Is fast thinking slowing you down?

By Susan Letterman White

In 2012, Facebook conducted an experiment to see whether it could influence the emotions and postings of its users by curating news feed content calculated to manipulate mood. The experiment worked.

If you had any doubt that your decision-making is affected by forces that fall below your radar, this should make it clear that even if you are not interested in knowing how you make decisions, other people are. Neuroscience has made its way into mainstream thinking and lawyers are catching up. We’re beginning to talk about the impact of neurochemistry on our decisions about whom to hire and how we apply objective standards in subjective ways to evaluate performance and allocate compensation and rewards.

Unconscious forces pervade our thinking, feelings and decision-making every day, yet there is little talk about this reality.

More important than discussing the exact neuroscience behind behavior is to acknowledge the possibility that your decision-making isn’t always as logical as you think it is. Do your actions always match up with your intentions and aim?

If you agree it’s possible that, on occasion, your decisions are flawed, then it makes sense to develop self-awareness of how you make decisions and a strategy to stop, evaluate and perhaps slow down your fast thinking when it happens.

Fast thinking and its impact

Nobel laurate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman has explained fast thinking. There are two systems of thinking: System 1 is fast and based on a gut reaction, and system 2 is slower, conscious and deliberate. Fast thinking is the unconscious bias that affects our thinking, decisions and behaviors. It can, under certain circumstances, lead to unintended outcomes.

The phenomena that comprise fast thinking are pervasive. They affect how we feel and what we think. They affect our perception of events — what we notice and miss — and decisions about meaning and what to do. There are times when fast thinking creates the results we want. This column is about the times is creates results that do not match our intention.

Without you knowing it, your fast thinking may lead to miscommunication and misunderstanding. It may cause you to negotiate a less advantageous agreement or lose a prospect or client. It may create chaos in the workplace and interfere with good client relationships, colleague collaboration, and effective organization performance. Understanding when your tendency to think fast is triggered is the first step.

Psychologists have been talking about schemas, mental models, mindsets, heuristics and scripts for years. These refer to mental shortcuts to save time when making decisions.

For example, a captain of a sinking ship needs to think fast and lead in a directive way. It’s an emergency. There is no time to waste, and resorting to habits for responding to emergency situations is required to keep people safe. However, most situations are not emergencies.

Stressful situations trigger most people to behave as if there is an emergency and resort to fast thinking. Most people feel stress when they are tired, ill, angry, afraid, excited, joyous or under the influence of any strong emotion. Then, they fall back on mental shortcuts to save energy. Unfortunately, in many of these situations, fast thinking leads to more problems than it solves.Everyone has unconscious biases affecting decisions every day. These fast ways of thinking remain unconscious, without reminders to look for them. They exist to protect self-interest, even when slower, more deliberate decision-making is needed to make the right decision that is actually in one’s self-interest.

Sometimes, we cannot know what we don’t know and must rely on feedback from others for a fact-check to avoid jumping to the wrong conclusions. If a goal is to make evidence-based decisions, then knowing common mental shortcuts is a start. Here are a few.

Anchoring

The hidden process of anchoring makes the first piece of information you notice seem to be more important. It blocks thinking about possibilities. In a negotiation over money, the first number heard sets the tone and movement for the entire negotiation. This doesn’t mean that if you throw out an unreasonably high or low number, you’ll end up with a higher or lower result. The number must seem reasonable. If not, it could stall further discussions.

Availability

Availability refers to giving too much weight to personal information and not enough weight to the array of relevant information. Example: believing that success is based on hard work alone because of personal experience that minimizes the value of being born into a powerful network that has presented opportunities and affected performance evaluation or the resources to improve performance ability.

Representativeness

Representativeness refers to predicting that a certain person will have certain characteristics or abilities based on their similarity to a stereotype. One example: judging mathematical ability by the choice of attire — a pen in a shirt pocket with a pocket protector. Another: expecting that a parent who could not travel for work one week shouldn’t be offered a travel opportunity for a different week.Loss aversion

The desire to avoid feelings of loss. All change efforts involve the sense of loss of certainty and what is familiar even when change leads to a financial or other gain. For example: choosing to stay in a job that makes you unhappy instead of exploring other possibilities for fear that you’ll lose a safe situation.

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias refers to the tendency to notice and accept only information that confirms your position, while not noticing or ignoring evidence that undermines it. One example: An expert witness examines evidence that is open to interpretation after seeing other evidence of an accused’s guilt and interprets it in strong support of guilt. Another: You have already decided that you do or don’t want to confront a co-worker on his behavior that was hurtful and unprofessional. When you consider your decision, all you notice are reasons that support it.

Compensating for fast thinking

Develop a habit of scanning your feelings — physical and emotional. Strong feelings can impact your ability to make reasoned decisions. Learn to notice when you are feeling stressed emotionally or physically. Learn to recognize your emotions. Stress, illness, tiredness, anger, fear, excitement, and other physical and emotional feelings play a role in your decision-making. Expect fast thinking any time you are trying to make a personal change or a change to the way you run your business.

1. If you are having strong feelings, stop and think about how they are affecting your decision-making ability.

2. If possible, postpone important decisions until you are feeling more neutral.

3. If postponing is not an option, use your emotional intelligence skills. Take a deep breath and manage your emotions.4. Schedule important decisions for a time when you have enough energy to contribute to the task. Don’t make important decisions when you are hungry or tired.

5. Take your time to make important decisions. Think about them overnight. Consider possible outcomes to your behavior, including your feelings.

6. Incorporate processes to avoid wasting energy on routine decisions or allowing your fast thinking to intervene when inappropriate. For example, read and respond to email at certain times of the day instead of allowing it to interrupt your work.

7. An effective way to counter your own confirmation biases is to ask others for their perspectives on the data behind your decision and the decision itself.

8. If you make a mistake, acknowledge and correct it as soon as possible. The risk of not doing so is piling on self-serving justifications for making the mistake.

9. If you gravitate toward the first suggestion or idea, gather more information about the purpose or goal for accepting the suggestion or idea and then re-evaluate whether the first one is the best.

10. Never assume how someone else is thinking and feeling. Never assume that you know what they are capable of doing. Our assumptions are often based on incomplete or irrelevant data. Force yourself to prove your assumptions are true before you take them as fact.

Conclusion

Fast thinking can interfere with communication with clients, colleagues and yourself. Ultimately, what matters is whether the ways you think, feel and act are moving you closer to your goals or farther from them. Managing or leveraging fast-thinking biases begins with self-awareness and self-management.

Contact Us Now!

4 Steps for Post-Merger Integration Strategy

By Susan Letterman White

Resistance to change is always a danger even in small projects and promising innovations. But when a whole company is about to change its shape, to transform itself into something entirely different through a merger, emotions can run rampant. Rosabeth Moss Kanter (Supercorps)

Perhaps there is something inherently wrong with most of the advice suggesting a merger as a sensible strategic move. ALM research suggests  that five years after a merger is announced, 30% of firms experience a drop in gross revenue, 73% of gains are actually less than peer firms experience, and 93% of firms see an increase in cost-per-lawyer despite the argument that mergers are a way to gain efficiencies and reduce expenses.  Or, maybe there is another reason for these strategy failures.

When the financial analysis supports a decision for a merger or acquisition and the ongoing financial plan enhances financial stability, there is no reason for a merger to fail, yet they do. The same research references above suggests that disruption is commonly experienced following a merger. Mergers at the organization, group, and interpersonal levels are vulnerable to failure without a plan to address the to-be-expected resistance to change. 

Recently, I worked with a large firm on a post-merger integration project aimed to reduce resistance at the group level.  The combination of two firms resulted in friction among teams at the Chiefs, Directors, and Managers level. The old ways of doing things were not working effectively in the new firm. This is a common experience in any organization after a merger. 

My sponsor within the firm and I worked together to design a program to reduce resistance. She recently reflected on that work and said, “teams are working more effectively than a couple of months ago.  Whenever you can have folks communicate effectively and candidly about integration and discuss the concerns that people have, it reduces the anxiety that many may feel when firms initially merge.” That was our goal for a two-part pre- and post-lunch program at a two-day retreat. 

In most combinations, success depended on people understanding what the combination means. How will the new puzzle pieces fit together to create a new firm? How will their piece of the puzzle fit? Are people at risk of losing their jobs? It is not an overstatement to say that a merger is a significant change process. During the early stages of any significant change processes, namely for the first year after the event, anxiety is high and confusion abounds.

In my client’s situation, each legacy firm had its own way of doing things – its own culture. Culture isn’t something people talk about. In fact, they usually do not notice it. Culture is the behavioral norms that results from shared, yet hidden and undiscussed assumptions and beliefs about how people should interact with each other and what is valued most and least. 

When two cultures merge into something new and different, it’s a bumpy transition for many reasons. Some of those reasons are about the logistics, the actual organization dynamics change. Other reasons fall under the category of psychology – how human beings think and feel about change. People need to figure out how to navigate their differences and work together effectively and efficiently in the midst of changes to the law firm’s structures, processes, and resource allocation. 

As is common in a merger, in my client’s situation, many people affected by the merger were on the same team and yet had never met. Even among those, who had communicated with each other, most did not know each other very well. They came from different organizations with different workplace cultures and had different work styles and processes.  Superimposed over that, they had different, undiscussed assumptions of how they should be working together until they met at a two-day retreat. Merging the organization dynamics was as important as merging the cultures. 

In a successful merger, different individuals, groups, and organizations with necessarily different identities and cultures are becoming a unified whole and if done correctly, the new organization develops into a fierce marketplace competitor. Done incorrectly, it’s may be a mistake from which the firm will never recover.  

Key integration steps include the following.

1. Select the right people, groups, and firms. The group selected for the initial project included, Chiefs, Directors, and Managers.  These individuals were responsible for working together and supporting the work of the overall firm and attorneys. The specific small working-groups were designed with the “right” people – people that needed to work together and solve their problems that were interfering with their ability to work together effectively and efficiently.

2. Demonstrate concern for people and respect for their feelings and situations. The two day-retreat created the time and space for people to talk about the merger and its effects. A significant component was a portion devoted to explaining the logistics and psychology of the merger and providing time to discuss individual experiences of these effects. 

3. Integrate while acknowledging different identities and by choosing inclusion. Encourage new ideas and ways of thinking. Encourage people to challenge old ways of doing things. The retreat was part of an ongoing effort to acknowledge the differences of the two legacy firms, while also developing shared ideals and co-creating a shared future. The retreat included time for these firm leaders to collaborate as problem-solvers. They learned about the different legacy cultures driving how work was done effectively and efficiently and then began co-creating a new culture of new ways to effectively and efficiently working together.

