SI VIS PACEM, PARA BELLUM: EMBRACING CONFLICT, PREVENTING WAR

  Some years ago I remember discovering a piece of art by Salvador Dalí that really captivated me in a way just a few paintings have gotten to do. The work was "Soft-Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)" and it shows two parts of what appears to be an only monster wrestling with himself. Dalí wanted to reflect the self-destruction that occurs in a Civil War like the Spanish Civil War.

Self Construction with Boiled Beans - Salvador Dalí / Philadelphia Museum of Art 

  When we find conflict we, human beings, have developed hundreds of different cognitive-emotional strategies to cope with it the faster the better, even though it means not getting much from it. Although first reaction when spotting conflict let us identify this as a premonition to harmony collapse and we immediately tend to suppress it, studies show how important and neccessary is to deal with it in the right way.

Benefits of Conflict

Increases level of IMPLICATION
CHANNELS animosity
Promotes CONNECTION and sense of belonging
Increases ACTIVITY
Promotes CHANGE
Promotes new IDEAS
Reveals difficulties and ANXIETIES towards tasks
Reveals PERSONALITIES
Reveals feeling and underlying EMOTIONS

  However, we need to control the environment of conflict and, as team leaders, try not beeing the source that provokes it.

  The conflict management guru Josep Redorta gives us the key to analize conflicts: "in a conflict situation you must always attack the emotional roots first, they have at the end made it explode." After this we need to clarify what the conflict is, there are multiple and very usefull ways of categorizing the conflicts (Prof. Redorta created the Conflict Analysis Typology, a standardization of 16 conflict elements that help us categorize the type of conflict in a really brilliant and highly comprehensive way). After the clarification comes the analysys of the excercises of power, he says "the power is always in the centre of the interaction". Lastly, analyze the values, norms, beliefs and the importance of them between the conflict and start an strategy to mediate effectively.

  For me the most fascinating part of his proposal is how to deal with different underlying emotions. However, you need to know although it might seem easy to identify different emotions, it is not, and it requires a certaing amount of time and training to master the technique of doing it.

  Anyhow, here I paste you a simple guide of how to react and cease the arousal of this different basic emotions that normally underlie on conflicts. Even though it needs more explanation (I strongly recommend Prof. Redorta's book), I think it might be a useful guide at least to think about it.

Emotion	Compensators
Anger	Calm / Divert
Fear	Understand / Protect
Sadness	Care / Cheer Up
Interest	Help / Explore
Surprise	Guide / Prevent
Excitement/Joy	Understand / Share
Disappointment	Explore / Guide
Envy	Avoid / Explore
Guilt	Reduce / Displace
Admiration	Rationalize / Learn

  These are important ideas and thought I'd like to share:

- Don't panic if the conflict appears on your organization, look at the bright side, consider this an opportunity to reinforce your team.
- Before acting there are several things you need to think first, and there is a first one over the other ones: what is the emotion this appeared from.
- Think and ellaborate a strategy, elicit a compensator.
- The solution of a conflict is in cooperation and cooperation is an important value, an asset you will be able to use in the future. Use the conflict resolution as an example once you are sure it had a healthy healing.

  Hobbes stated in his Leviathan people live in constant war because man need to share sources of pleasure, which are defined as scarce. Most people is self-interested and causes of conflict are self-inflicted and because of this nature come all the conflict between man: homo homini lupus est.

  I am not saying this statement is distinctively wrong, it is not, but time has passed since the era of the Imperialism and our objectives are different and now the trend is not looking at the causes, but the forms of conflict which are widely more useful if our ultimate goal is to mediate and help solving them.

"So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death." Leviathan Chapter XI

Written listening to "Country Joe And The Fish - Electric Music For Mind And Body" album (Rate:7/10)

HOW CAN EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP CHANGE THINGS

How does a messy corporation look like?

- Divergence between areas. There are places where energy and resources are being explicitly wasted.

- There is confusion, every leader, manager, director has its own perspective of what is going on. The culture of rumor has installed and there is little or no information.

- The leadership and the employees are highly reactive, they respond adversely to any new event or occurrence.

- There is neither intention nor purpose and the topics, decisions and actions adrift from one scene to another.

How does a fine-looking corporation look like?

- United. Leaders have learned to debate and solve openly and maturely their conflict and disagreements.

- There is common strategies, objectives and a shared operational procedure.

- Corporation takes the initiative and acts over the competitive setting.

