A quick visual exercise can utterly transform how a group understands itself. I recently worked with a Board that perceived themselves as very divided. One camp was supposedly dedicated solely to the organization’s Program H and placed an extremely low value on Program C; the other camp reversed these values. They told this story over […]
Tag Archives: Conflict
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The beginning of a new year is a traditional time for self-reflection, often resulting in a list of habits to initiate, change, or break. Many of them revolve around health behaviors: stop smoking; eat more salad and less junk food; workout every day. Seth Godin’s blog post Angry Is a Habit suggests that our emotional […]
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I spent all day Saturday doing landscaping work with my cohousing neighbors. I actually don’t like gardening all that much. I have very little experience or knowledge, having lived all my adult life in trailers, apartments, and condos. But the foliage was threatening to take over and so the troops were assembled and armed with […]
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I continue to think about the definition and use of this word safety, which we facilitators are charged with creating and maintaining. (See previous post here.) A family camping trip this past weekend gave me opportunities to consider the issue in a different context. We camped in the woods near a large lake; swimming, fishing […]
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In a recent post I wrote about the role of discomfort in group dynamics. Trying something new is generally not comfortable. Trying to communicate in a different way is not comfortable. Finally digging in and dealing with hard stuff that you’ve been avoiding is not comfortable. A certain level of discomfort can be necessary for […]
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I love this blog post on creating trust within your workplace; the author’s key point is that if you act as though your workers are trustworthy – assuming positive intent, not micromanaging them, allowing them to make decisions – they are more likely to BE trustworthy than if you are continually vigilant for signs of […]
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At last week’s HR West conference, I had the pleasure of graphically recording a keynote by trainer and consultant Shari Harley. Her company name is Candid Culture, and she talked about the need to choose candor over comfort in our communications. People can’t meet our expectations or needs if we don’t tell them what they […]
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Human beings are hard-wired to read faces – our babies figure it out way before they can talk or walk. While there are facilitators out there who help groups in virtual meetings, I am not one of them. I find it hard to connect with people when our interaction is mediated by a screen – […]
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Many of our resolutions, personal or professional, are about things that we’d like to DO. Some are about things we want to STOP doing. I rather like this little piece by Jeff Haden at Inc. on ten things to stop doing in order to be happier at work: blaming, impressing, clinging, interrupting, whining, controlling, criticizing, […]
Comments Off on More Resolutions: Happiness by Subtraction
A common complaint that I hear from my intentional community clients as we prepare to work on a vexing issue is, “We talked about this same issue LAST year!” There is a great desire to be DONE with it already, to set it to rest, to come up with a final solution or policy that […]
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