4. Provide the space and time. Busy people need reasons and scheduled time to get to know and develop trust for one another. The two-day retreat did this. They were given a shared task to figure out how to improve their experience of working together and were also given time for informal networking to get to know each other better.

Mergers and integrations have the potential to jumpstart a new growth cycle for your law firm when leaders plan in advance to address the resistance that inevitably follows. That means paying equal attention to the logistics and the people affected and their wants, needs, expectations, interests, and concerns, and responding effectively and innovatively.

Contact Us Now!

Everything You Need to Know About Unique Value Propositions

By Susan Letterman White

What is a value proposition?

A value proposition is what you are offering to provide in exchange for your fee.  Your value proposition is your service, product, and/or the experience of working with you. It’s not about your personal brand – your identity or values. It’s not about how able you are to create trusting relationships, where clients have confidence in your legal acumen and ability. It’s not even about how people feel when working with you, although that is important. 

Rather, it is about the perception held by a prospective client, client, or referral source of the unique value you offer to people – the meaningful difference you can make in their lives and in helping them with their problems and goals. It’s about their point of view, the problems they care about most, and whether you offer a different and better solution to those problems.

The operative word is value, from your client’s point of view. There are three categories of value from your client’s point of view. You can create new value, protect existing value, or restore value lost for clients. If you find ways for your clients to do what they want to do, then you create value.  If you find ways to help your clients preserve what matters to them most, then you maintain value.  If you find ways to make your client whole after being physically, emotionally, or financially limited or harmed, then you restore value. 

A good value proposition quickly tells clients the problems you will solve for them, the leverage you will provide to make attaining their goals easier, and the benefits that will make their lives easier and better.

Why are some value propositions better than others?

Let’s take a look at two service companies to see what works and what could use a little improvement. 

As a ride-sharing company, Uber appeals to drivers and riders with different and persuasive value propositions.  On its website home page, you will find this:

Very quickly, I know how Uber can be of value to me, whether I am a rider or a driver. 

Boston University is a private university. Its campus is the city of Boston. Its competition for undergraduates is stiff. There are many similar universities in similar locations – even within the city of Boston. On its website home page, you will find an old-fashioned landing page and center stage is a picture and story of neuroscientist Rahul Desikan, a “pioneering neuroscientist” who “was attacking ALS. Then, ALS attacked him.” This may be an interesting and moving story, but it doesn’t tell me anything obvious and persuasive about the value of attending Boston University as an undergraduate.

Underneath and in small font are four categories: headlines, research, community, and alumni. Each category offers more information.  Under headlines is news about BU today. There is an article on E-cigarettes, managing information overload, and getting to know Dorchester. BU is not in Dorchester, so I find this very confusing. The information under the other headings is similarly aimed at a narrow audience of people, who might find the specific topics of interest.  Nowhere on the homepage of this website does it tell a prospective student why BU is a better choice than any other university. There are thirteen information links at the top of the page, many with drop-down menus. Each menu has too many additional topics.

Even if I select “ABOUT,” I’m told that “Boston University is no small operation…our three campuses are always humming, always in high gear.” These clichés tell me nothing at all. I could choose to click on any of several additional links, including to “meet the people and places that keep the University running smoothly,” but it’s difficult to find meaningful information at first glance about why Boston University is unique and worth the tuition and estimated expenses of $69,668 per year.

Clarity in a succinct message of the unique value to your target market is what makes a value proposition good. 

Why create a value proposition?

To a client, your value proposition is the value they conclude they are receiving in exchange for what they give you? If they do not conclude that they are receiving more value as a result of hiring you, they will opt to live with a problem or attempt to solve it in other ways. Clients give you their time, money, and emotions. In exchange, they want a problem to disappear and a solution to move into its place. They have needs and interests, none of which are the details of how you will use your legal expertise. When you can convey precisely, which factors or aspects of the service or the experience you offer will solve which of their specific problems, you give your prospect the information they need to decide whether or not your unique value proposition is of sufficient value to them.

Some people say that your value proposition is the most important piece of your overall marketing messaging. It’s a catalyst for transforming prospects into clients when it tells them why they should hire you, rather than another lawyer. It clearly conveys the benefits of working with you. The most important element is that it connects to the conversation about a problem or desire already happening in your prospect’s mind. 

How to create your value proposition

Many value propositions are drenched in trite, meaningless, weak, and ambiguous words. An effective value proposition explains how your services address a specific need experienced by your ideal client. A value proposition is also called a unique selling proposition because by using the language of the prospect, not the lawyer, and talking about the prospect’s problems begging for solutions, you transform a prospect into a client. The way you speak about your services to other lawyers or legal staff or even your family should differ from how your clients describe your services and how you describe your services to them.

Creating your unique value proposition is a five-step process.

Step One: Describe your ideal client or prospect. Is your client an individual or an entity? If an entity, who is the decision-maker? What does that person care about most? What makes this client or prospect ideal?

In a for-profit corporation, your client cares about creating or preserving value – their profit or competitive advantage.  They may also care about restoring value that they feel has been unfairly taken or not paid when due. Individuals may care most about their family member’s health and well-being, what others think about them, or restoring value that they feel has unfairly been taken. Non-profit organizations care about creating value through fundraising and relevant acquisitions and actions, helping their stakeholders, growing their members, and keeping their existing members happy. 

Step Two: Do you create new value, maintain value, or restore value for your client? 

Step Three: Describe the value in detail from the prospect’s point of view. What unique experience and value are you offering?

Step Four: What problems do your prospects have that keep them awake at night? Come up with as many problems as possible. 

Step Five: For each problem you identify, which specific factors, qualities, characteristics, or defining features of your service, product, or the experience of working with you respond to each problem?

Step Six: Put this information together to write a short, easy-to-recall, value proposition in the language of your client. Make it persuasive and distinguishable from competitors. What problems will you solve, or situations will you improve? What specific benefits will you deliver? Why are you better than the lawyer down the hall? 

You may need to analyze your competition to discover where they fall short.  Their weaknesses are your opportunities to distinguish yourself. What do you do better than your competition? There are three ways to differentiate yourself. You might describe the features – the facts or characteristics of your service; the advantages – how a feature can help the prospect; or the benefits – how a feature or advantage meets a prospect’s explicit needs. Research shows that benefits are the most persuasive way to describe solutions.  

Your features are what you offer – notify of new lawsuits soon after they are filed, explain the risks of different strategies, file all documents related to a trademark request, etc.  Your benefits solve your prospect’s problems – early notification of lawsuits, sleep better at night, knowing someone is on the lookout for lawsuits against your company. Your advantage may be your price point or speed.

Start with one short sentence about the end-benefit of your legal services. Then in 2-3 sentences, specifically explain those services and why they are useful. List three key features, advantages, or benefits of your services with bullet points.

Conclusion

Your value proposition should be read and understood quickly in less than 30 seconds. As long as you are not trying to sell something that few people want to buy or trying to sell to someone who doesn’t have purchasing power, your value proposition will transform prospects into clients and clients into brand advocates.

Contact Us Now!

Resilience and your personal brand

By Susan Letterman White

The ability to anticipate and bounce back from setbacks quickly - is among the most valuable competencies. Like the ability to easily learn new skills, it catalyzes a person's ability to respond intentionally, intelligently and with an effective strategy to any surprising and significant change that the person faces. Resilience is what helps a person adapt to adversity, manage stress and even find hidden resources to meet goals that at first glance appear difficult to attain. It is never more important than when you are trying to discern and adjust your personal brand. You have a personal brand. Everyone does. It is the image you project and is a consequence of every single aspect of your identity and behavior. This part of your identity is expressed whenever you are communicating, i.e., whenever you are in the same physical or virtual space as another person. You can't really identify your brand with accuracy without information from other people about how they perceive you. You may have a few ideas, and your ideas may even be correct. However, personal brand is what other people notice about you. It's a particularly difficult challenge to discover that your personal brand isn't what you thought it was and perhaps not aligned with your goals. This twinge to one's self image is what has been called an "identity abrasion."1 It is easy for someone who is accustomed to excelling academically to have a self-image as a high performer, and interpret the information about his or her brand that doesn't match the person's self-images as a fatal mistake or failure. In truth, it is nothing more than data to evaluate and an opportunity to learn something about how other people, who have experienced you in a particular context, perceive you. An identity abrasion to someone with low resilience can cause shock and a sense of loss. When this happens, it takes time to psychologically process the feelings associated with shock and loss. Some people are so fearful of an identity abrasion that they will protect themselves by refusing to collect data about their brand from other people. Unfortunately all this strategy achieves is to keep those vulnerable and low resilient people blind to the most valuable gift - feedback about what others believe is true. People with higher levels of resilience approach challenges with optimism that they will succeed. They have more confidence, are more motivated to tenaciously plow through difficulties, and view themselves as problemsolvers, rather than victims of unfortunate circumstances. Having this attitude, which can be cultivated with training, coaching, and practice, is what directs them to want data on their brand and make sense of it through an analytical lens crafted by curiosity. For this reason alone, developing your brand with the help of a coach is invaluable.

Tips for developing resilience

Identify competencies associated with emotional intelligence and develop them. Learning to manage your strong emotions, such as the anxiety associated with an identity abrasion, is one element of emotional intelligence. Another aspect of emotional intelligence, the ability to affect the emotions of others, will help you develop a brand that will help you expand your network. After all, people like helping people that they like, and people like people who affect their feelings in a positive manner. Learn to reduce your anxiety with controlled breathing, relaxing your tensed muscles, and using positiveimagery. Learn more about your anxiety through close attention to the circumstances surrounding your anxiety and reflecting on the experience afterwards.

PBN: Pause. Take three deep Breaths. Notice what is happening around you according to your five senses, and to you - physiologically, emotionally and what you are thinking and saying to yourself.

Tips for identifying and developing your personal brand

First ask yourself about yourself: What matters most to you? Who are you? What do you do? How do you do it? How are you different from everyone else? What do you want people to remember about you after you leave? Second, ask your colleagues, friends, clients, supervisors and anyone else that knows you, what they notice and remember most about you. Not everyone will perceive you in the same way. Your personal brand may vary from one person and context to the next.  Third, given your vision for success, goals and the people with decision-making power that matter to you, how, if at all, do you want to change your brand? Fourth, what will you do first to change your brand from what it is today to what you want it to be? The overlap between brand and resilience is the last step for developing your personal brand. That step is when you identity the action steps you will take to notice and manage any identity twinge that might arise.

