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“Working with Eric was a pleasure. We developed a good rapport and established a level of honesty and trust. I valued his counsel and recommendations. I find Eric to be very competent in a variety of disciplines. He is able to correctly diagnose organizational problems and suggest solutions that are on point. I found Eric to be a professional with the highest levels of honesty, integrity, and ethical behavior. I would not hesitate to engage his services again in the future.”

Kathy Lueckert,
former Corporate Services Director,
Department of Planning and Development,
City of Seattle
(Kathy is now Director of Planning and Finance for Advocacy and Communications at World Vision.)

“I've worked closely with Eric on developing and presenting the Leadership Eastside community leadership program. He has that rare blend of extensive real-world experience along with a very strong background in theory and research. He moves easily between big picture strategy and the tactical details. Eric brings a superb ability to plan, execute and follow-through, both as a behind-the-scenes planner and as an upfront instructor and facilitator.”

Annalee Luhman,
founding board member,
Leadership Eastside

 

Conflict and change: The blog

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21 May 2008

What is your situation?

Suppose you are facing some kind of challenge, like getting someone to accept a change or recommendation you are proposing. There are probably many factors in play, some help your cause, while others are potential barriers. How do you decide where to focus your effort?

One simple but powerful technique involves creating a “picture” of your situation on a single sheet of paper. On the left side of the page, you list all the factors or forces that are helping drive you toward your goal. Examples might include cost savings, customer demands, proven track record, or support of a key executive. On the right side, list all the factors or forces that are restraining you. These can involve political opposition, lack of executive support, costs of implementation, etc.

Once you’ve laid those out (you can always add to the list as you go along), circle the ones that are most significant. Can you change any of these? Can you strengthen any driving forces? Can you add new ones, such as a new selling point or supporter?

Can you reduce any restraining forces or remove them entirely? Say, by allaying someone’s concern about your intentions or how they’ll be affected. Maybe you can even convert a restraint into a driver? For example, by turning an opponent into a supporter.

This tool is called a “force field analysis.” It was developed decades ago by Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of organization development. It can give you a quick-and-dirty analysis, or you can use it to drill down much deeper to discovery hidden forces and factors that are holding you back. It’s very robust. Check out an example I posted on the resources page.

 

19 May 2008

In praise of boundaries

Can you have a healthy workplace without boundaries?

Over the weekend, I was reading a book on dealing with teenagers. Much of the sage advice in this book (Get Out of My Life but First Can You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall, by Anthony Wolf) focuses on establishing boundaries—behavioral boundaries, like a curfew, and interaction boundaries, like ending a conversation when your teenager whines about a decision you’ve made.

This gets me thinking about boundaries at work. I would certainly NOT suggest that managers treat employees like teenagers (that would be demeaning), but I do often encounter managers and executives who are unwilling to set clear behavioral boundaries and enforce them.

You cannot establish a productive workplace without setting clear expectations for both performance and interactions. And, once you set them, you need to hold people to them, which may involve looking someone in the eye and telling them their behavior is unacceptable. You may not have to do it every day or with everyone, but you've got to be willing to because it’s essential for the team and organization.

So, why don't we set boundaries? First, we'd have to confront transgressions, which takes resolve. Second, we ourselves would have to live by the boundaries we set (otherwise we look phony and untrustworthy). Third, we would have to endure complaints about the fairness, appropriateness, or necessity of the boundaries.

Those may seem like good reasons not to bother, but I would argue that the benefits of clear expectations pay off in greater productivity, job satisfaction, and smoother work relationships. The costs of failing to set clear boundaries—in terms of lost time, wasted effort and emotional burnout—are far too high.

 

16 May 2008

How deep do you go?

How deep do you go when helping a team that is stuck?

The simple answer is: No deeper than you need to.

The hard part is getting to the right level, not too shallow and not too deep. Many of us have had the experience in a team building activity of being led too far into very personal territory, where we no longer felt safe and, in fact, hadn’t agreed in advance to visit. On the other hand, we’ve all participated in many meetings and team building activities where the group didn’t go deep enough. We didn’t get any new stuff on the table and discuss and resolve it. We didn’t talk about the “elephant in the room.”

