One of my favorite topics to teach, in any teambuilding, leadership or communication skill-related class, is Peter Senge’s concept of balancing advocacy and inquiry in conversation.  Advocacy means explaining one’s own thinking and reasoning while advocating for a position, rather than keeping hidden agendas and withholding relevant information.  And even more importantly, inquiry means spending at least as much time, if not more, asking good questions and actively listening in order to understand another person’s position or perspective on the issue.

Personally, I have a long way to go in skillfully achieving this balance in my own conversations.  I do well with sharing relevant information but I need to work on my inquiry skills.  But where I really get frustrated is in dealing with personality types who are uncomfortable with any type of conflict or disagreement and prefer to avoid it altogether. What do you do when someone just doesn’t want to discuss the issue?  They don’t want to listen to you explaining your own position, and they don’t respond to your attempts to get them to explain their own.

I think I understand why they do this.  It’s not about being cowardly or self-serving.  For some people, to discuss a conflict is to dignify and perhaps magnify something they feel is unproductive, damaging, or maybe just trivial.  They believe it is better to hold their tongues and let the problem work itself out or just go away.

But problems and issues don’t usually just go away, especially interpersonal problems.  When someone ignores them, especially someone in a leadership position, problems simply seek alternative outlets.  Or they fester and grow.

I struggle with how to use the idea of inquiry and advocacy to take on the very concept of conflict resolution with folks who prefer to avoid rather than tackle.  How do you show respect for their preferences and still advocate for the view that many (most?) conflicts must be dealt with?  More importantly, how do you stop them from simply shutting down and walking away from the very conversation?  I’d like to hear your thoughts.

A great blog post on Harvard Business Publishing’s site–-Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work by John Hagel III and John Seeley Brown—summarizes some interesting trends from the authors’ recent book The Power of Pull.  (I confess that I haven’t read the book, but it’s on my list!)  Two of the trends in particular jumped out at me:

1. “The collaboration curve supplants the experience curve.”  It’s no longer possible to keep up with the competition through individual experience and expertise alone; things are moving too fast.  It’s only through collaboration that an organization’s ideas and implementation can keep pace, and that’s why network-centric efforts in technology are increasingly popular.

2. “Companies will not be able to fully harness the potential of collaboration curves until they resolve the Dilbert Paradox.”  We continue to say that talent acquisition is our top priority but we do nothing to keep and nurture that talent, instead creating the stultifying work environments parodied in the Dilbert comic strip.  We talk about talent development but approach it through training programs instead of redesigning the work environment.

The point I want to make is that designing training programs and redesigning the work environment need not be two separate efforts competing for resources; they can be the same thing.  Set up your training as a collaborative effort; not only collaborative in the sense that full work teams attend the session together, but also that the session represents a collaborative effort between the team and the facilitator in the service of a particular goal.  If the goal is to improve a management team’s coaching skills, then that session should focus not only on imparting theory, tools and best practices to the team, but also on giving them time to work out how those new tools and best practices can be instilled in the workplace by the team, within the culture of that workplace.  If the goal is to increase awareness of diversity on a project team, the facilitator might alternate the presentation of diversity awareness material with time for the team to collaborate on how they might work differently together in order to leverage their diversity.

Any “training session” that does not include time for participants to make collaborative plans for putting new structures and norms in place, in my opinion, misses the mark.  That’s why I advocate sending teams and work groups to training together, rather than holding open enrollment sessions that are attended by employees from all over the organization who don’t work directly with each other.  In the latter case, participants may pick up a new skill or two, or increase their awareness.  But without the subsequent reinforcement from teammates who have just learned the same skills or increased their own awareness, there will be no “stick”.

The Dilbert Paradox happens when people work in isolation, instead of together.  We can’t always change that, but we can certainly change the way training happens.