1. Martin Davidson, "The End of Diversity as We Know it: Why Diversity Efforts Fail and Why Leveraging Differences Can Succeed" (2011).

Contact Us Now!

Top 3 tips for difficult conversations

By Susan Letterman White

Years ago, I mediated a conflict between two partners in a law firm. Peter was ten years senior to Jim. They had worked together as partners for five years and over that period, it had become extremely difficult for them to have a civil conversation about anything.  Once they looked back at their history working together, they identified a root of their conflict. 

The root was anchored in Peter’s exertion of seniority to block Jim’s desire to fire his assistant immediately. Both had good reasons for wanting what they wanted. The assistant had been gone from the firm for at least three years.  It seemed like a disagreement of three years earlier, over how best to manage a subordinate, was still alive and affecting the ability of Peter and Jim to work together. Over the years, Jim’s resentment grew as did Peter’s certainty in his decision and exercise of power. They avoided talking about their feelings and instead empowered them.

Why is it easier for professionals to give clear direction and bad news in the midst of of a time-sensitive, critical emergency than to have an open and honest conversation about feelings? The words for conversations to resolve a conflict or misunderstanding between two lawyers, accountants, financial advisors, and consultants, making sense of an uncomfortable situation or finding the right words to say and knowing what do are blocked by emotions.

While some emotions, like excitement and anger can feel energizing and bring clarity, others, like humiliation, embarrassment, guilt and shame can be paralyzing. The latter feel so uncomfortable that they block, what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2 thinking – deliberate, logical, and analytical thinking. Instead, they nudge into play the easily accessible options - acting too quickly and paralysis in an attempt to escape these feelings. The end point is the same - unintended consequences.  

The triggers for difficult conversations that trigger System 2 thinking often involve the readjustment of roles and responsibilities or the resolution of conflicting values.  Succession planning, compensation, or the business model are often a source of agitation.  Conflict and misunderstanding are often consequences.

If you are facing a difficult conversation arising out of conflict or misunderstanding, keep these three tips in mind.

1. Acknowledge emotions and thoughts.

It’s a mistake to ignore emotions.  Doing so, empowers emotions to cause blocks and missteps and impairs good decision-making. Instead of ignoring emotions, notice the signs – the knots in your stomach, a headache, a racing heartbeat, or an increase or decrease of sensation within your torso or limbs. Then ask yourself questions about what you are feeling. Name the emotion if you can. If not, google emotions to expand your vocabulary and your ability to name emotions. You may have heard the phrase with regard to emotions, “name them to tame them.” The power of emotions over thought processes and decision-making lessens with acknowledgement. Emotions are easier to spot than the hidden narratives and thoughts, but know that unconscious thinking also affects emotions.

What are you telling yourself about the difficult situation and conversation? Expand your self-awareness and expand your options for managing a difficult conversation effectively.

Why do you expect an upcoming difficult conversation to be difficult? What are you expecting to happen during the conversation? What emotions do you expect others to experience? What do you imagine they expect? 

After acknowledging your emotions and thoughts, consider the overall message and specific information you really want to convey and how best to do it, so that it will be heard and processed as you intend. Focus on your main message and a good outcome for the conversation so that collaboration for a solution becomes possible. Be clear about what you want, don’t want, need, expect, or prefer. Know your mind and then you’ll be better able to help others, who can’t read your mind, understand where you need help.  

Noticing isn’t just personal.  It’s about noticing the emotions of others and adjusting what you say and how you say it, to keep the conversation flowing productively. Emotions, just like the content of a conversation, provide important information.

2. Listen.

When your stress level is too high, you may overlook important information and limit the meaning of what you notice and hidden opportunities.  Instead, slow down. Take a breath. Do nothing other than listen carefully. Listen for content and emotion. What’s being said and how? It’s easy to assume that you understand another person’s position; however, conflict is often not about different positions as much as it is about emotions, interests, needs, and wants that go unnoticed and unacknowledged. The only way to understand another person is to listen to understand. Asking good, open-ended questions will give you content worth your time and effort to listen carefully.

It’s often easier to engage in targeted listening.  Listening for information that supports or undermines an existing position is easier than listening to understand what matters most to the person communicating an idea or emotion. Instead, if your goal is to resolve a conflict productively, listen without judgment.  Listen to understand. Assume whatever you hear is true for the person saying it instead of trying to correct what you believe is a misunderstanding. 

If you listen to better understand the other person’s interests and concerns, you may find options to resolve a conflict without damaging relationships.  One of my clients put it this way, “R before T.” Relationship before task.  The team and organization falls apart if relationships are not built and solidified at every opportunities. Without relationships, the tasks that can be completed are extremely limited.

3. Demonstrate that you care.

Even the best listener and the most astute observer and analyst conveys unintended messages by skipping over the opportunity to demonstrate understanding and compassion.   Digest what you hear and observe and share back your summary. Then, ask if you captured everything the other person wanted you to notice and understand. Include emotional tenor and not just content.

Active listening, empathic listening, or reflective listening all suggest the importance of being aware of the inadvertent messages you send by what you do and say during and after the other communicates. During any conversation, especially one with an element of conflict, the opportunity to convey intentional messages to improve relationships exists. If your goal is to strengthen the bonds of a business or personal relationship, take advantage of all such opportunities.

Demonstrate that you care about the other person by asking open-ended questions. Then, acknowledge their feelings, demonstrate concern, summarize and paraphrase what you hear, and then ask if you understood their meaning.

Contact Us Now!

Find the marketing strategy that’s right for you

By Susan Letterman White

Marketing and business development begins with an answer to the question: Who are you trying to attract as future clients? Your answer should infuse every choice you make about your marketing methods and content. Marketing methods include both active and passive means, using the array of technology options available or no technology at all, and traditional modes of advertising like on billboards, the back of a bus, television advertising or print materials. Once you know where, when and how to connect with your target market, you can decide what to do to let them know the solutions you offer, what it is like to work with you and how you deliver those solutions. Your goal? Remain top of mind, so that when they need what you have to offer, they will know the way to get in touch with you.

Here are three examples of different marketing strategies. Which one is closest to what might work best for you?

Marketing without technology

Alex (real person, name changed) doesn't have a website, Twitter account or LinkedIn page. She isn't active on social media and doesn't write blog posts or print articles. She doesn't plan and deliver programs on her substantive area of law to potential clients or referral sources. She doesn't send out Christmas cards or newsletters to her clients. Her clients do not have email access to her. By all accounts, she isn't doing anything that the experts in law firm business development and retention say are necessary to sustain successful revenue generation for today's solo and small firm lawyers. Yet, she has a steady stream of clients asking for her representation. What's her secret?

Alex's law practice is focused on criminal law. Her potential clients and their referral sources are often where she is demonstrating what she can do for them - in court. In fact, her clients, potential clients and referral sources do not select their lawyers from their digital footprint; instead they select them by evaluating their performance f irst-hand. The upside is that Alex has more free time to practice law with a life outside of law. She also manages the client relationships by phone or in-person only. If they want to communicate, they must pick up the phone. If it's a true emergency, they will get an immediate response. If it's important to them, but not an emergency, they will get a return call within 24 hours.

Marketing has been explained as communicating to many people simultaneously in-person or digitally. Alex doesn't intentionally market her law practice. The upside is that she saves time, money and possible anxiety associated with that endeavor. She is, however, delivering content about what she does and how she does it for clients, by being in court regularly. She has no digital intermediary between herself and her potential clients and referral sources. She's always on display when in court and passively marketing without any buffer. Every day she is in court she interacts with the people who have the decision-power to build or stall her practice. For some lawyers, that would be the downside.

Perhaps an explanation for Alex's success is in this response to a discussion about websites and getting noticed on JDUnderground, "I don't think people much care when your source of referrals is word of mouth. Word of mouth is 10 times better than any other kind."

Regardless of your practice area, Maggie Watkins, chief marketing officer of Sedgwick, LLP says, "Nothing replaces a face-to-face meeting when developing new business. It is a relationship business after all, and prospects want to know you understand them and their businesses and that can only be demonstrated by speaking to them and discussing their issues and needs. Articles, speeches and social media are all designed toget that meeting with the prospect, but the selling begins once you are in front of them and have the conversation."

Content marketing through technology

Not all practices offer the opportunity for passive marketing, as do some areas of criminal law. In contrast, the market (potential clients) in family law is composed of different niches according to family finances. The Legal Services Corporation reports, "86 percent of the civil legal problems reported by low-income Americans in the past year received inadequate or no legal help." This represents a significant business opportunity for anyone who figures out a solution. Damian Turco, a Massachusetts divorce lawyer with a personal injury component of his practice based in Boston, explains: "Prospective clients want to understand the general extent of their legal rights, considering the facts and circumstances of their cases. A natural starting point is the internet. Browsing is anonymous and you can provide them the answers they so need. While doing so, some prospective clients will decide they need representation and, because you've already established yourself as a credible solution, some will call you, schedule a consultation, and become paying clients."

Create a digital presence that answers the questions that are on the minds of your prospective clients and the people who are trying to help them. Then, to further attract the right people further into your marketing funnel, provide the answers to their questions about cost. Turco Legal has designed a specific program for them - Justice for All, - that involves resource-based billing for family law clients.

Content is king for Turco Legal because it is the right content at the right time; however, not all digital marketing content meets this bar. Your digital content may not be as valuable as you think it is. Jayne Navarre recently wrote about the problem with content that isn't engaging the right people. She writes, "The "organic" social media produced by law firms - the stuff that was supposed to create conversation and conversion - appeared to be mostly seen and applauded by a handful of their own employees, lawyers and a few real-life friends and relatives." Create content that will serve as a bread-crumb trail from your next best client's concerns and interests to a virtual handshake with you.

Combine low-cost technology with traditional marketing for a cost-effective combination

Even the best content can get lost among similar content online or on tangible venues, like billboards, public transportation and television. You may need to amp up your efforts by focusing on a narrow niche and repeating your message in different venues at different times. Enter the Truck Accident Lawyers in Pennsylvania. Munley Law is a personal injury law practice with niche marketing aimed at clients who have been injured in truck accidents. This enables clear, concise messaging online and on television.

Of course, this costs money and time and you may face stiff competition for tangible space and the right to get noticed by the right people at the right time. If you are going to use tangible venues in your marketing efforts. Bernie Munley, Chief Marketing Officer of personal injury law firm Munley Law in Pennsylvania, says, "Integrate them with your social media and digital marketing efforts. Social media allows marketers to build brand awareness, engage with their audience, and even target potential clients - typically at a lower cost than traditional media. It would be a mistake to overlook this opportunity.

Contact Us Now!