So, how do you determine how deep to go? First, you identify what you want from the team. What is the performance you want but are not getting? I’ve had people call me wanting a toxic situation to be converted into bliss and wonderment. I tell them that will take a lot more time and resources than I’ve ever seen a client devote to a team.

A better, more realistic process is to focus on the business results needed and what kind of team environment is needed to get those results. If you’re clear on the business goals, then it’s much easier to judge how deep to go. The second way to determine how deep to go is to start at a shallow level (like clarifying goals and roles) and see whether that delivers results. If so, everything’s peachy. If not, then would you go into deeper stuff (like group dynamics).

Together, these two strategies help you figure out how go deep enough to be productive, while also keeping you from going in too deep.

 

15 May 2008

Strength of Weak Ties!

Last week, I spent a morning listening to Leadership Eastside community project teams present what they’d done. Like most of the LE faculty and board, I was utterly amazed and delighted at what people had achieved in just eight months. The projects and presentations were inspiring. As an instructor in the program, I was heartened to hear references to some of the material I presented. One mention in particular delighted me: the strength of weak ties.

When I was studying sociology in graduate school, one of the most beloved pieces of research was Mark Granovetter’s paper called the “The Strength of Weak Ties” (American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78, Issue 6, May 1973, pp. 1360-1380.) In his research, Granovetter posited that the most important connections in your social network are weak ties, not strong relationships.

Strong ties are those longer-term relationships with people you spend more time with. You have strong mutual trust with them. Strong ties include friends, family, and co-workers. Weak ties are with people whose name you know, and with whom you have something or someone in common. Weak ties could include acquaintances, “friends of friends” or long lost colleagues.

The weak ties supply you with a far more diverse set of information and opportunities. (Granovetter found that most people got jobs through their weak ties, not the strong ones.) Strong ties usually only provide you with information and opportunities you already had. In community leadership (the focus of Leadership Eastside) success rests with building a broad network of weak ties. In fact, that’s true any time you need others to help you get things done.

 

13 May 2008

Why are we doing this?

A few weeks back, I was chatting with a woman after a conference session we both attended. The session was on generational differences in the workplace (Boomers, Gen X, Millenials, etc.). My acquaintance was using what we heard in the session to grapple with a challenge in her own organization, a prestigious non-profit. She described an unusual situation where most of the managers were Gen X and most of the staff below them were Boomers. She said that the staff were resisting changes in the organization. I asked her some questions about how the change was being done; in particular, I asked if management adequately described the context and reasons for the change. A light went off for her. She realized that they hadn’t explaining the context and reasoning well enough. The staff didn’t understand why management was making the change—why the old ways had to change and what the new ways promised. Immediately, she had a clear idea of what they had to do to help reduce resistance. (Sharing the context is probably not the only thing they need to do, but it’s a start.) There are two morals to this story: (1) Context matters a lot—people want to understand why they are being asked to do something—and it takes effort to communicate the context and reasoning. And (2) it’s important to consider more than one framework for understanding a problem (i.e., resistance). In this case, the generational model wasn’t helping my acquaintance as much as an organizational change model.

 

9 May 2008

Perils of storytelling

Earlier this week, I was at a conference when a close colleague and friend (let’s call her “M”) left all of a sudden. A friend of ours saw M racing out of the retreat center. He asked what was wrong, she said “I don’t want to talk about it.” When he told me what had happened, we were both puzzled. My next thought was “What did I do to offend M?” I wracked my brain, retracing our conversations, to see if somehow I had offended her. I couldn’t come up with anything, but for the rest of the evening, I kept wondering what had happened. Maybe someone else at the conference had angered M, and that was why she bolted and didn’t want to talk about it. I had seen her just 45 minutes before she left and she seemed fine, so I assumed that this transgression had happened during that 45-minute interval. And, M is not easy to offend, so whatever happened must’ve been a “humdinger.” As I worked to understand what had happened, my explanation grew more and more elaborate. Fast forward to today: I related this story to a coaching client to illustrate how easy it is to get carried away developing a story about what happened, especially when you have very little data to work from. In this case, there were just two pieces of data: (1) M left the conference early and (2) she didn’t want to talk about it. But, I didn’t let that stop me! I was able to “deduce” a whole narrative from those two facts. Think about how we often do this! This tendency to create stories can get in the way of understanding what really happened—to get the “rest of the story.” As it turned out, M wasn’t offended at all. The next day I found out that M had gotten word that her sister, who cares for their aging mother, had been in a car accident; M needed to leave immediately to get on a flight to go help out. That's why she left in a hurry.

