The Need for Healthy Conflict
Creating Our Own Future in an Economic Decline
Today I began working with a new organization excited to take charge of their destiny in this turbulent economic climate, Their primary focus of our work together is to help them embrace the practices that will increase the effectiveness of their collaboration and ultimately optimize their team productivity. They recognize the need for greater efficiency in their efforts and are committed to align their energies to optimize their results. Like many companies who are proactively engaging this challenge, they are creating a bright future for themselves.
Building Trust and Reaping Highly Functioning relationships
While preparing to meet with this group, I revisited a classic reference in team building. Pat Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Reading this in our current social, political and economic environment, one might be struck by the disparity between the underlying operation of our social system, and those more desirable of a functional team. The foundation of this challenge is a lack of real, demonstrable trust.
Silent Compliance is not Trusting, It’ s Avoidance
Now, as we find ourselves facing a collapse of the mortgage and banking industry, many say our problem stems from too much trust, rather than too little. At first glance this appears to be true. However, a truly trusting relationship is accompanied by healthy conflict, demonstrated as a willingness to challenge ideas and perspective. This wasn’t present in the run up to this collapse. The allure of easy credit and rising values was too attractive for many to stop and question the assumptions upon which the housing bubble was being created.
Relationships Require Vigorous Debate to Remain Strong
We Instead of vigorously debating the issues to ensure the assumptions beneath the meteoric build up were valid, we collectively embraced the perspective of the “experts,” and lost our connection to common sense. We wanted to believe that our economy could continue to be built on leverage and restructured financial instruments. And as the saying goes, “We most easily believe that which we most want to believe.” We saw the Emperor’s new clothes and we liked them.
Meaningful Dialogue Needs a Free Flow of Ideas
What does any of this have to do with team building, and more importantly, why is it so critical that we once again engage our most critical thinking? We are facing a global challenge that will require coordination and collaboration of many disparate voices if we wish to succeed. That will require from each of us is a desire to understand the perspective of the other, but also to courageously and with civility, present our own perspective. Only through this free flow of ideas will the best solutions arise.
Authentically Communicate with Compassion and Courage
This demands both compassion and conviction. It calls for us to respect the intentions of others and to earnestly seek to understand their perspective. Moving forward, we will need new ideas to capitalize on the opportunities that will certainly present themselves. And new ideas are most often created when we combine different approaches, harnessing the strengths of each. Through our willingness to hold our ideas loosely and lessen our need to be right, we are prepared to capture the brilliance and creativity that result for vigorous collaborative work.
Exercise: In a relationship in which you have already developed strong trust, place your focus on areas where your beliefs are not aligned. Make it your objective better understand the other’s point of view from their perspective. Remain with this inquiry until you feel you absolutely understand their motivations and reasoning. After having gained such insight, request an opportunity to share your perspective so they might better understand you as well. Contemplate how this mutual respect and caring impacts your feelings about the relationship. Consider the consequences if you consistently sought to engage the world with compassion and courage. Please share you findings and let us grow through one another’s experiences.
Live on purpose!
John
Conscious Consumption and Its Impact on the American Economy
What Would Happen if We Thought Before We Bought?
I was having a conversation with a good friend just prior to the Christmas shopping season in 2007, marveling at the amount of money that was soon to exchange hands, alleviating social guilt, while often buying little of real value for the recipient. When I mentioned that I thought we had been duped into societally driven consumerism, he compared me to Scrooge.
I am all for demonstrating our love and caring, not just at certain holidays, but throughout the year, but it seems as if we have merged the two. Our cultural obsession with growth has relied upon the consumer to spend, but what has been the cost?
What would happen it we all woke up and started to consume only that which had real value to us? We may be seeing the first signs of this, and I for one believe its not all bad.
For decades now, our economy has been increasingly loose credit markets and savings rates insufficient to meet our emergencies. Very few have sufficiently planned for seamless retirements, yet the big marketing powers have lured us, (willingly, no doubt) into an unsustainable pattern of buying our wants in advance of our ability to afford them, brilliantly justifying it as patriotic, as if our love of nation were directly correlated to our willingness to spend.
But what have we really been buying? Although we have captured countless tools to increase our efficiency and effectiveness, we work more now than ever before, bit in hours per week and weeks per year. Our families are spending less time dining together and communication is often to casual to truly be influential. We are essentially trading in the deep richness of relationships for the shallow and temporary high of commercialization.
While I eagerly anticipate the recovery of our economy, I do not hope that it returns to the same mindless consumer driven shoparatzi that has epitomized the American economy booms for the past generation.
Growth for the purpose of growth, without respect to the health of the host is concerous, and we must not go back to that which infected us to begin with.
My hope is that we use this time as a wakeup call to be more intentional about all aspects of our lives. Let’s make our expressions more thoughtful, whether those expressions be how we share our love or where we spend our dollars.
Our choices matter. When we are choosing unconsciously, the outcome is a reflection of our mindlessness. Awareness in all our choices will ensure that we create lives that reflect our core values, and will once again be developing our happiness from the inside, rather than attmpting to buy it from the outside.