When change happens, don't run up the ladder of inference

By Susan Letterman White

Hypothetical #1: Loren has been a partner at Smith, Green, and Post for close to 10 years. Loren is "a team player." Until one year ago, Loren was the "right hand" to named partner Chris Smith. Loren managed client relationships and was the first or second chair in most of the complex litigation that Chris claimed as origination. Loren never complained about the share of the firm profits, although the differential between the firm's highest and lowest paid partners had been widening over the years. Last year Loren was told to develop originations, experienced a pay cut and learned that Chris was giving work to other lawyers, junior to Loren. This year Loren was told that despite finding other sources of work to boost billable hours, Loren needed to leave the firm by the end of the year.

Hypothetical #2: Taylor hung a shingle after years of working in larger firms and as Taylor's firm grew, the time came to hire another lawyer. After much searching, Taylor hired Sydney about six years ago. It took Taylor and Sydney six months before true comfort in the working relationship developed. After five years, Taylor was certain in the belief that Sydney would become Taylor's partner. Their work styles were complimentary and they had become close friends. The past 24 months had seen a significant slow down in work and revenue. Indeed this topic was the first point of discussion for every office meeting. Additionally, Sydney had moved out of state and back home to be near family as Sydney's family grew larger with the birth of children. Sydney had expressed concern about the drop in revenue and the cost to the firm of keeping Sydney on payroll. When Sydney told Taylor of an intention to take a position with another law firm, Taylor was devastated.

Neither Loren nor Taylor wanted the changes they were experiencing to occur. Both were concerned about how to manage the change and still meet their interests, needs, wants, expectations, hopes, dreams, concerns and goals.

People often experience change as an unanticipated and undesirable loss and a "felt need" to change or escape from a particular uncomfortable situation. The simple fact is that we are loss-averse. As Nobel Prize-winning economist, Daniel Kahneman says, "the asymmetric intensity of the motives to avoid losses and to achieve gains shows up almost everywhere." When our thinking and behavior is driven by an intense desire to avoid feelings of loss instead of taking the time to adjust to those feelings and allow them to dissipate at the right time, we stop thinking effectively and instead jump to conclusions. This hinders our ability to move forward strategically and intentionally toward our true interests.

For example, Taylor may be in shock from the surprise that Sydney is leaving. Taylor may also feel a need for more revenue in the business. Instead of first making sense of Sydney's departure in a way that allows forward movement of actions, Taylor may not consider the possibility of maintaining any part of the relationship with Sydney. Instead Taylor may jump to the conclusion that the relationship is over, that there will be nobody with a complementary skill set and the business won't survive. Chris Argyris called this thinking, running up the ladder of inference.

In the previous example, Taylor may be only able to notice a small set of data relative to the departure of Sydney- that the relationship with Sydney is ended. Taylor selected a piece of data and attached a limited meaning - that the relationships with Sydney is over and without Sydney, the law firm couldn't be managed well or easily.

In the example with Loren, Loren's identity as a law firm lawyer may limit options for new positions outside of law firms. If Loren begins with a position that it is better to be a partner in a law firm than counsel in a corporation, Loren won't notice or consider any opportunities that might be a better fit with Loren's personality or interests.

When change happens to you, begin with an open mind and challenge your assumptions about the situation. Find your true interests and possible options.

Questions to ask: How did things change? What are my assumptions about the change(s)? Why? What if my assumption was wrong?

What are my interests, wants, needs, preferences, hopes and concerns? How can I move forward toward my interests? Where should I look for options?

Contact Us Now!

Technology's Impact on Law Firm Management and Training

By Susan Letterman White

Technology and the Disruption of Organizational Structures, Leadership & Management, and Talent Development & Evaluation

Technology will continue to change our workplace, as it has always done. It connects people with each other and new ideas that otherwise would remain separated by vast amounts of space and/or time, while paradoxically diminishing the quality and quantity of contact between people physically near to each other. Technology has eliminated opportunities while creating new ones. In short, technology has created options for new structures to change who can work together, new processes for how they can work together, and new product and service outcomes as a result of what they do.  Many of these changes present growth opportunities for different elements of the legal industry from law schools to law departments, law firms, and individual lawyers. 

Many leaders of professional service organizations look at technology as a disruptive threat to manage instead of an opportunity to leverage for a unique, competitive advantage. The fact that it is now possible to work together across vast expanses of space and time make mega-firms possible. The challenge is leading and managing those firms so that the organization, as an entity, is sustainable.

Indeed, this very challenge is present in much smaller firms, too. In the legal industry, repeated efforts to protect a marketplace position, flow from an argument to protect the public. The argument’s construct is that providing advice and drafting documents is a role reserved for the few people, who have received a certain level of education, experience, and expertise that is difficult to duplicate or automate.  This defensive position requires significant resources and has been limited in the past and additional limitations will arise in the future. The effort put into creating and enforcing laws to protect the public from the unauthorized practice of law could have gone elsewhere.

If the legal industry leaders had been looking for the opportunities associated with change as the Accounting profession moved from the European to the US marketplace, they might have been looking for way to eliminate prohibitions against lawyers and non-lawyers sharing work instead of foolishly trying to prevent the amplifying wave from hitting the shore. They were right to worry about the loss of work to Tax and Trusts & Estates attorneys; however, their response was mistaken and detrimental. Law schools could have developed courses, if not degrees, for aspiring accountants and the lawyers who would share work with them. 

Presently, law schools are missing the opportunity to create degree tracts in regulatory affairs , and law firms are missing the opportunity to provide a lower-cost service, despite the fact that Biotech, Pharmaceutical, and Medical Device industry leaders must have been complaining to their lawyers about the growth of an overwhelming amount of compliance paperwork. In the universities that see the opportunity, the tract is not housed in the law school. In another example, using the old argument that a lawyer, who is too closely connected to a non-lawyer in business can’t be trusted to maintain the independent judgment necessary to represent clients, the ABA has blocked alternate business structures that would allow the existence of publicly-held law firms, eliminate compensation policies that creates too much vulnerability to the organization with too much power in a few individuals, and provide funding to invest in more technology. Unfortunately, the lawyer mindset for change is to see risk and try to eliminate it, while the business mindset is to find the opportunity and leverage it. Finally, who isn’t familiar with Legal Zoom, which has productized many of the services, previously within a lawyer’s offerings and considered too creative for commodity packaging, and reduced the cost to consumers. 

Every one of the examples in the paragraph above begs organization leaders to consider their business model.  Combined with the next wave of changes, aimed at automating high-level management, leaders ought to feel the nudge to consider their talent management and development models, too. Developing and deepening relationships with clients and referral sources has become much more important as client loyalty (or dependency) has diminished. Leadership and management have risen in importance and the tasks and competencies defining both continue to change. Finally, it’s critical to consider the criteria by which talent – at the leadership and subordinate levels – is evaluated and consider options for change.  

The next stage of technology is aimed at automating high-level management and the law firms that remain competitive will consider adjustments to their organizational structure and what it means to be a lawyer, manager, and leader. Research, document drafting, marketing and business development, and invoicing and collecting fees are processes that have been transformed by technology. These transformations raised the importance of project management processes and skills.   

Enter iCEO, a virtual project manager for knowledge-based products. It’s only in Beta; however, in addition to being able to take a complex knowledge-based task and break it down into smaller individual tasks, it is also capable of assigning discrete tasks to knowledge-workers anywhere in the world by using multiple, already existing, software platforms. The latter platforms shake up the notion of a traditional workforce even more than do contract attorneys or moving functional divisions, like HR or finance to back offices located in cheaper real estate markets hundreds of miles from the front office spaces, which has been happening at least since 2001. 

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, oDesk and Elance match requests for discrete tasks with workers, who will complete the tasks. Mechanical Turk is essentially a 24/7 virtual workforce.  The platform matches human intelligence workers with thousands of different tasks listed by requestors. When I reviewed the site for this article, one task was described as reviewing the work previously done to extract and verify information contained in a legal document. oDesk is a site for matching any job that can be done on a computer, from writing a blog to developing software, to the right individual, team, or technology tool. Elance lists categories of freelancers in several areas, including legal, marketing & sales, finance & management, office administration, and writing as well as web development. 

iCEO is managed by a person using a dashboard system to assign tasks , which allows the creation of drag and drop assembly lines for the production of a complex end product- for example, a 124-page research report for a Fortune 50 company.  IFTF, the non-profit that created the prototype software ran that experiment. Project management required a single skill, knowing how to use the iCEO software. The discrete tasks that went into the creation of the written report, including images and graphs, were routed across 23 people all over the world. The reduction in time from months to weeks and presumably cost were profound. It isn’t a huge leap from creating this type of research report to creating a legal memorandum on the current state of law on any issue. Law firms and legal departments are already creating proprietary databases with contract clauses from various types of contracts.  Perhaps vendors are too. Imagine the options.

Questions to ask and Ideas to Consider

Here’s the paradox: How can you design a sustainable and tightly-held-together organization and give individuals the independence they want and need?

Organizational Structures

Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of The Institute for the Future, suggests designing the organization to support individual initiative instead of managing to rigidly mold behavior and an expansive organizational network of relationships. Measure an individual’s performance by internal contributions to the business model and the person’s connections and standing in external communities that are important to the business model. Instead of organizing that is driven by a linear hierarchy, consider an organizational design driven by networks of projects and other relationship-drivers.

Structures, or how people are organized and connected and their actions influenced by others, include tangible structures, like office buildings and the arrangement of walls and intangible structures, like formal hierarchies, divisions, and teams, and the informal networks of friends and acquaintances. Places resembling offices, the corporate structure for the storage and flow of information, followed the invention of writing and the need to keep records and for people working on related projects to communicate, for example, banking in 14th Century Florence. The corporate organizational structure, created in the 18th century for the purpose of an efficient workplace, began changing in the 1960s with the advent creative professionals, who were paid to think. 

Management and Professional Development Processes

The project management function is obviously changing right now, even though most law firms barely have been introduced to current project management skills and best practices. So, too, should be attorney development, as is professional development in other industries. The argument that the legal, management, and professional development functions require too much creativity to allow for automation is being eroded and the erosion will continue. As people become more accustomed to receiving services coordinated with the assistance of technology, the benefits of reduced time and cost for technology driven management and professional development will grow. 

Law firms can choose to outsource to companies and individuals routine unskilled tasks like handling mail, reception, or photocopying duties or skilled tasks, like legal research and writing. Project management skills and training are the focus of professional development to leverage new technology opportunities and save time. Management, as a task and skill, has risen in importance and is about to fall in importance just as quickly. Traditional organization structures are becoming less and less important as a new generation of alternative technologies comes into existence.