Another great Newsweek column from Sharon Begley, The Limits of Reason—Why evolution may favor irrationality, describes a phenomenon of human error that brings to mind Chris Argyris’ Ladder of Inference.  Begley talks about the natural human tendency to succumb to confirmation bias when, for example, we have the idea that woman are bad drivers.   We see and recall only the bad female drivers we’ve seen lately and not the good ones.  Argyris describes the same thing; we walk up our ladder of inference, discarding the data that doesn’t fit with our previous theories and overemphasizing the data that does, and eventually our actions are impacted.  Next time we see a woman driver making a minor mistake that perhaps would have gone under the radar screen from a male driver, we give in to road rage.  It’s irrational, Begley says, but we all do it.

What’s interesting is that Begley cites a more recent idea from cognitive scientists that may explain why we do this.  It’s because irrationality helps us “devise and evaluate arguments that are intended to persuade other people,” according to psychologist Hugo Mercier of the University of Pennsylvania.  This is called motivated reasoning, and by this theory we come to realize that the holder of the confirmation bias about woman drivers simply wants to convince us that it’s true.  Argyris probably says the same thing when he says that we filter the data around us according to our “mental models,” but he’s a little more diplomatic about it, focusing on the fact that we can’t process everything that goes on around us so we have to choose certain data to notice and filter everything else out.  The guy who wants everyone to believe woman can’t drive, on the other hand, has a hidden and at least semi-conscious agenda.  Sounds more insidious, doesn’t it?

Begley’s other examples are, similar to the women drivers example, things I get worked up about.  Bush looking for evidence of WMD in Iraq because he was already convinced of its existence; tea partiers looking for evidence of Obama’s foreignness and ignoring the fact of his birth certificate.

It’s easy to think of workplace examples.  The manager who has to make cuts and so looks for performance problems that don’t exist, because it will make it easier to do what already has to be done.  The problem employee who is convinced of unfair treatment and thus can’t see that there are very really reasons why she’s being counseled and disciplined for chronic tardiness.  The senior leader who has decided a recent decline in profits is caused entirely by lazy workers and now can’t see any other theory as even remotely plausible.  Perhaps our focus in such situations needs to shift from trying to reason with someone to asking ourselves the question, “What is this person trying to persuade me of?  And why?”

The problem, as always, is that we can see this stuff when it applies to someone else.  But it’s not so easy when it’s about our own selves and our firmly held (irrational) beliefs.

I like to talk about the Fundamental Attribution Error, because after you explain what it means, everyone has a good story.

Take the workshop I taught this week, for example.  I explained the FAE theory (which states that we tend to attribute our own actions to situational factors, but we attribute the actions of others to their intentions) and someone said, “That really explains most cases of road rage.”  How true.  If I cut someone off in traffic, I usually have a reason and it has to do with the situation.  I was avoiding a squirrel in the road, or I was about to miss a turn, or perhaps I simply didn’t see the other guy.  But the other guy, meanwhile, is convinced that I am just a @#@#!  And he may tell me so, through a certain gesture or two.

What I was thinking about today is how the FAE tends to apply in situations involving gender differences in communication.  One of my pet peeves is men who think I’m asking for advice when I’m not.  In a paternal, perhaps even patronizing tone, they begin to bestow their great wisdom and experience upon me when all I was trying to do was make conversation by telling them about something I’m working on, or maybe something I’m doing for fun.  My immediate reaction is usually that the guy’s intentions are bad.  Because I’m a woman, he assumes that he knows more than I do and I must be asking for help.

Might it really be that I’ve been sending mixed messages to this particular colleague or friend for many years, and so he perceives this as a situation similar to a previous one?  Maybe I asked him how to change a tire last week, or I begged for his help with a particularly thorny computer problem.

I’d like to think so, anyway.  Because if it’s really matter of me sending mixed messages, than I can do something about it.  That’s the beauty of the FAE; it takes problems out of the realm of someone else’s control and puts them under our own control.

Got a good story of your own?

I love Sharon Begley, Newsweek’s science columnist, because she makes me realize I had a false notion in school: that I hated, or at least could not get interested in, science.  Of all the columns I read diligently in Newsweek every week, hers tends to be the one that most inspires me to make connections with workplace issues.

