Appropriate operational processes and relationships require the ability to arrive at positive outcomes through negotiation.  While some may think that a leader can dictate rather than negotiate, keep in mind that when a board of officers or an executive team get together, they cannot dictate to one another, but indeed must negotiate with each other to arrive at solutions that move the organizations’ initiatives forward with methods and procedures that are conducive to the ways their various branches, departments or divisions operate. The same is true when leaders or representatives of various organizations meet to address a particular matter. Negotiation, not dictation, is the process of determining how to move forward together.  

A positive outcome is one that achieves win-wins between the parties involved.  Ideal agreements provide each party with the best opportunities to succeed at their organizational missions.  To arrive at positive outcomes, however, those negotiating must pay attention to how they go about the exchange.  Negotiation etiquette helps improve communications so the parties proactively engage to arrive at mutual long term satisfactory outcomes.  

When people from varying viewpoints come together to discuss an issue of mutual interest and concern, the potential “storming” that can occur must be managed tactfully, so the participants relax enough to work through any initial misunderstandings, and perceived insults and threats.  I have facilitated meetings where people begin to misinterpret statements, and so as a moderator, I manage the conversation, so the participants do not jump to conclusions that the other parties do not mean or intend.  When people really care about their organizational missions and jobs, they can speak passionately, which also causes emotions to arise in others, who can interpret what is being said through the filter of their resulting spontaneous feelings and preconceptions.  I enjoy facilitating these types of interactions and helping people clarify and restate so they reassess the past, and get renewed focus on the mission and vision to address the root of the issues that help overcome the challenges we’ve been brought together to solve.  

 While the negotiations are underway, the worst thing that can happen is for people to put their marbles in their pocket and withdraw from the process.  Real lasting progress is impeded if people emotionally, intellectually or psychologically shutdown and disengage.  Temporary breaks may be necessary, however, to ease tensions so that later cooler heads can prevail. Sometimes temporary breaks also are advisable to give the negotiating parties the opportunity to digest information divulged, learned and received.  

Here is why it takes etiquette to arrive at an effective outcome from a negotiation. If when negotiating, one party or more is overly forceful, an agreement may be struck, but if one party or more feels forced into it, or feels he or she was not fully heard, or feels he or she was run over or through when trying to express reservations, before they leave the room and the door quits swinging shut they are working on ways to break the agreement or resist its initiatives.  

Sometimes the ideas or initiatives actually are good, but if those involved in the processes, however, feel they were not afforded the appropriate time to take the information back to their organizations to determine how the initiative can be implemented in a way that works best for them, they will feel forced into the decision.  In such cases, the right thing implemented in the wrong way becomes the wrong thing from their perspective. 

I recently facilitated a session with an organization that was struggling, but could not quite put its finger on why.  After delivering some initial training, so they got into the right frame of mind to address the issue, we conducted a two-hour session with all the leaders and the key members of each department.  They all agreed they had struck a great path to the customers’ door.  But when we began analyzing what was beyond the door, we discovered that the customer had a different profile than those it thought it would reach.  The challenge was that to continue providing services to those unintended customers and reach more of them, the organization has to restructure some of its operations.  Progress only could be made by first getting all the department heads into a room and taking them through a process that led to these discoveries.  

Because knowledge is power, they were so empowered by the discovery that they decided to extend the meeting, and I spent an additional two hours facilitating a discussion where the departments negotiated with each other to lay out a process map for what they specifically were going to do to make the necessary adjustments.       

Is your organization at a crossroads that your senior leaders need to negotiate to address?  My powerful three-dimensional leadership training, analytical tools, and objective facilitation can help.  Visit www.threedimensionalleader.com to learn more.  

To negotiate is to interact with others to reach agreed-upon courses of action. Negotiation is not manipulation. It is bargaining, consulting, and discussing to reach settlements where mutual, collective advantage or outcomes occur that satisfy the various interests represented.   Negotiation is a continuous process that parties must engage and reengage in as the context changes. A change in context or variables require renegotiation to arrive at or maintain the circumstances that facilitate mutual organizational success.  

The opportunity for negotiation occurs when two or more parties have missions that converge in such a way that requires their agreement, cooperation or participation to be successful.  The goal of negotiation is to keep the mutual agendas and missions moving forward in a win-win manner, thus ensuring they do not collide.    