Contact Us Now!

The Curious Mindset

By Susan Letterman White

Developing Curiosity for Better Communication

Curiosity is at the Foundation of Collaborative Communication

Curiosity is the ability to suspend judgment about what you see and hear in favor of gaining a more comprehensive understanding about meaning. In two way communication, we often jump to a conclusion about what we believe the meaning is behind a statement. In particular, people often state their positions instead of stating their interests - their goals, wants, needs, expectations, concerns, motivations, and hopes. People hearing positions then evaluate those positions through their lens of what is fair and reasonable. Options are eliminated before they are even identified because there is not opportunity to first identify interests, discover possible overlaps, and co-design solutions that meet the most important interests of each person.

Argyris and the Ladder of Inference: Instead of curiosity, people often run up the ladder of inference and restrict what they notice, how they make sense of what they notice, and ultimately, their choice in action. It starts when a person begins with a position in mind, which may limit the data the person notices.

The curious mindset begins with a suspension of judgment. Judgment and the allure of proving a position’s value is replaced with asking what information and assumptions are behind your position as well as the statement of others. You wonder and ask why something seems so important. Questions to show curiosity and suspend judgment are:

1. Why is that important?

2. Why is that a concern?

3. Why does that matter?

4. What leads you to that conclusion?

Contact Us Now!

6 Tips on Productive Communication

By Susan Letterman White

Communication Tips for Productive Conversation Introduction: 

Good communication along with relationship development and management are two interests that are at the foundation of productive meetings, retreats, and conversations, especially those in support of a change initiative. Communication between two people is a two-way process of perception, reflection and sense-making, creating an intention for a reply, and responding. People often start with very different perceptions of events. It’s no surprise that they reach different conclusion about meaning and appropriate responses. Communication Quality refers to the degree to which people understand the messages intended by each other. By listening and checking for understanding, in a back and forth fashion, the two people negotiate a shared understanding. Then, they are able to build on that foundation of shared understanding to identify options and design solutions. This valuable skill improves leadership efforts to drive change initiatives and the efforts of those who are trying with other to make sense of and adjust to changes in their environment.

Principles of Production Communication:

Productive communication solves problems and develops new ideas. It builds mutual understanding and develops relationships. There are six principles of productive communication to support mutual understanding and uncover options for strategic action. They are:

1. Communicate purposefully

2. Listen to understand

3. Suspend judgment

4. Identify interests

5. Brainstorm options

6. Design solutions

1.) Communicate purposefully means that you have a clear intention of how you want your communication to affect another person. Questions to ask yourself before you communicate include:

• What is your purpose?

• What are the messages you want to send?

• To whom is each message directed?

• How can you best convey your message?

2.) Listen to understand means that you listen to another person without planning your response. After carefully listening to understand the person’s interests, you ask questions to check whether or not your perception of the communication is what the person intended to communicate to you. Statements to seek understanding are open ended questions or requests for elaboration and begin with:

• Let me see if I understand, you said…

• Did you mean…

• Tell me more about…

3.) Suspend judgment means that you are curious to discover what information and assumptions are behind a person’s statements. You refrain from stating your position and arguing and instead you state your interests. You wonder why something communicated is important to the person communicating. Questions to show curiosity and suspend judgment are:

• Why is that important?

• Why is that a concern?

• Why does that matter?

• What leads you to that conclusion?

4.) Identify interests means identifying goals, wants, needs, expectations, concerns, and hopes.

• Disclose your interests.

• Listen for and acknowledge the interests of others.

• Clarify your understanding of others’ interests.

• Look for and identify shared interests.

5.) After everyone has had an opportunity to identify their interests and understands the interests of others, the group can brainstorm options to satisfy as many interests as possible. It is not the time to evaluate the options. It is the time to generate as many options as possible. Look for and identify shared options.

6.) Designing solutions means jointly discussing the options and how each satisfies interests. It is the time for evaluating solutions. Look for fairness, reasonableness, and the ability to implement the solutions. Do you need to add in time management or accountability processes for ideal solution implementation?

Contact Us Now!

Connect With Us on LinkedIn

Contact Us Now!

ERG's to CERG's

By Susan Letterman White

Employee Resources Groups (ERGs) historically have been an effective tool for developing workplace inclusion. They are a structure or grouping of people who are exposed to each other, form relationships, and share information and experiences. Organizations that want to be known as places where everyone has a fair chance to succeed and as having a positive reputation with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion discovered the invaluable nature of networks of voluntary, employee-organized communities that foster connections between employees that share similar interests, characteristics, or backgrounds. Most commonly, employees of similar ethnicities, gender identities, or sexual orientations form employee resource groups to give them a safe space to discuss their experiences at work. They build psychological safety and give a collective voice to individuals that share a sense of marginalization or a voice that has been underrepresented in workplace narratives.

What if we reimagined the possibilities of ERGs? Would it be possible to structure them in a way that expertise and power are also exchanged across differences in addition to information and experiences as relationships are formed? We think of ERGs as groups of people with significant commonalities.  What if we thought about how to bring together people who have more differences than things in common? Could the right differences create the context where the relationships lead to an exchange of expertise for valuable opportunities?

I have two examples to offer, which I call Community + Employee Resource Groups (CERGs). They can serve as models for future design: the Boston gym, Inner City Weightlifting and the New York City research collaboration with local universities, Town + Gown. Each of these is attractive to a diverse group of people with different skills and needs. They are win-win for the people involved and an additional “win” for the larger community. They build valuable relationships across differences, the necessary ingredient for creating more diversity at higher levels of power and leadership in the workplace and community in which that workplace exists.

The Boston gym Inner City Weightlifting (ICW) pairs trainers from lower-SES backgrounds with more affluent clients. The trainers have the expertise and this flips the power dynamics, otherwise based on SES and creates a genuine form of inclusion. Trainers get access to new networks and opportunities and clients gain new insights into complex social problems, like inequitable incarceration in addition to weight training expertise. 

New York City’s Town+Gown is a systemic action research program that focuses on the Built Environment. The program engages students interested in local urban planning in research questions of importance to various city agencies involved in construction and development projects. It is a public-private partnership among entrepreneurs, city agencies and the academic community. The City gets exposure to talented students and researchers in local universities and students get exposure to the City workforce. Universities are one area that often focus on building internal student body diversity, making them a good source of City exposure to a pool of talented people across a variety of differences. Cities and state governments with easy access to local universities and an interest in building a diverse leadership pipeline should consider launching a Town +Gown program. The added benefit is that the design of the program is to come up with innovative solutions to important problems.

The benefits of CERGs make sense and are aligned with the data recently published in two research papers on increasing economic mobility of low socioeconomic status (SES) people through exposure to high SES people. The key message is that in a context that both exposes people to others who are socially diverse and encourages the development of true friendships, it is possible to create the exchange of valuable benefits that include the extension of a valuable opportunity by a person who has access to that value.

Social economic status (SES) is the relative position and power a person has in a society based on a combination of their social and economic position, access to resources, and work experience. Many studies have shown that if you are connected to people who are more educated or affluent you are more likely to be the beneficiary of valuable information, mentoring, and job prospects. It can also shape your aspirations. Additionally, there are many studies that have shown how a person’s social networks influence their adherence to social norms. These two recent papers show that it is not exposure between these two SES groups is not enough. The context in which the exposure takes place makes a difference. The context must be one where friendships are forged. The paper introduces the concept of “friending bias,” defined as “the tendency for people with low SES to befriend people with high SES at lower rates even conditional on exposure.”

Policies and processes shape contexts.  For example, smaller groups are more likely to encourage friendships. Contexts where the power dynamics are flipped is another. The Boston gym Inner City Weightlifting (ICW) pairs trainers from lower-SES backgrounds with more affluent clients. The trainers have the expertise and this flips the power dynamics, otherwise based on SES and creates a genuine form of inclusion. Trainers get access to new networks and opportunities and clients gain new insights into complex social problems, like inequitable incarceration in addition to weight training expertise. Peer mentoring programs, like this, that flip the delivery of expertise will empower as the expert the otherwise socially marginalized and underrepresented group and make dependent the otherwise socially empowered group. This re-equilibration opens the door for a real friendship to happen and for the sharing of valuable opportunities for subsequent SES change possible.

Our natural tendencies for developing friendships and the flip side, the friending bias, can be reduced if we understand how to create the right context so that exposure across differences gets the right conditions to make a difference. It comes as no surprise that friends are often those who cross paths with regularity, such as coworkers, classmates, and people we run into at the gym. That’s the exposure piece of the equation. Social identity, it seems, is also part of the equation. Apparently, we like people who support our current view of ourselves.

Communication facilitates the first two essential behaviors: self-disclosure and supportiveness, both necessary for intimacy. We must be willing to extend ourselves, to share our lives with our friends, to keep them abreast of what's going on with us. Likewise, we need to listen to them and offer support.

What makes a friendship https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200611/friendship-the-laws-attraction

Contact Us Now!

Why Conflict is Good

By Susan Letterman White

Conflict is a natural consequence of differences. People have differences in what they notice and miss in their world view, how they make sense of what they notice based on their experiences in life and what they want for the future, how they express their ideas, and their emotional reactions to different situations. These differences are what help groups see new avenues for achieving shared goals or to re-conceptualize what they want for the group and themselves individually. Conflict, when re-conceptualized as a challenge, signals opportunities. The benefit comes from the pause leading to deeper thinking, creativity, and understanding of differences that lead to different and options for resolving the challenge.

Unresolved conflict, however, can have disastrous consequences for a group that otherwise has the potential for unstoppable success. It can frustrate, anger and cloud perception, become verbally or physically violent, reduce morale, increase stress, and decrease productivity. The energy around conflict can lead to creative solutions or like a pot of boiling water can either explode over the sides or dry up and ruin the pot. Why does some conflict result in innovation, while others just ruin the “pot?”

It seems there are two types of conflict: relationship conflict, which is personal and emotional and task conflict, which is about ideas and opinions. It also seems, based on research Adam Grant discusses in his book, Think Again, teams that perform poorly start with more relationship conflict than task conflict.

Conflict is inevitable in a healthy workplace. The Thomas-Kilmann model explains five possible approaches to ending conflict. These approaches stem from how that person experiences conflict and their initial reaction. They might try to avoid it, accommodate the other party involved with them in a conflict, find a compromise to end the conflict, collaborate with the other party to find a sustainable solution, or compete to win. Superimposed over a default tendency a person has for approaching conflict is that person’s natural tendencies in communication.  The Social Style model explains four possible communication style preferences that may appear more or less: (1) analytical, (2) focused on resolution and action, (3) supportive of others, or (4) enthusiastic and imaginative. So, although conflict is healthy, productive managing the energy around conflict is a high-level leadership skill that is not taught in traditional academic programs. Too often the conflict in a discussion is not about the ideas, but about the tension created because ideas are communicated in ways that trigger a strong emotional reaction when received. 

