April 15, 2010

Employee Development Systems, Inc.
The Personal Accountability Company

7308 South Alton Way, Suite 2J
Dry Creek Business Park
Centennial, Colorado 80112 

Phone: 1-800.282.3374  

employeedevelopmentsystems.com 

info@edsiusa.com 


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These active learning sessions cover vital people skills such as assertiveness, listening, decision making, motivation, presentation skills, leadership, and teamwork. Each activity is fully reproducible, and all participant handouts and transparency masters are included. Activities take 1-3 hours to complete.  

 

Price: $139.95 $99.00

Did you know that about 47% of people rate themselves as collaborators in conflict situations and only 25% to 33% of people are rated as collaborators by others?  Clearly, many of us feel we are collaborators, but are not perceived that way by others. 

 

The fact is, collaboration takes two willing and active participants.  While not all conflict situations are conducive to collaboration, in situations where you value both the outcome and the relationship, collaboration is the ideal conflict-resolution style. 

 

Here are some techniques to help you create a framework for successful collaboration:

 

1) Confirm that the other person shares your needs and objectives.

 

2) Stimulate information sharing; disarm defensiveness. 

 

3) Brainstorm as many alternatives as possible.

 

4) Schedule interactions when emotions are not elevated.

 

5) Agree on a collaborative process at the outset.

 

When you are faced with a challenge that requires adoption by the members of your team, department or organization, where do you begin?  How do you leverage your influence to shift the group's mindset? Most of us rely on the power of persuasion-we talk, explain-even cajole.  Although this is the typical method, it is not always the most effective. 

 

The great persuader is often a "bundle" of methods.  For example, sometimes personal experience and compelling stories will succeed in influencing others.  At other times, you may be best served by embedding motivation into the situation, or adding a social structure that encourages members to work with each other to succeed. 

 

Let's take a look at six major influence styles introduced in the book, The Great Influencer (McGraw-Hill, 2007). Combine these influence styles to achieve the outcome you need:

Michael, you have an interesting combination of expertise as an asset manager and a writer.  How have typical decision-making models affected the economy in recent years? 

 

There is certainly a great deal we can learn from recent events. Let me share a few concrete examples. First, a common mistake is trying to understand how a system of interacting parts works by looking at the parts in isolation. It is kind of like trying to understand the workings of an ant colony—which is almost like an organism itself—by interviewing the individual ants. The ants are clueless about what’s going on at the colony level: they operate with local information and local interaction.

 

It is fair to say that ground zero of the recent financial mess was the subprime mortgage market. But it’s not that hard to see that each of the actors in the value chain were behaving in the own self interest. These actors included home buyers, mortgage originators, investment banks, ratings agencies, and the ultimate buyers of mortgage-backed bonds. The problem is the sum of these activities created a very fragile system, one that ultimately collapsed and nearly took down the financial system with it. So the lesson is to pay attention to what is happening at the system level.

 

Another big mistake is a failure to consider the role of social context in decision making. We all like to think that our decisions are objective, rational, and based in fact. But in truth our decisions are deeply influenced by how others around us behave—for better or for worse. If you apply this to the recent crisis, it’s not hard to see that there was a lot of pressure to take on more and more risk. Chuck Prince, the former chief executive officer of Citigroup, expressed some concern about the nature of the markets. “But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance,” is what he said about it. It’s crucial to be highly aware of what others are doing and to continually ask whether your choices make sense.

 

One more mistake I’ll mention is what philosophers call “the problem of induction.” The basic idea is that humans like to generalize about a broader system after have seen only a sample of the system. For instance, you might generalize about stock market returns from looking at only a few years of data. The challenge is if you happen to see good outcomes only, you’ll think the whole system has better outcomes than it really does. The antidote is to constantly seek evidence that disconfirms your case. This is very unnatural.

 

Going forward, it’s hard to see that any of these decision-making mistakes will change much. One area to consider carefully is policy reaction from government. There is a natural tendency to fight yesterday’s battles, and I suspect you’re seeing some of that now. But perhaps we will see some more thought given to the role of incentives, which may improve the quality of decisions. 

 

Jeff, a new manager, is having trouble learning an administrative system associated with his job, but his attitude is positive and he assures the executive staff that he will keep trying until he succeeds. 

 

Meanwhile, Jeff's subordinates, who all are long-time employees, are becoming frustrated at having to correct his errors in this administrative task, which is second nature to them.  It is clearly causing problems in the team.

 

You want this manager to succeed and build positive relationships within his team. Jeff is doing well in all of the areas that led the team to hire him, and his ability to carry out the administrative process is not related to his success in this position.

These active learning sessions cover vital people skills such as assertiveness, listening, decision making, motivation, presentation skills, leadership, and teamwork. Each activity is fully reproducible, and all participant handouts and transparency masters are included.  

 

 

Activities take 1-3 hours to complete