The basis for negotiation is for parties and the people who represent them to at least be willing to see each other’s viewpoints. Negotiation only can be effective with people who think as we think and who feel like we feel. This does not mean that only homogeneous clones can arrive at harmonious accords.  Satisfactory outcomes from negotiations require that there is agreement of basic terminology, which demonstrates that diverse perspectives are willing to organize around an agreed-upon set of distinctions, parameters, and values.  

The people at the table must have an agreed-upon common understanding of the terms and issues that are being parleyed.  This means that when they say the word “deficit,” or “blue,” or “truth,” they are talking about the same thing. Thus you have the basis for win-win.  When one party misunderstands what the other means, the potential increases for win-lose.  Effective, long-lasting outcomes from negotiation occur when both parties obtain wins.  

(The above article is from page 278 of The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context, by Earl C. Wallace.  Read more at www.ThreeDimensionalLeader.com)

       As a supervisor you should see your role as that which safeguards the integrity of the organization’s culture.  A supervisor’s job involves conducting periodic employee job evaluations. Job descriptions and evaluation forms can be thought of as the organization’s formal process of delegating roles, and responsibilities to employees. The evaluation process should provide objective feedback regarding how the employee is handling the mission that is delegated to him or her. 

It is all too easy, however, for an employee-evaluation program to degenerate into a personality contest. Human relationships and sentimentality often cloud objective judgment. To be sentimental means to be prompted by feelings of tenderness, sadness, or nostalgia in an exaggerated and self-indulgent way.  Sentimentality is the “easy way out” for supervisors who are uncomfortable with objectively evaluating the performance of another.  

If someone is nice to us some of the time, we all too often want to overlook their negative behaviors that continually undermine organizational productivity. Frequently, we hear people say in reference to a coworker that he or she is a nice person but fails to do this essential thing or that essential thing. The same people who avoid dealing with a non-performer because it is so difficult to communicate and coordinate with him say, “But he is such a nice guy.” Even though those employees undermine nearly every work process they get involved in, coworkers repeatedly say they are nice people because they greet them warmly in the hallway or show up at office parties to wish them well on their birthdays.  

When people have a pleasant personality and yet fail to do the jobs for which they were hired, they are often not evaluated on the basis of their job performance.  We allow our sentimental feelings to undermine our organization’s mission and processes because those poorly performing employees greet us pleasantly each morning and give us cards on our birthday.  We fail to evaluate their job performance objectively but instead evaluate them on the basis that they do nice things a few brief moments of the day and on special occasions throughout the year.  Consequently, we do not deal in a consistent manner with their job performance shortcomings.  

There are people who routinely circumvent the execution of smooth workflow processes by their surliness, procrastination, passive-aggressive behavior, and tendency to withdraw their presence from essential activities. These people contribute to silo mentalities or single-handedly erect barriers and prevent cross-pollination of organizational principles, guidelines, procedures, and policies and thus hinder and undermine operational strategies, yet we say they are “nice people.”  They repeatedly fail to provide information on time and meet deadlines. They refuse to operate within established frameworks and decide not to participate fully in projects in which the rest of their teams and others throughout the organization are intensely engaged. They resist accountability and refuse to work within established channels.  Yet we and others throughout the organizations say they are “nice people.”  Employees, however, should be evaluated upon the basis of their job performance, not how we feel about them as human beings. We can respect people as humans and still categorize their job performance for what it is.  

The healthiest mission-focused organizations are those in which the culture, “a group’s shared set of beliefs, values and assumptions about what is important” is consistent with the reality of two plus two equals four.  “Nice people” do not undermine and circumvent their organizations’ processes. Poorly performing employees do. The goal of an evaluation program is not to acknowledge that people are nice, but rather to determine if they are contributing to their organization’s mission fulfillment by engaging in their work in the ways that contribute to the entire organization working effectively.  Employees should be evaluated upon two primary categories.  To paraphrase Jack Welch, one is, “Are they getting our numbers?” and two, “Are they demonstrating our values?” 

