Let's take a workplace teaching moment from the Obama-McCrystal dust-up as provided to us by the New Yorker in this week's Talk of the Town piece, Team Effort. In reporting the dysfunction on Team Afghanistan (McChrystal vs. American Ambassador Karl Eikenberry with President Karzai as a manipulative by-stander) the NY'ers George Packer recalls a description of governmental decision-making provided by Obama's special representative for the region, Richard Holbrooke, last year:
People sit in a room, they don't air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.
If that defines your workplace, it's time to have some difficult conversations in which a genuine consensus is negotiated among those in power, all the while remembering that everyone is afraid of the scary HR lady down the hallway. As the recession appears to deepen and run American business off the rails, its time we get real, get smart, get efficient and get right with one another. If not, next thing you know, you'll be learning to spell Q-U-A-G-M-I-R-E yourself, wondering how the heck such a profitable enterprise could meet such a messy and costly end.
Here are some resources:
Difficult Workplace Conversations by Conflict Zen blogger Tammy Lenski - an old post but a timeless one.
Bursting the Bubble, Cultivating Dissent in the Workplace by mediator and negotiation trainer and consultant Diane Levin of The Mediation Channel.
Resolving Conflicts at Work by Ken Cloke and Joan Goldsmith.
The Martial Art of Difficult Conversations by Peter (why I returned my iPad) Bregman at the Harvard Business Review
Toward a Theory of Managing Organizational Conflict by M Afzalur Rahim (for the academically-minded)
And, last but not least, the google book site for the Art of War
And remember . . . . never ever ever get comfortable with a reporter around.
Social scientists contend that the difference is more than just cosmetic. They cite a 2006 study by the Wellesley Centers for Women that found three to be the magic number when it came to the impact of having women on corporate boards: After the third woman is seated, boards reach a tipping point at which the group as a whole begins to function differently. According to Sumru Erkut, one of the authors of that study, the small group as a whole becomes more collaborative and more open to different perspectives. In no small part, she writes, that's because once a critical mass of three women is achieved on a board, it's more likely that all of the women will be heard. In other words, it's not that females bring any kind of unitary women's perspective to the board—there's precious little evidence that women think fundamentally differently from men about business or law—but that if you seat enough women, the question of whether women deserve the seat finally goes away. And women claim they are finally able to speak openly when they don't feel their own voice is meant to be the voice of all women.
I continue to bark at the moon.
From today's "She Negotiates" lesson.
