities to be weird, to stand out, to go to the end of the emotional universe, and to jump willingly into the deep end of the pool of emotional experience.

There are few strategies for managing getting into the deep end:

Realize that you won’t die—the pool of conflict is deep on purpose, so confronting your boss, your co-worker, you parents, or someone else who you think has power over you about their conflict behavior and choices, won’t result in death. Just you being uncomfortable for a while.

Realize that the deep end is where real changes happen—getting excited about the new Iphone or Samsung phone is not a change. Going to the deep end with another person on their behavioral choices that have impacted you negatively is a change. And change always happens at the edges of confrontation and away from the safe, chunky middle.

Realize that, of course you can’t handle it, that’s why you’re doing it—just responding to a conflict (i.e. with accommodation, avoidance, confrontation, collaboration, or compromise) in the ways that you’ve always been comfortable responding is what you’ve always been able to handle. Moving away from that safety emotionally and behaviorally will feel scary, uncomfortable, and will yield results that you couldn’t have imagined. Because you had no basis from which to imagine them in the first place.

If you’re not doing something every day, to change how you address conflict behaviors in your life, you are placing yourself in the shallows of life. And when a real storm comes, and it always does, the deep end of life will come and visit you, instead of the other way around.

[Opinion] It’s Up to MBAs to Save the World

Business students—modern day, Internet savvy, native users of the information superhighway we’ve all built for the last twenty or so years—can save the corporate world.

The unfortunate thing is that somewhere along the way to cashing out in a cushy consulting position, or advancing in organizations by whose culture they are troubled, someone forgot to tell them.

This is not unusual. Partially it’s due to the echo chamber of higher education—the faculty who teach from a worldview and frame set on preserving the world they teach in—and partially it’s due to a corporate world still focused (in spite of all the evidence of disruption to the contrary) on achieving cookie-cutter, command-and-control outcomes on a quarterly basis.

There are, of course, a range of types and varieties of business students, from undergraduate business majors, dutifully studying their work at second, third, and fourth tier institutions, all the way to community and junior college students “older-than-average” who return to business programs to either run a small business better, or to provide for their families.

Finally, there are the top tier, classic business school students from elite institutions who are studying to become the next masters of the universe. These are the ones that we traditionally think of as dominating the salaries and cultures of corporations and organizations where MBAs are hired.

Except, at all levels, the work that matters is shifting away from what a human used to do well toward what a computer can do better. Accounting, spreadsheet analysis, financial reporting, supply chain management, and on and on, really matter less and less as topical areas of focus and interest in a world where information is changing hands faster than the left to right swiping motion on a smartphone screen.

The work that does matter, in organizations, to individuals, and the work that is going to reshape the global paradigm of the next fifty years, doesn’t show up on spreadsheet, and can’t be open to analysis. And it never did; but, industrialists of the past century who built the old paradigm want MBAs and anyone in a business program of any kind to continue to believe otherwise.

Philosophically, there must be a change in how we teach bright, young, ambitious, people at all levels (from community college programs to the Ivy League) in order to succeed with outcomes that will be measurable, not in terms of dollars and cents (though that will come) but in terms of people, connection, and the continuing malleability of human nature.

But what would a two-year immersive, MBA experience look like?

Here’s a rough idea of how practically, an MBA program would look, one focused on getting bright, ambitious, Internet native, students to develop and nurture the kind of work that will grow organizations in the 21st century:

  • Year One:
    • Semester One:
      • Ethics
      • Sustainability
      • Conflict/Dispute Resolution Skills
      • Failure, Success, and Resilience
    • Semester Two:
      • People Management
      • Psychology of Supervision
      • Storytelling
      • Listening
  • Capstone Project: Peer Reviewed and Focused on Building a Functioning Business in the Real World
  • Year Two:
    • Semester One:
      • Finance
      • Accounting
      • Supply Chain Management
      • Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis
    • Semester Two:
      • Persuasive Writing
      • Digital/Virtual Leadership
      • Organizational Culture
      • Restorative Justice
  • Capstone Project: Go and Turn Your Peer-Reviewed Project from the 1st Semester into a Business

And after all of this, there must be follow-up. But not in the traditional sense of “Did you get a job?” and “How much does it pay?” which are questions that really only interest the federal student loan originators. Instead, follow-up with these students would be focused on the only metrics that matter: failure, success, long-term growth, and connection:

  • Did you fail in 5 to 7 years after the program?
  • Did you succeed in 5 to 7 years after the program?
  • What “dent” if any, did you make in the universe?

And that’s it.

With such a program, the MBAs we are turning out from all institutions would be prepared to save the world from the current troubles and hypocrisies, that have caused many corporations to collapse under the inability to change for the future that is here.

Now.

[Advice] Evolving Cultural Sensibilities and ADR

As the economic, cultural, and spiritual forces that used to bind us together continue to refragment from overarching macro-cultures to indispensable micro-cultures, alternative dispute resolution practitioners must take notice.