- Employees and leaders actively take part of the corporation and they are fully engaged with the objectives.

- A common purpose sense is shared throughout the company. There is progress.

  So the question is, what do we change in "messy corp" to become "fine-lookin' corp"? First of all, we need to focus on identifying the underlying problems. But don't panic, these use to be quite predictable. Normally there can be identified 5 behaviours that need to be changed: Divergence, Reaction, Apathy, Inactivity and Drift. The leadership need to turn this trends into others.

  Once we know what to do... how do we end up changing things? Here are some proposals to get this trends swapped.

- Turn Divergence into Solidarity: Provide a more consistent understanding of what is the situation for the company, invest resources making sure everyone is in line with the company's point of view.

- Turn Reaction into Initiative: Define a well landed strategy based on specifics. Clarify how the company is expected to achieve goals with the given resources.

- Turn Apathy into Proactivity: Inspire the members of your corporation to embrace the culture of effort and illusion for achieving goals.

- Turn Inactivity into Activity: Mobilize your people to transform their resources into means to achieve the goals. Set the right expectations, reach an agreement and harmonize collectively the objectives.

- Turn Drift into Purpose: Spread the sense of responsibility through managers and employees. Everytime its possible, make them part of the decision making and strategy design so the sense of belonging flourishes among them.

  Important Note: Leadership is not something that one person is, leadership is a process, a social dynamic which is shared in a given context in a given moment. So we should stop talking about leaders as individuals and start talking on situational leadership. To know more on this topic read the super comprehensive Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory.

Written listening to "Mogwai - Kicking a Dead Pig" album (Rate:8,5/10)

LOOKING BACK HOME: RE-RECRUITING TALENT

"And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you,
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles its a very, very
Mad world"

Tears for Fears - Mad World

  I was thinking how mad the world turns when we are heading nowhere. Come on... I know it sounds lame but I'll get to a point, I promise :)

  As I was saying, everybody needs a direction to head on and this is something sometimes difficult to manage when you are leading a team. Some of the main responsibilities of a leader towards his teammates is to handle this individual development. But this is easy to say, now, how we can deal with this? First amendment of employee development: Everybody likes to feel special.

1. Assessment: Schedule a calendar in which you need to talk to your reports individually at least once in a month. Managing means having your ear ready to anything that could lead you to a better guidance with your teammates. To get the most productivity on your team you need to approach every member one to one first, make sure they are on the best possible role to help the group.

HR has to provide with specifically designed (together with managers) development plans towards a particular and measurable model of competencies. Define the necessary competencies by task, not only by role (this is a common error, in order to get the most from a team you need to go to specifics). Only then you will be able to identify the bias and develop the tools to face this better.

2. Open Cross-team Re-Recruitment Processes: Why not democratise the progress of your best talent? Make the measurements collective and accessible to all members of a group. Bring back the 360º's. Make a culture on sharing best practices collectively.

I'm not saying anything new if I mention the sense of belonging is probably one of the most important engines of motivation any human being can have. Make all your team a participant of a process, specially when this internal promotion stays inside a particular working team. This will transgress the expected vertical secrecy through your company and will help building community feeling.

3. Founding Trust: As you can read in one of my previous posts, one of the most common causes of leaving the work is for trust between employee and company. When this divorce occurs, oh boy... Friedrick Nietzche said once “I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you”. 

If you re-recruit, if you promote your people instead of finding the resource outside, you will grow instant trust among everybody. But be careful, even though it is not your fav one, you need to base your recruitment process on pure meritocracy. Make objectivity and logic flourish in your company. Promote only the bests, but promote them, look what's inside before looking outside. This will help create a culture of competition and self-improvement.

4. Grow Culture of Talent: Top Performers need excitement. They need to feel they are doing the best they can in the best place possible. Use your own talent development to convince others to embrace the culture of performance. 

5. Be the first to offer: You might not bear in mind that your best employees are being contacted by other companies several times a week. If you offer first the odds are high talent will stay in your company because of inertia.

6. Get out the rut: An employee excitement cycle is short. It's even shorter if this one is a top performer. Your talent behaves like the overexcited infant, once the sugar rush ends the kid crashes anyplace. Take control of this variable, promote the activity. 

  Some parts of this post were inspired by Dr. John Sullivan's (The Michael Jordan of Recruitment) article in TLNT.

Written listening to "Tears for Fears - The Hurting" album (Rate:8,5/10)