Last week, for example, she wrote a column call What’s Really Human? about the fallacy of psychologists drawing conclusions about “universal human nature” from their typical lab experiments.  These experiments usually use college students as lab rats, and the college students are almost always from WEIRD cultures, an acronym that stands for “western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.”  The result, predictably, is that we conclude certain traits are universal when they are actually culture-specific.  The examples she gives range from things things like optical illusions to a sense of fairness and justice.  “While some scientists express skepticism that a discovery about college sophomores applies to, say, Tsimane tribesmen of Amazonia, all too many findings are cast as illuminating The Human Mind,” she says.

We continue to do this in the workplace, don’t we?  Everything we “know” about creating an engaged workforce comes from the organizational development theories of WEIRD cultures.  I can’t help but think that it’s usually a good thing; who wants to argue against the notion that employees who are treated well will perform better, or that positive feedback will create a motivational atmosphere?  But we also assume that the same things that westerners find motivational or rewarding will be equally so to employees of other cultures.  For how long have we been repeating the idea that managers should “praise in public and censure in private?”  In some cultures, where community is more important than the individual, public praise is terribly embarrassing.

What examples do you have?

I just read one of the best articles I’ve ever come across on interpersonal communication and particularly on the sources of misunderstanding: How to Avoid (and Quickly Recover from) Misunderstandings, by Peter Bregman.  Don’t just read my musings about it; read the article, it’s worth your time.

There are a couple of things that make it a great article.  First, he uses a very specific example that most of us can relate to, a misunderstanding about a simple, everyday conversation between him and his wife, and he tells the story well.  He tells us what was said, what he was thinking, and what he finally learned that she was thinking.

Then he takes us through his mental and emotional process of first being frustrated and self-absorbed, then questioning his assumptions, then beginning to understand how his wife might be feeling, and finally checking out his assumptions with her by asking questions.

Finally, he makes a great point: that when misunderstandings arise, the responsibility to ask questions and get to the bottom of it falls to whoever sees the misunderstanding first.  It doesn’t matter who “fault” it is.  What matters is who has the insight to fix it first.

What the article made me think about is that specific examples and good stories we can relate to are what’s so often missing from communication and interpersonal skills training, and are what makes the difference between training that sticks and training that doesn’t.  We can present models and theories all day, but telling a good, realistic story about a workplace miscommunication, a story that makes everyone say, “Yeah, I’ve been there,” is what really makes a difference.  I try to do this in my own communication skills workshops by writing workplace scenarios for the participants to dissect, but it’s hard to get that edge of realism.  I don’t do it nearly as well as Bregman does.

So I’ve resolved, from now on, to carry a notebook for this purpose.  Whenever I see a workplace interaction that makes a good story, or hear about one in a training session or meeting, I’ll write it down.  And if you have any of your own, I hope you’ll share them here.

Of all the wonderful self discovery assessments and tools out there, my personal favorite is the one I’ll call Interpersonal Styles.  I first came across it in the form of an assessment called Social Style and put out by The Tracom Group.  Like many other such tools, it’s used in many different forms by many different organizations using different names.  I prefer to call it Interpersonal Styles, since it deals primarily with how people work and communicate with others.

One of the primary things that distinguishes it from Myers Briggs or DISC is that it focuses on how others see you rather than how you see yourself.  Done in full format through The Tracom Group, it includes a 360 assessment.  It also includes a “versatility rating,” which measures the degree to which others see you as flexing your style to meet the needs of another.

The best thing about it for me is that the model is very intuitive.  I can present a 10-minute overview to a group of people and have them grasp it immediately, and even make references to it throughout the rest of the meeting.

The model includes two rating scales, one for “assertiveness” and one for “responsiveness,” the latter measuring the degree to which a person shows emotion.  Combining the two scales, there are four distinct styles: expressive, driver, analytical and amiable.  While there are many parallels to the four DISC styles, there are differences also.

When I was first introduced to the model, about 10 years ago, it helped me make an important self-discovery: that while my natural interpersonal style was “expressive,” my colleagues saw me as “amiable,” and this was because I was deliberately cultivating a style I thought was expected of me as an HR person.  I came to realize that it was much more effective to be myself and focus my energies elsewhere.