 

13 April 2008

Team rescue

A few weeks back, I was attending a trade fair and stumbled upon the term “team rescue” to describe what I do with work teams (and larger units) who are stuck in conflict, poor morale or low trust. I found that people visiting my table really lit up when I used the term. They seemed to understand right away what I was getting at. Team rescue seems so much clearer and more precise than the alternatives, team building or team development.

But the term also has disadvantages. On one hand, team rescue implies a dire situation, while team building suggests less urgent training and preventative maintenance. (I do both.) Even more important, in the helping professions (like OD), “rescue” has a negative connotation. When you rescue someone, you do too much for them; you assume responsibilities that belong to them, like management of their relationships with other people. Rescuing is especially egregious when you try to directly manage (manipulate?) someone’s emotions or moods. Taken to the extreme, the person rescued becomes utterly dependent on you. So, rescuing is not good; it doesn’t help the client in the long run. The fact is people need to be personally responsible for facing up to their situation and making changes. When I take on a client, I work hard to establish these boundaries. It’s OK, of course, to ask for and receive help, just as long as the ultimate responsibility for taking action remains with the client.

Still, I’m mighty fond of that term “team rescue.” It sure did the trick at that trade show.

 

18 March 2008

Perspective is worth 50 IQ points

Years ago, a colleague at the city of Seattle introduced me to Alan Kay’s popular aphorism (“Perspective is worth 50 IQ points.”) and I am still constantly reminded of it. Interviewing a former client recently, I learned that one of the most important things I did for her was to help her “see” what was going on in her organization. She said that I helped focus attention on the underlying problems and issues. (She also said I “implicated everyone,” which she also thought was useful.) Basically, I brought to her and her colleagues a clear, systemic view of the situation—one that opened doors to do work that they needed to do. Using the perspective I brought, they were able to see things more clearly, take action, and get results.

 

10 March 2008

Relationship Repair

“Relationship repair” is the term a client recently used to describe what I did in her organization. I was able to help her to resolve differences between her and her peer, as well as between two sets of professionals who had been entrenched in a bitter, divisive conflict. This latter problem had been building for a while. (One side was convinced the only solution was to fire someone on the other side. One manager was so certain that needed to happen that she herself resigned when it became clear that I wasn’t going to recommend such a firing.) Despite all that, the parties were willing to sit down together, work through some difficult issues and feelings, and change how they work together. I find this work very gratifying: to help people to really understand each other’s concerns and needs—to unravel the conflict—and then work to design and create the future they all really want.

 

4 February 2008

TIME

Last week, I facilitated a meeting of sales managers drawn from all over the country. We were working on an important organizational issue—one that was affecting the bottom line. As sales managers, every minute spend in that meeting represented lost income—and yet, there they were. It was that important. And, we had an intense and productive meeting that I think will lead to real results. Unfortunately, not all clients are as clear about the stakes of a project. On more than one occasion, I’ve been asked to work on projects that didn’t seem to matter, and some of those I've pulled out of. These days, I try to ascertain at the beginning of the project if a client is really serious about doing it—to make sure it really matters. What are the business results you are looking for? Are they important enough to warrant the resources needed to fix the problem? One of the best indicators of commitment is how much time the boss is willing to spend on the issue. How personally involved is s/he willing to be? If it’s important, people tend to find the time. If it’s not, maybe the project shouldn’t be undertaken and consultant (me) not hired. No matter how difficult or damaging a situation, it’s better to leave it alone than attempt to fix it when you’re not serious about getting results.