A former mediation student of mine passed away last week and I’ve found my thoughts turning repeatedly to his wife and what she must be experiencing right now. Given David’s special kindness and his natural ability to reach out to others, I imagine that there are many in her community who are now trying to do the same for Allie.

These musings brought to mind a new website designed just for such moments, when many individuals want to help a family in crisis. I’m recalling times when a colleague has been ill or lost a family member, and a group of us has tried to offer solace by helping out with life’s more mundane demands. Lotsa Helping Hands was created to make the act of helping a bit easier: [Read more...]

Penguins are definitely in fashion. Harvard B School prof and organizational change expert John Kotter certainly hasn’t missed the trend. With Holger Rathgeber, Kotter has penned a delightful, simple and informative change management fable based in an Antarctic penguin colony.

In Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions, the penguins discover their iceberg home is melting and need to do some serious flock-wide work to address the problem they face. As the fable unfolds in this short little book with illustrations that can’t help but make you smile, Kotter and Rathgeber bring to life key concepts for managing change in any system…work, home, community.

Read it once through for the fun of the story and the dry penguin wit. You can do it in less than an evening. Then read it again for the change management lessons. Then keep it on your bookshelf for reference, or even better, invite your management team to read and discuss it. Back in my college dean days, it’s the kind of book I’d have asked staff to read before we headed out for our annual retreat picnic.

Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.

Some disputes are worth your effort. Some are worth turning your back and walking away. How do you when to talk and when to walk?

I offer the following seven questions as an informal litmus test for you to use when you’re trying to decide:

1. Can I let this go…really let it go? Sometimes you think you can let go of it, maybe even think you have, but the effects creep into your mind, your heart, or your relationship. The walls in home and work relationships build one brick at a time, after all. If you can’t really let go, or try and find it isn’t working, then there’s a message for you in that.
2. If I don’t deal with this one, will it eat at a work or home relationship that is important to me? This is a slightly different version of the first question. I recommend considering both of them.
3. If I confront this, what are the things I and my relationship with that person will gain? In my experience, folks considering whether or not to try to deal with a conflict have a pretty easy time catastrophizing. Dwelling on all that could go wrong prevents you from giving equal time to all you may be missing if you don’t deal.
4. What is the worst that can happen if it doesn’t go well and what specific steps will I take to recover? The other problem with catastrophizing is dwelling in the muck without investing time to determine how you might get out of it. I find that when clients consider the worst case scenario and then consider concrete steps they’d take to recover, it becomes much clearer about whether it’s worth confronting the problem or letting it truly slide away for posterity.
5. Are there others who stand to lose if I don’t confront this? Are there co-workers, direct reports, customers, family members, or others on whom this situation has had an impact and who would benefit, directly or indirectly, from me stepping up to the conversation?
6. When I imagine myself thinking about this in a month, will this be one that counted? Will I even remember it in a month? Enough said.
7. When I’m 100 and looking back at my life, will this be a dispute or a relationship that counted? I call this one my “life review litmus test.” It’s the one I use with myself and with my clients when they’re struggling with taking on a difficult conversation with a loved one or a treasured colleague.

How do you know when to talk or walk?

Conflict Zen by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConflictZen.com.

I’m still thinking about that 1950s Handbook of Preparedness from Rod’s scrapbook, in part because I’ve received so many notes from readers about it. Apparently I’m not alone in looking back at “duck and cover” with awe at the naivete!

There was another section of Rod’s booklet that offers an idea with merit for conflict resolution and I thought I’d share it with you. The opening paragraph reads,

There are three phases of family preparedness which could mean the difference between life and death in a disaster: home shelter, disaster know-how, first aid.

If we could reduce the draconian approach a bit, these three phases handily mirror the three phases organizational leaders and managers can use to manage workplace conflict effectively:

Conflict Shelter: It’s an interesting idea…a place that people in your workplace can consider “shelter in the storm.” It’s a place where they feel safe, can get their balance back, figure out what to do next. You want someone in or associated with your organization who can be that shelter (but not be the person who sympathizes so much they inadvertently increase the conflict) and be a trusted resource to the persons involved.

Conflict Know-How: This one is no surprise, right? The way you respond to a workplace conflict can make the difference between an entrenched problem and a cohesive team. You want someone in or associated with your organization who knows how to engage conflict successfully, how to use conflict to build greater creativity and better decision-making.

Conflict First Aid: Do you have an organizational conflict triage person? Sometimes that person is an HR professional, though sometimes HR managers are tempted to “pat down” a conflict instead of work to resolve it in the way a trained mediator would. You want someone in or associated with your workplace who knows how to help folks respond to a conflict without that response leading to further destructiveness or stalled resolution.

If I can be of service in helping your organization with its conflict preparedness and response, I’m a phone call or email away.

Conflict Zen by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConflictZen.com.

Remember “duck and cover”? If you’re in your 40s or older and grew up in the U.S., you probably do. I recall those classroom drills designed to help us survive a nuclear attack by hiding under our desks. Yeah, right.

Rod, a child during the height of the Cold War, was going through old scrapbooks last night and found his 1958 copy of the government-issued “Handbook for Emergencies.” Included were disaster preparedness tips for fire, flood hurricane and tornado…and nuclear fallout.

I found myself particularly drawn to the page excerpted here (click to view entire page), initially for its sheer lunacy: Shower to get the radioactive “dust” off of you, and vacuum up the remainder.

But then I got to thinking…It’s darkly ridiculous advice for surviving nuclear fallout. But it’s not half bad for another kind of fallout, the kind that follows a painful argument with someone important to you. [Read more...]

The Conflict Management Articles Vault is a monthly feature that dips into the archives and shares still-relevant articles from one year ago:

• Interview: Liz Strauss, Publishing Consultant: Particularly relevant given the proximity of this post to SOBCon!
• Conflict Hack: I Hear You: Good tip for when you think they’re not hearing you at all.
• Certainty in the Asparagus Patch: Conflict resolution in the garden…who knew?
• Email and Communication: In Moments of Tension, Pick Up the Phone: Keyboard is great for a lot, but not so great for this.
• In Difficult Conversations, Avoid the Zax Trap: All these years later and Dr. Seuss is still teaching us stuff. [Read more...]

I had the chance to learn from over 100 SOBs this past weekend. And true to their SOB-ness, they taught me a lot.

The SOBs were Successful and Outstanding Bloggers and the event was SOBCon ‘07. Attendees were all people who think of themselves in some form as “conversation architects” (with a nod to David Armano for the apropos phrase), online, professionally offline or both. These were folks who taught me something new every time they spoke, and folks for whom connection, community and engagement are really important.

I’m still processing what I learned for use in business, but I’m here today to share my favorite take-aways for engaging your most difficult conversations and building connection with those who really matter to you, at work and home: [Read more...]

Want a workplace team that’s at its creative best, able to think freely and abstractly about whatever they’re working on? Or perhaps there are times you need a group to work in concrete fashion, focusing on details and specifics?

Then you might want to consider the ceiling height of the workspace before you book that conference room.

University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management researchers report that ceiling height can influence consumer responses. In The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing People Use, described in the Innovations Report and to be published in the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers report, [Read more...]