Productive conflict happens in a group of people, who trust each other to point out blind spots, are humble about their personal expertise, and push each other to be curious about new perspectives. They, fearlessly or with courage, question the status quo and demand re-thinking as a group. This happens only when the relationship bonds are strong and individual goals are to elevate the work of the group and not simply give and receive ego-building praise.

So, this means to harness the “good” in conflict, the group must reduce relationship conflict and learn how to manage task conflict productively. Reduce relationship conflict by strengthening or eliminating relationships that are fraught with personal animus. They are destructive to the important work of the group. Improve the individual emotional intelligence of group members. Emotional intelligence begins with developing an awareness of one’s emotions in the moment and learning to quell strong emotions when they interfere with productive conflict.

Reduce task conflict by reframing the conflict as a challenge that is collectively shared. Introduce discussion norms to make explicit the emotional triggers resulting from how ideas are communicated and how to reduce destructive emotional energy, while preserving productive emotional energy.  There are six principles of productive communication:

1. Communicate purposefully 

1. Listen to understand 

2. Suspend judgment 

3. Identify interests 

4. Brainstorm options 

5. Design solutions 

1. Communicating purposefully means that you have a clear intention of how you want your communication to affect another person. Questions to ask yourself before you communicate include: 

• What is your purpose? 

• What are the messages you want to send? 

• To whom is each message directed? 

• How can you best convey your message? 

2. Listen to understand means that you listen to another person without planning your response. After carefully listening to understand the person’s interests, you ask questions to check whether or not your perception of the communication is what the person intended to communicate to you. Statements to seek understanding are open ended questions or requests for elaboration and begin with: 

• Let me see if I understand, you said… 

• Did you mean… 

• Tell me more about… 

3. Suspend judgment means that you are curious to discover what information and assumptions are behind a person’s statements. You refrain from stating your position  and arguing and instead you state your interests. You wonder why something communicated is important to the person communicating. Questions to show curiosity and suspend judgment are: 

• Why is that important? 

• Why is that a concern? 

• Why does that matter? 

• What leads you to that conclusion? 

4. Identifying interests means identifying goals, wants, needs, expectations, concerns, and hopes. To do that:

• Disclose your interests.

• Listen for and acknowledge the interests of others. 

• Clarify your understanding of others’ interests. 

• Look for and identify shared interests. 

5. After everyone has had an opportunity to identify their interests and understands the interests of others, the group can brainstorm options to satisfy as many interests as possible. It is not the time to evaluate the options. It is the time to generate as many options as possible. Look for and identify shared options. 

6. Designing solutions means jointly discussing the options and how each satisfies interests. It is the time for evaluating solutions. Look for fairness, reasonableness, and the ability to implement the solutions. Do you need to add in time management or accountability processes for ideal solution implementation?

Contact Us Now!

But I'm a Lawyer not a Project Manager

Contact Us Now!

Is Your System Ready for Change?

By Susan Letterman White

Implementing culture change for organizational goals of increased revenue and  profit, actual inclusion and equity, or stronger capabilities and productivity never happen unless the collective organization system is sufficiently ready.

One of my first consultation projects was for a professional services firm that had hired another consulting firm to create a strategic plan, which sat on a shelf, collecting dust. This was before the digital revolution. Recently, in the local news, I read of a city (not our client), whose leaders were criticized publicly for not making the changes recommended in the city’s diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plan delivered over 18 months earlier. These cases demonstrate the complexity of a culture change project and that even the best strategic plans do not spur people into action if collectively, they are not ready. But, when is the system ready for a culture change?

Over forty years ago, Beckhard and Harris developed a cost-benefit formula to explain change readiness. (1) It asked the question:

Is the collective dissatisfaction with the status quo plus the clarity and desirability of the vision for the future plus the knowledge of what to do to change, greater or less than the personal cost of change or points of resistance to change?

Impediments to organizational change readiness may be logistical barriers or psychological barriers. Often, both are present. 

Logistical readiness means that an organization has sufficient resources, capabilities, information flow and a low level of competing demands on the people expected to design an implementation strategy and then execute it. Sufficient resources means that the organization has enough empowered leaders to serve on a Steering Committee to design an implementation strategy, and also sufficient resources to follow through. Capabilities are sufficient when people tasked are able to distill goals into discrete actions, develop implementation plans that clarify who will do what by when and how, and have the ability and desire to create the changes anticipated. Information must be available to the people who need it when they need it and they must be able to use it effectively and efficiently. Finally, because time is the most precious resource, if there are competing demands on the people involved, their ability to design and executive the implementation plan will be split and diluted. 

This is what typical implementation planning involves. Someone convenes an Internal Steering Committee that may decide to seek perspectives and assistance from an External Steering Committee. Committee members design the implementation plan details and after roles and responsibilities are assigned, execution begins. At some subsequent time, data is collected to assess the progress toward the goals of the original strategic plan. The process iterates or is scaled up. Logistical readiness means people have the resources and capabilities to make specific changes happen. How strong is your organization’s collective confidence that people have the necessary resources and capabilities to implement the complex organizational change envisioned?

Psychological readiness is more complicated. It’s about people’s emotions and beliefs. Changing those is much more difficult than changing a single process. In fact, changing collective beliefs and feelings may require multiple, simultaneous changes (2) to the organization context combined with powerful, prolific, and persuasive communication. 

A typical implementation process for organizational change requires collective action by many people. When people are not similarly and strongly committed, problems arise and resistance may grow. (3) Additionally, because people generally process change as a loss, the organization needs an “adaptive” or “growth” culture to overcome resistance flowing from the fear people have of making a mistake and embracing anything that is new and different. 

The emotions and beliefs related to commitment flow from how important, beneficial, and worthwhile changes are perceived to be. How strong is the collective belief that the changes proposed are urgently needed, solve an important organizational problem, or will produce benefits for them personally? Do the changes resonate with the collective core values? Are the changes clearly and obviously supported by the collective’s formal leaders, opinion leaders, and peers?

An organization’s culture will

“align effort, engender shared sensemaking, increase predictability, and encode organizational lessons” through a  “shared set of values (what we care about), beliefs (what we believe to be true), and norms of behavior (how we do things).”

An adaptive or growth culture encourages motivation, passion, taking risks, being curious, making and learning from mistakes, tenacity, and resilience. Unfortunately, many organization cultures have a fixed theory of intelligence, a belief that intelligence is a stable trait based on sheer brainpower and IQ. This is a serious source of resistance to creating a culture of equity and inclusion, physical or psychological safety, or innovation of any sort. What do your policies, processes, and procedures signal to people about embracing any culture change? What criteria are being used formally and informally to evaluate performance? 

As an organization leader, when your goal is to change culture, begin by assessing system readiness for change and developing a strategic plan to increase readiness well before it is time to design the implementation strategy.  

(1) Beckhard, R. and Harris, R.T. (1977). Organizational transitions: Managing complex change. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

(2) Weiner, B.J., A theory of organizational readiness for change, Implementation Science (2009).

(3) Id.

Contact Us Now!

DEI: How Leaders Drop the Ball

By Susan Letterman White

Leaders expect results, organizations fall short, time and money are wasted, and frustration builds. 

How did that happen? How do you fix it? 

Expectations and effort are not enough. An equity audit is not enough.  Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training is not enough. 

Hastings Law Professor Joan Williams reports in Fortune magazine that organizations spend some $8 billion a year on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)­—and see remarkably few results. Leaders are trying sincerely to bring a more diverse workforce into their organizations, yet, despite expending large amounts of time and money to drive high expectations, their approaches are ineffective. They begin with an equity audit or hire outside experts from the best universities to explain concepts like implicit bias and systemic racism. Neither is sufficient alone or even together. 

As a current DEI practitioner and former managing partner of a law firm, I've provided assessment, training, coaching, and facilitation for high level executives at law firms, municipal government, and state and federal government agencies in transportation, healthcare, and finance.  I've worked with top leaders and executives who have a sincere desire to change their organization to a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture. When we work together, they experience positive change. However, most leaders, who are failing to achieve their organization’s expected results, drop the ball by not continuing the work. 

Too many leaders waste time and money trying to address DEI problems without sustainable results. The problems are systemic problems and the solutions should be systemic, too. DEI challenges are not solvable with a single intervention. Real, sustainable change requires ongoing efforts throughout every level of the organization.

Every organization has opportunities for systemic change. Yet, most organizations stop after making a single change at a single level of the organization, like training individuals to change how they think and behave. Every organization has opportunities for sustainability. Instead change efforts stall after an equity audit or a training series as if DEI is a “one and done” proposition.

An Equity Audit Is Not Enough

Leaders drop the ball when they don’t leverage the momentum built from an equity audit.

Leaders seek equity audits because they have recognized the symptoms of systemic issues of inequities, like disaggregated data showing implicit bias-based disparities in hiring, compensation, and/or promotions or listening sessions that generate qualitative data of implicit bias-based disparities in how people are treated in workplace meetings and team conversations.  Collecting and analyzing equity data and then creating the strategic blueprint is not enough.  Leaders must take the next step and call their team together to collaboratively design and implement a plan based on the blueprint, yet many organizations never go through the required steps and wonder why they are unable to execute the strategic blueprint provided by the racial equity audit.

This failure phenomenon is not limited to DEI projects. HBR reported that statistically, approximately 70% of change projects fail. There is debate on the accuracy of this statistic; however, there is no debate that according to 2008 research from IBM, the need to lead change is growing, but our ability to do it is shrinking. McKinsey reported that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support. Even when people are truly invested in change the success rate is only 30 percent more likely to stick.

DEI change recommendations have a better chance of being implemented when leaders quickly transition into implementation planning and execution of the strategic plan. If leaders hesitate pushing positive change forward, the organization loses momentum. To recover, takes additional time, money, and workforce effort. One of my first clients called me after this exact experience.

The law firm had hired a well-known consulting firm to develop a strategic plan. It sat on a shelf collecting dust because firm leaders had not been able to translate the strategic plan into an implementation plan, which often requires discussions about roles, responsibilities, and timing. Often, difficult discussions about trade-offs in resource allocation and sometimes difficult decisions about changes to a business model arise. The avoidance of difficult conversations combined with the absence of clear roles and responsibilities was enough of an obstacle to stall the entire process. By the time they called for help, any motivation and energy for the work, first had to be recovered.