Overarching macro-culture was driven by communal events, television, economic stability, and overarching cultural “norms” that allowed people to engage in conflicts and disputes with the same regularity they always have, but also allowed the impacts of those conflicts to be dampened.

Indispensable micro-culture is driven by technology, network connections that defy geography and notice, a dismissal of the status quo, and a strong identity component. People still have conflict in these micro-cultures (what used to be called “sub-cultures”). But the impacts of those conflicts are like wildfires that catch the masses attention for a moment, but without a “there” there, there is little sustained effort mounted to ameliorate the effects upon people in those micro-culture conflicts.

Conflict resolvers, conflict coaches, conflict engagers, mediators, arbitrators, and others have watched this evolution occur over the last fifty or so years, with greater acceleration, but the response to the evolution through providing access points to conflict resolution has not been as quick. This is mainly for three reasons:

  • Indispensable micro-culture is still seen as “niche” and not really enough to build a business model on by the entrepreneurial conflict resolver. This is a terrible fact, but except for some people doing some great work in resolving conflicts in specific areas with specific groups in conflicts (i.e. with parties in churches, with divorcing or separating pet owners, etc.) there is more focus by ADR professionals on how to gain credibility with the courts—still standing as the last guardians of a passing away overarching macro-culture.
  • There are still enough parties in conflict participating in the remaining civic life of a formerly overarching macro-culture. This is something that will pass away over time, but right now, there are enough of the “masses” left around that many professional conflict resolvers look at the problems and conflicts of that group and decide to address their issues first. Both as a way to make a “dent” in the universality of conflict, and to make money from a reliable income stream.
  • Refragmentation is still not understood—or accepted psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually—as an inevitable outcome of the erosion of the twin, post-World War 2 oligopolies of corporation and government. Now, this is not to say that government will disappear either now or later; but the fact is, that as conflicts and disputes between parties in indispensable micro-culture become harder and harder to understand, the overarching macro-culture responses from government entities (i.e. new laws, regulations, taxes, and fees) will be less and less effective. This is because indispensable micro-culture conflicts are driven by esoteric, identity based rules, that require conflict resolvers to engage in relationships with those cultures to resolve—and to go beyond the overarching macro-culture rubric of intercultural communication skill sets.

None of these three areas are that daunting to overcome. And once overcome, the business models to get ideas for resolution to people in conflict begin to overwhelm the entrepreneurial conflict resolver. All that is required to get there is the courage of conflict resolvers to act outside of the “box” they have been trained in.

[Strategy] Reframing your Organization’s Litigation Strategy

Your organization’s litigation strategy is based on how your organization perceives giving an apology, taking responsibility, or passing around blame.

Your organization’s litigation strategy is based on how the founder perceives conflict, engagement, resolution, and even resilience and grit.

Your organization’s litigation strategy is based on how founders, executives, investors, employees, clients, customers, and others integrate and engage with (or don’t) lawyers, the legal system, and even legal professionals.

Your organization’s litigation strategy is not an accident, or something that “just grew” like Topsy. It is a strategy that is either intentional, or reactive.

Just like your organization’s conflict engagement, avoidance, or resolution strategy.

[Opinion] Realizing Your Potential is Not Even Half the Battle

Let’s talk about potential.

The idea that another person can do something that you can’t do, and do it better than you, typically engenders a couple of different responses in people:

The first reaction is one of coveting, not only the talent that the other person has, but also the ability that they have to leverage them. This reaction leads to jealousy, envy, and eventually taking actions that prevent the talented from fully realizing their potential.

The second reaction is one of surprise and joy, not only at realizing the talent that the other person has, but also engaging actively in helping that person find opportunities to connect with others who can help them fully realize their potential. These are actions that are designed to delight the person with potential and are done somewhat selfishly by the other party.

Then, there is a third response which doesn’t get a whole lot of attention, but that rears its head far more often than we might think: This is the reaction of the person with the potential.

This person may not see the potential in themselves.

They may not care about pursuing that potential in the way that another party would like (we see this with parents and children sometimes).

The person may have other things going on in their lives (i.e. they may not have an “empty lot” on which to build their potential).

Or, they may simply be someone who enjoys the stimulus that comes from being recognized as having potential, without having to actually take any action to grow that potential in the long-term.

Every person views potential in different ways, and through different frames and lenses, based on stories they tell themselves (and stories that they repeat over and over again from childhood), but the truth is, potential—which is a combination of innate talents, learned skills, and the accumulation of the impact of life choices—is still a personal thing for each individual.

And even as the Internet—and before the Internet, the computer—has disrupted all of the old, “tried and true” Industrial Revolution ways of realizing potential and turning that potential into viable products and services for other people, people have stayed the same in how they react and respond to the potential in themselves, and others.

Curious…