How about you; what’s your favorite personal discovery tool or assessment and what stories do you have about it?

Recently I wrote a blog post called Overcoming objections to alternative work arrangements. A reader named Sharon made some interesting additional points about why telecommuting causes heartburn for many managers:  “Every management position has power.  Some power is visible in symbols such as corner offices and floors of open cubicles with workers answering phones and talking into headsets.  Maybe we just need to figure out a good way to give managers a power symbol for how many people they have working for them… kind of like the power bars on the phone.”

As I was thinking about that, I came across a blog post on Harvard Business Publishing’s site called Grooming Leaders to Handle Ambiguity by Scott Anthony.  Anthony says that in most companies, size matters, and therefore we look to give our up-and-coming leaders bigger territory as they move up the ladder.  He asks whether this is the right approach in a changing world where complexity and ambiguity are increasingly the factors that provide challenge.  “I’ve never run a multi-billion dollar company, but I’m willing to bet the difference in complexity between managing $1 billion and $10 billion in revenues, or 1,000 versus 10,000 employees isn’t that great.  In other words, giving up-and-comers more responsibility helps them to refine skills they already have, when what they need to do is to develop the capability to flexibly respond to unanticipated challenges.”  Anthony proposes giving star leaders new geographic markets and new business models rather than bigger territories.

Is that the answer—to change our paradigm rather than search for alternative power symbols based on size?  Another recent HBR blog post reinforces the idea from another perspective.  Whitney Johnson in Venus May Be Rising but Don’t Neglect Mars says that the danger inherent in the rise of female power in the workplace is that women rise by emulating the way men wield their power.  “Is there the risk,” she asks, “of a turnabout attitude of  ‘now it’s my turn to bully you’”?  Johnson hopes not, because successful corporations are finding ways to harness the unique strengths of both men and women, including  the “feminine strengths of interpersonal connectedness, care, sensitivity, and responsibility to people.”  That’s a concept that sounds to me a lot more like ambiguity and complexity than size-equals-power.

Returning to our remote worker issue, our new paradigm would look like this: status would be accorded to the manager who most successfully handles the complexity of building a high-performing team despite the challenges of dispersed work spaces and hours.   The metrics used to measure this success wouldn’t be a whole lot different than the metrics we typically use: How much did they get done?  How fast?  With what quality?  What customer feedback?   The difference would be that senior leadership would emphasize the fact that it got done with a virtual team.

I hope to get some feedback on these thoughts, because I’d like to take it further!  How do we change the paradigm?  And what would be the visible symbols of this new power?  Or am I barking up an impossible tree?

If there’s one thing all customer service workshops have in common, in my experience, it’s the big picture stuff: why customer service is important, the costs and benefits, the organizational philosophy around customer service.  And the basic skills that customer service providers need, like active listening, courteous communication, anticipation of needs, managing non-verbal behavior, etc.

All that is certainly important.  But what front line employees also need are the nuts and bolts of specific techniques for specific situations.  Here are a couple of examples:

1.  Telephone silence: When someone is very upset on the phone, they may talk incessantly.  Say absolutely nothing, not even “uh huh”.  Eventually the customer will stop and say, “Are you there?” and this will allow you an opening to respond.

2.  Distraction: Designed to break the anger cycle by getting customers to shift their attention away from their anger and toward a physical object.  For example, “If you’ll take a look at the computer screen (swivel the screen toward the customer) you’ll see that we have your policy expiration date as November 6^th”.

3.  Questioning instead of stating: Questions can be used to soften a statement or command.  Instead of saying “Do this online” you can say, “Did you know that this can be done online now?”

The next step after giving class participants these kinds of practical techniques is to have them apply the techniques to realistic workplace scenarios.  Make sure the workplace scenarios are written for your workplace, and deal with the very types of challenges your service providers are faced with on a regular basis.  Nothing is a bigger waste of time than using generic scenarios that are written for another organization in another industry and address different challenges.