DEI Training Is Not Enough

Leaders drop the ball when they make training their only DEI initiative.

Equity audits almost always include a recommendation for extensive DEI training. The strongest leaders may not be inclusive leaders and even the best effort at fairly evaluating individual performance is often not equitable. They will benefit from training. Training is also an easy initiative to launch. Leaders delegate the training design and delivery to external experts or their learning and development department. Leaders then “show up” and learn, like anyone else at the training. The time demand on leaders is minimal as compared to other DEI change initiatives and a leader can say they did something. Unfortunately, what often happens is that training is the first, and often, only DEI initiative. Similar to an equity audit, the bulk of the work and time is delegated, while giving leaders credit for DEI efforts. Also similar to the equity audit, the initiative has a high likelihood of not achieving the expected DEI results without the right follow-through from leaders. The follow-through with training is the immediate application of learned material to a DEI challenge and the intentional spreading of DEI competencies learned to others in the organization through behavior modeling and using feedback effectively. 

Systemic problems are never addressed with an initiative aimed to improve individual skills and performance. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. While DEI leadership training is a solution aimed at individuals in an organization, adjustments to policies, processes, and structures are systemic solutions aimed at the organization as a whole. Equity audits include recommendations for changes at the organization itself.

If roles, responsibilities, lines of authority, and collaboration requirements are unclear in job descriptions, then implementing change is difficult or impossible. If the culture does not favor a growth mindset - the openness to discuss and learn from mistakes - then people in the organization will behave in alignment with a culture that encourages excessive  defensiveness and inhibits learning and change. If communication is flawed, either the right messages are getting lost or the wrong impressions are left unexamined. If the hiring, evaluation, and promotion processes are inequitable; i.e.,they use decision criteria that are not objectively measuring the ability to do a job or apply objective criteria through an implicitly biased lens, then disparities will continue to define the status quo.

Equity audits always identify organization-level strategies, yet too often, they remain as ideals or long-term goals. They require more time and effort to put in place and, unlike training, there is no option to simply schedule an event and then “check-the-box” for completion. 

Fixing the Problem

Leaders meet expectations when they follow through

Take these steps to sustainable and systemic change that increases diversity at all levels and strengthens a culture of equity and inclusion.

An Equity Audit - A robust equity audit that identifies strategies for change at all levels of the organization is the first step. Without the result of an equity audit - the blueprint or overarching strategy for improving diversity at all levels of the organization and a culture of equity and inclusion - you won’t know where to focus your efforts. 

Designing Your Implementation Plan - Leverage the momentum of your equity audit and put the recommendations into action right away by bringing the right people together to collaborate on the development of the strategic implementation plan.  The “right” people are those who will be expected to implement any action step of the plan and those who will be affected by changes anticipated. These are changes at the organization level to structures, processes, resource allocation, and communications and selecting who is responsible for doing what by when to make those changes a reality. This is often the first time the points of disagreement surface and why including an outside facilitator to help transform conflict into a productive discussion that builds commitment, engagement, and motivation in addition to help with prioritizing initiatives is wise. 

Executing the Implementation Plan - Once you have a strategic implementation plan that dictates who is responsible for doing what by when, start the execution.  Execution is an iterative process where improvements are expected at every cycle.  When problems and obstacles arise, it’s time to develop strategies to eliminate or navigate around them.

Having Difficult Conversations -  The iterative process of executing a strategic implementation plan always surfaces points of resistance from anyone affected by the change work and disagreement among executives. Do not avoid these conversations.  

Making Difficult Decisions - Resistance can stop or stall progress. Do not avoid making these decisions. Get help from a facilitator who is experienced with conflict management.

What Next? 

Leaders are already demonstrating their commitment by allocating resources, like time and money. If your organization has done an equity audit it’s time to plan for its implementation.  If your organization has done training it’s time to aim more broadly and consider how to change processes and structures. Sustainable improvements will follow as long as actions continue.  As a leader you can change your organization and the time to do it is now. 

Contact us Now!

The Power of the Pause

by Ashley Coleman-Fitch

Take one minute right now to pause– to do nothing for even just ten seconds. 

What did you do with your pause? 

How did it feel? 

How do you feel now on the other side of that pause? 

I recently facilitated a group working to build a more inclusive culture within their organization. As this group of primarily outspoken leaders contemplated how to bring the more reserved members of their teams into important conversations, the topic of silence came up. “We all need to pause,” one participant said, “[but] when I pause, I hear nothing. The silence is killer– not hearing that engagement on the other end.” There were murmurings of agreement. It seemed that the group understood all too well the risks of a lull in the conversation and accordingly, like many of us, had become practiced at avoiding these lulls by filling the space. But what happens, I challenged them, when we allow that silence and embrace it? 

As we discovered through our discussion, four powerful things happen: 

1. We allow ourselves space to think and respond mindfully

2. We create space for others to enter the conversation

3. We listen to the quality of the silence 

4. We breathe… and so does the conversation

Responding Mindfully 

The essence of mindfulness is the practice of pausing to acknowledge the present moment and allowing our whole selves– our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual selves– to show up in a space. When we are more attuned to the world around us, we begin fostering cultures of inclusion in diverse settings. Some experts argue that cultivating mindfulness is the most important step in developing intercultural competence, the individual precursor to developing cultures of inclusion.  Cultural competence expert Stella Ting-Toomey suggests that we must not only pay attention to ourselves– to our assumptions, to our internal dialogue, and to our emotional reactions– but also to others, “becoming exquisitely attuned to the other's communication assumptions, cognitions, and emotions.” (1) We begin to see more, to listen better, and to take in each interaction with the whole of ourselves, approaching the unfamiliar with curiosity and compassion rather than judgment and intractability. “To be mindful of intercultural conflict differences, we have to leam to see the unfamiliar behavior from multiple cultural angles.” 

The Buddist monk, spiritual leader, and peace activist  Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “Whenever we feel carried away, sunk into a deep emotion, or caught in thoughts about the past or future, we can return to our breathing to collect and anchor our mind.” (2) Nhat Hanh invites us to pause, to breathe, and to gather ourselves before moving forward– to become present and take ownership over our response. In this way, we give ourselves time to digest the present moment– what happened, as well as our emotional response– before responding, resulting in fewer gaffes and missteps in the conversation. Additionally, this practice allows each of us a moment to check our implicit biases and blind spots, consider the perspective we are speaking from, and purposefully attune our response to our particular audience to ensure that all aspects of our message– verbal and non-verbal– are heard and received by our intended audience, thereby also decreasing the likelihood that we might unintentionally offend someone we are attempting to connect with. Maybe it sounds like a lot of work, but it’s the work we need to do to connect better and be more whole and human, which feel like worthy goals. 

In addition to encouraging your full, authentic self to be present and helping you check your assumptions, biases, and blind spots before putting your foot in it, pausing to become more mindful does one other thing almost by accident: It makes you a more powerful, eloquent orator.

 As a facilitator, my role is to guide the conversation– to highlight pivotal ideas and help my participants get past blockages to dive deep into the subject. It can be tempting to talk, but after years of facilitating, I know that mine is the least important voice in the conversation. Truth and solutions are most powerful when people discover them themselves, so my goal is to talk as little as possible, keeping the spotlight on the most important people in the room– the people doing the work. It took me time to appreciate the value of saying less and even more time to learn to use silence as emphasis, highlighting the key part of my message. Embracing silence made me choose my words more intentionally, making my message more powerful and resonating in the silence that followed. It took me even more time to skillfully leverage silence to encourage my participants to become fully engaged and invested, allowing me to step back into the role of coach and guide. That is the power of the pause– its stillness acts as a catalyst for creativity and an invitation towards action and engagement. It invites flow– authentic energy exchange.  

An Invitation to Enter

“I grew up in a big family. If I didn’t talk over people, I’d never be heard.” one participant commented. There was lots of nodding and noises of assent around the table. 

Someone else offered, “I grew up in a family where it was not ok to interrupt someone who was speaking. It was deeply ingrained in me:  Wait your turn to speak… or else,” she finished laughing. 

The dichotomy of these two statements illustrates several important things for leaders to remember as they work to facilitate inclusive discussions: The deeply ingrained patterns that may never be articulated but show up in every exchange we engage in, the differences in communication styles, and, as a leader and facilitator, the necessity of attending to all of these different styles and carving out space for each of them in the space.  

Just as people enter a space differently– some strike up a conversation before they’ve even entered a room while others take a lap, mapping out the lay of the land before settling in while still others need to nest first– people enter conversations differently as well. Some dive right in, always the first to speak; others wait to be invited. As a leader and facilitator, it is important to be mindful of these different styles and leverage silence as a tool to level the playing field. 

A purposeful pause is an invitation. It allows your audience– learners, attendees, participants, peers, etcetera– space in the discussion to breathe, to digest your message, and to formulate their own mindful response. People are allowed to respond to what you have said silently, reflecting on both your message and their reaction before feeling pressured to respond back. 

Listening to the Silence

Have you ever gone out in the middle of a snowstorm and listened to the snow fall? There is nothing more emblematic of a peaceful moment than listening to the whisper of those tiny flakes shushing themselves into tiny piles. The world is muted, and for a moment, it’s easy to get lost in the stillness and the magic of the moment. 

But why is that moment so magical? What is it about snow that transports us and invites us to simultaneously get lost and be present? Its visual qualities aside– striking as they may be– part of snow’s magic is its ability to mute the world– to impose silence and stillness on a world that is constantly moving. And in that silence we find peace. 

Most of us are aware, at least peripherally, that every silence has its own quality: some silences are pregnant, full of anxiety and anticipation; others are tense, holding all of the unnamed feelings in the space; others feel dead, devoid of life or engagement; while still others can signal contentment and mutual understanding, a freeing from the usual din of small talk to be replaced by amiable presence with another. 

As facilitators, we are often so afraid of those uncomfortable silences, or worse yet, those dead silences that likely indicate that we have lost our audience, so instead, we fill the silences with our own noise. In doing so, we miss one of the richest sources of information that could tell us not only how our message is being received but who is receiving it and how. When we actually pause to listen to the silence, it speaks volumes. Armed with this new information, we can then better adapt our next steps to respond more effectively and guide the group toward the desired goal.   

Breathe

A pause in a conversation is like the blank space between paintings in a museum or gallery– it gives the mind space to rest, digest, and reflect before moving on to the next. It invites each of us– and the conversation– to breathe, to take in all of the nuance and complication embedded in our messaging, and to respond thoughtfully, as our whole authentic selves. 