Some people say that you can’t just teach customer service providers how to deal with specific situations because you can’t cover everything that could possibly come up—so you have to teach them to think in ways that allow them to solve any problem on their own.  I agree to a certain point, but I think in order to teach them how to think critically you have to work with real scenarios.  Then they learn to adapt the techniques for those scenarios to fit others.

What do you think?  Customer service trainers out there, what has worked for you?

It seems that in every management training session I do lately, the same issue comes up: we’re being forced to do this flex time and telecommuting stuff and it doesn’t work for us.  We need our people here in the office.  We need them available during certain hours.

I acknowledge that it’s not as easy as saying, “If you manage by results then it doesn’t matter where your people are working.”  Some jobs are structured around handling service tasks as they come your way and you really do need someone to be in a particular place at a particular time.

Nonetheless, it often seems to me that managers are acting out of entrenched habits or resistance to change.  Open-mindedness is called for.  The world is changing, and we must change with it or risk becoming an employer that can no longer attract the best and brightest.  Here are some common objections I hear, and my response to them:

1. My people don’t produce anything, they just answer questions and provide support. So I need them to be here during the hours I’ve said they will be available.

Clearly in this case, the hours your people work are critical.  You need to be able to publish specific hours to your customers.  But does it really matter where your people are working from?  Set standards for responsiveness, and then find a way to gather customer feedback.  Do your customers tell you that the phone goes to voicemail frequently, or that they leave a message and don’t get a call back in a timely manner?  Then you have a problem.  The problem is not that the employee is working from home and you can’t see them, it’s that they aren’t answering the phone or returning calls to the standard you have set.  Address the real problem.

2.  I often call my employee because I need her and she doesn’t answer the phone.

Doesn’t that happen when she’s in the office too?  Let’s be reasonable here.  Sometimes your employee is in a meeting, on the other line, or in the bathroom.  These things happen in the office as well as at home.  Set standards, once again.  Tell her how soon you expect a call back when you leave a message.  Or ask for a schedule of conference calls and breaks so that you know when the best time to call is.

3. I get what I ask for.  But how do I know that my employee is really working eight hours a day?

This is really a key point.  Who cares if he’s working eight hours a day, if the employee is producing the results you’ve asked for?  Is it fair that the employee who works efficiently and gets the same job done in six hours as others do in eight hours gets penalized?  They should be rewarded instead.  Give them some extra assignments if you think they have extra time.  Choose assignments that are “stretch” assignments and will develop the employee, or choose projects that you know the employee will enjoy.  That way you get more from them, plus they get rewarded for being efficient.

4. I think my employee takes care of personal business on company time.  Sometimes I call and I can tell he’s out in a store or somewhere other than at home.

Again, this comes down to setting standards, communicating your expectations, and then measuring what you get.  If your employee is delivering what you’ve asked for and can shop at Home Depot at the same time, why does that matter?  If, on the other hand, your customers are telling you that they call and get put on hold while the employee deals with a cashier at the grocery store, then you have a problem.  Deal with the real problem.

5.  I need my people to work well together as a team and to communicate frequently.  They need face time for that.

Perhaps more than any other objection, I acknowledge this one as a true challenge.  Teamwork is important, and face-to-face communication is a great teambuilder.  Nonetheless, the world is changing.  Some teams are entirely virtual and they make it work.  Recently I heard a good suggestion from a manager in a federal agency.  She said she sets one day a week, Wednesday, as an “all hands in the office” day.  Except for true emergencies, everyone must be in the office that day and all routine team meetings are scheduled for that day.  For teams that are geographically dispersed, video conferencing is a way to make something similar happen.

I’m opening up a can of worms here, but there really is a generational trend in all of this.  Some of us Boomers just can’t get over the fact that we weren’t allowed to work from home or have flexible hours when we were just starting out in our careers.  Get over it!  If you’re truly managing by results, and you should be in most cases, then you’ll eventually see all these objections for what they really are—excuses and irrelevant noise.