Pausing to breathe, to contemplate, to respond makes us more effective communicators. It makes our message more powerful and leaves room for us to become more generous and compassionate listeners. This might be the most important skill in both understanding others and making them feel heard and valued, thus fostering community development based on authentic inclusion and belonging. 

Viktor Frankl once said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space…In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response, lies our growth and our freedom.” Create space to nurture your growth. Pause. 

Contact Us Now!

How to Respond to Microaggressions

By Susan Letterman White

Microaggressions are commonplace daily verbal or behavioral slights that are often unintentional, yet communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward culturally marginalized groups. As leaders, it is important to act in ways that contribute to a culture of inclusion. That means considering what you will do when you are either the recipient of a microaggression or the observer of a microaggression directed at another person.

Whether to act or stay silent depends on many factors and the decision of whether to act, and if, what to say or do, is an example of a difficult leadership decision.  Factors to consider include what the actual recipient of a microaggression wants, the good of the entire group or organization in which the event happened, the timing and surrounding circumstances of the event, and if action is the conclusion should it be done publicly or privately.  

Additionally, you should consider whether acting will escalate a situation in an unhelpful or dangerous way.  Is there a risk of danger to physical safety? Will the utterer become excessively defensive in a manner that is better handled privately or not alone? If the relationship is important to you, how will what you say affect the relationship? 

Some scholars have criticized the microaggression concept thinking it promotes psychological fragility and possibly stalls the development of skills to stand up for oneself. Certainly, the developmental trajectory of the individual recipient is important, as is what the individual wants to happen. Regardless, there is no excuse for leaders who do not recognize the harm microaggressions can cause and consider what they will do when it happens.

It takes courageous leadership to manage one’s emotions and also the behaviors of others in conflict situations. When a person uses a microaggression, regardless of whether it is aimed at a particular person or just offered as a poor joke, that action sets up a conflict, because, at the very least, it should not be an acceptable behavior in an inclusive workplace. 

The conditions that contribute to or subtract from leadership courage are rarely discussed. There are four conditions that all leaders should cultivate.

First, they should have a mental health, self-care routine.  When we feel emotionally well, we are better able to think constructively, call on a reserve of energy, and have difficult conversations. 

Second, leaders should be able to reframe a difficult situation as a challenge and ask: How might I address this challenge? Related to this concept is the third condition. Leaders should conduct a cost-benefit analysis that highlights the benefit of being courageous, which often means not falling back on default ways of thinking, feeling, and acting and instead practicing new and different approaches. For example, if speaking up seems like the right decision, but also difficult, highlight the benefits of acting and the risks of doing nothing. For example, you might say, “Do I want to stay silent and feel bruised and belittled or do I want to speak up and feel my self-worth and power as a leader here?”

Finally, leaders should remind themselves of a commitment to developing a growth mindset and putting that to use.  If the behavior seems challenging and difficult, it ought to signal a growth opportunity for learning or honing a valuable skill. Lean in and grow as a leader. Growth is often better as a team sport. If you are able, form a leadership support group where you can share stories of trying, learning, and growing and introduce a cultural norm where leaders prize the attempts of their colleagues and direct reports who share such stories.

Courageous leaders may be ready to say or do something in response to a microaggression and still not know what to say or do.  If it happens to you, it’s your choice whether to act or not. If you observe an event, it may be your responsibility to act or act in a particular way to comply with organization rules.  

If you decide to act, use feedback approaches that have the highest likelihood of being beneficial.  A skillful feedback response is delivered as close as possible in time to the event, criticizes the behavior rather than the person, uses “I” statements, and is clear about the behavior that must change.  For example, you might say, “When you said X, I felt Y.  In the future, I would prefer if you did not say/do X.  I understand that you may not have intended me to feel this way. Perhaps you were making a joke or you think I’m overreacting. However, our working relationship is important enough for me to speak up. I hope you understand. 

Contact Us Now!

Creating a Diverse Organization with a Culture of Equity and Inclusion

By Susan Letterman White

Advice on creating diversity, equity and inclusion in any organization usually begins by directing an assessment and following with changes to meet minimum legal standards followed by training. Although arguably necessary, this formula falls short of being sufficient. After all, what is the formula for transforming ordinary leaders into leaders, who drive the creation of diversity at all organization levels and a culture of equity and inclusion?

Certainly this type of systemic change requires leaders capable of respectful interactions, curious about people’s capabilities that often go unnoticed or discounted, and a willingness to help people achieve. But, even this disambiguation begs the question of why organizations and society-as-a whole are not making enough progress. This article spots the common snags that hold back systemic change to create a more diverse organization with a sustainable culture of equity and inclusion and shares solutions.

The Equity Assessment Snag

Equity assessments often skip measuring cultural indicators of system motivation and readiness for change. Motivation and readiness measure state of mind and emotional power to drive or block change efforts. Equity assessments must assess these measures in three groups of people; those who have the power to make necessary changes, those who have the power to affect the thinking and emotions of others in the organization who can either block or drive necessary changes, and those who will be affected by and involved in change implementation.

Equity assessments are usually quite detailed in what needs to be different and better, but unaware of informal networks where people share and reinforce their values. These networks entrench current attitudes and behaviors and are obstacles to motivation and change readiness. Knowing the opinion leaders and their opinions and the people who have the power to connect people and integrate different values is a data point often overlooked, yet the one that will drive change forward or block it. [1]

Some assessments include a stakeholder analysis; however the definition of stakeholder does not include informal influencers. When defined as a person with vested interest in something and who is impacted by and cares about how it turns out, it excludes those who are not at all interested or are interested in maintaining the status quo. Often, change leaders are unaware of the identities of informal influencers.

Indicia of motivation and readiness to change include assessment of why this change is personally important and degree of willingness to try using new behaviors and the tenacity to continue practicing them when mistakes are inevitable. Equity assessments that investigate organizational culture regarding a growth mindset or individual values regarding equity are rare.

The Talent Cycle Snag

Although it is easy to get experts to agree that people influence organizational performance, those same experts often forget that employee performance is overwhelmingly driven and reinforced by each distinct process in the talent cycle. A detailed review of each process with analysis of its effect on how people think, feel, and act is barely given adequate attention. Similarly, little thought is given to the behaviors considered indicative of capability.

Talent cycle processes, including the identification of decision criteria, are:

Recruiting,

Hiring,

Onboarding,

Performance evaluation,

Development,

Advancement,

Reward and recognition,

Engagement and wellbeing, and

Termination.

Capable performance is often detailed as skill only, yet motivation is equally important. “Expertise, knowledge, and skills will not produce great results if employees are unmotivated.” [2] Instead, people need to understand how their behavior influences a performance measure that personally affects them and they need to care about the personal effect.

If your organization’s talent cycle integrates values that are unimportant to the people you need to drive a change effort or fails to integrate values that are important, motivation wanes where it cannot. When an organization espouses values that are not integrated into the talent cycle, skepticism and distrust enter the culture and undermine change efforts.

Solutions

Find the disconnects between assumptions by top leaders and the beliefs of key groups of employees. To do this, first accurately identify through effective interviews or network analysis three groups of people; those who have the power to make necessary changes, those who have the power to affect the thinking and emotions of others in the organization who can either block or drive necessary changes, and those who will be affected by and involved in change implementation. Then ask the questions that matter. For example, if you were to ask top leaders whether and why creating diversity at all leadership levels of the organization is important and then asked employees the same question, what would you discover? If you discover a lack of alignment, the first step is a strategy to increase motivation for the changes contemplated.

Do a detailed analysis of the effect on employees of each process in each point of the talent cycle. Are any processes causing employees to think, feel, and act in ways that will undermine or fail to catalyze efforts to create diversity at all leadership levels of the organization and a culture of equity and inclusion? If you discover aspects of the talent cycle that are creating skepticism or failing to motivate employees effectively, then overhaul the talent cycle to create the motivation necessary.

Eagerness to engage in training before sufficient system motivation and readiness is a waste of time and money. Even worse, it can worsen the culture by increasing skepticism. All too often, employees consider training to be a “check-the-box” activity for meeting the minimum standards set by law. Instead, avoid this ending by first building sufficient motivation and readiness for change.

[1] P. Gray, R. Cross, M. Arena, “Use Networks to Drive Culture Change,” MIT Sloan Management Review, November 30, 2021 https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/use-networks-to-drive-culture-change

[2] E.E.Lawyer, “What Makes People Effective?” in Organization Development (Joan V. Gallos, ed.) 2006

Contact Us Now!

Leaders and the Role of Organizational Mindset in Creating a DEI Culture

Organizations that are strongly committed to creating a diverse workforce and culture of equity and inclusion integrate training programs for their people from leaders to front-line workers with changes to policies, practices, and resources allocation. The mindsets of individuals are scrutinized and retrained through workshops, readings, and viewing, to change, but the organizational mindset is rarely even considered. This is a mistake.

Carol Dweck popularized the concept of a growth mindset as contrasted with a fixed mindset. A growth mindset is marked by an attitude toward a difficult problem as a challenge and learning opportunity in contrast to a fixed mindset, grounded in the belief that only if a person has the ability and talent will they be able to address the difficult problem and if not, they will fail. The importance of shifting toward a growth mindset has been demonstrated repeatedly. Organizational mindset is whether a company is perceived to view talent as fixed or malleable.

Three studies published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2020, demonstrate the power of organizational mindset on key metrics of inclusion, equity, and organizational culture. When organizations are perceived to view their people as fixed, employees also perceived a more negative culture with less collaboration, innovation, trust, integrity, and commitment.

As always, it falls on empowered leaders to create the environment, the context, in which the work gets done and it is the leader’s choice of whether to cultivate a fixed or growth organizational mindset. Microsoft leader and CEO Satya Nadella opted to employ a “Model Coach Care” approach to develop the growth organizational mindset and this simple model can be applied in your business.

In this model, managers practice and demonstrate a growth mindset for approaching problems and rebounding from setback. Doing so, models this way of thinking and behaving for their team members to emulate. They use coaching techniques to help their team members develop and learn. The demonstrate that they care about their people by investigating each person’s capabilities and goals and providing resources (time, developmental experiences) to each person for their persona development.

How do your organization’s leaders demonstrate their own growth mindset or are they demonstrating that the really have a fixed mindset?

Do your leaders know how to coach and use coaching techniques in their training methodologies? How do they use reinforcing and redirecting feedback to help their team members development and improve?

What do your organization’s leaders do to find out the capabilities and goals of their team members? What resources are offered to their team members for team members’ personal development?

Contact Us Now!