An essential leadership role is to inspire employees to rally around the mission, which is the main reason why the company and their jobs exist, such as to provide excellent customer service or deliver products that satisfy customer needs etc…  

When people congregate or gather at work, if they are not pointed toward a compelling vision they can begin to focus on each other and not the mission.  Leaders need to constantly manage people by inspiring them (as opposed to trying to berate or control them) so they remain focused on what is most important about the job to fulfill the organizational mission.  

I believe that most people are excited about a company’s mission when they take on a job.  Passive leaders can allow this enthusiasm to dissipate by allowing poorly performing coworkers or those with a negative attitude to permeate the atmosphere of the workplace.  Leaders also actually can drive away worker enthusiasm with behaviors that communicate that the leader is more concerned about petty issues or themselves rather than the mission that matters most. 

A worker once told me that her supervisor called an morale-building meeting to chide others that she and her best friend in the office wore the same blouse that day and no one noticed.  Because the color blouse that one or more people were wearing had nothing to do with the work or the way their job tasks and assignments are completed or the mission is fulfilled, the leader communicated that the jobs that the parent company wants them to fulfill is not the most important thing, but rather it is the leader’s petty whims, desires and ideas.  My book, The Three-Dimensional Leader, says that "people want to rally to the mission and not the leader's mess!"

The employee who was a victim of this incident told me several stories about how the supervisor actually was impeding employee productivity by continually keeping people on edge about petty issues that had nothing to do with the way work was accomplished or the job performance outcomes their behaviors would achieve or fail to achieve.  The work environment was stifling because the leader constantly made certain that all the attention was on her.  She was the one-dimensional distraction that kept everyone from focusing on the mission that mattered most.  Perhaps she struggled with her identity as a leader, and mistakenly felt that, “Since I am the leader, everything I do must be important to those I oversee.”   Her leadership would have been much more effective if she understood that her focus was supposed to be on “what is work related and connected to the desired productivity outcomes we need to achieve.”  Issues related to that would be the rallying point to which the employees gladly would have come.

I think many of us are tempted to want the focus on us.  We must resist this, and focus the attention on the mission, because that truly is what matters most to the employer and parent organization, the customers and clients, and it is the reason why people have come to work in the first place.   

Earl C. Wallace is the author of The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating YourMission, Resources and Context. Read more at:  http://www.threedimensionalleader.com

The Emotional foundations for great leadership are highlighted in Arthur Carmazzi’s Directive Communication Psychology based “Environmental Leadership” styles and in what Earl Wallace calls “Three Dimensional Leadership.” These concepts detail what it takes to lead effectively in this new “connective age,” in ways that meet the emotional needs of others. 

Arthur Carmazzi says “Leadership does not involve changing mindsets or getting followers, but involves the cultivation of an environment that inspires individuals to take up leadership roles and competently develop themselves to make things happen for everyone.”  He explains that “Environmental Leadership is a psychological form of leadership” that fosters an atmosphere where people feel that their contributions matter.  They feel recognized, appreciated, and a sense of security and control within the work place. Carmazzi’s optimal environmental leader “implements a psychological support system that fulfills the emotional and developmental needs within a group.”  This leader creates a higher level of engagement, accountability and ownership within the team. 

Achieving the optimal leadership environment, says Earl C. Wallace, author of “The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context,” is an outcome from understanding three principles that contribute to being a three-dimensional leader.  These include understanding the “art of leadership, the “art of delegation,” and how to create a sense of “we all are in this together.” 

Wallace quotes Brigadier General (Retired) Robert A. Cocroft, who states, “The art of leadership is not getting people to do what you want them to do. It is getting people to want to do what you want them to do. There is a difference between having a job title and being a leader.”  The General goes on to say “Underlying leadership principles are values. … You can get people to do what you want them to do out of fear, and there’s also a whole bunch of other ways that are not the best way.”  “The art of leadership,” says Wallace, “is to get people to ‘want’ to do what the mission requires.”    

Wallace notes “Delegation is the downward assignment of formal authority from superior to subordinate, so the employees or volunteers are empowered to act for the good of the organization.”  Three-dimensional leaders know how to delegate so organizational performance inflates. Leading three-dimensionally engages and emotionally invigorates your work environment in ways that are psychologically satisfying to others.

One-dimensional leaders do not intend to serve the organization or the employees it relies upon to accomplish the work.  They use their leadership positions so others can cater to their desires and whims. Their main preoccupation is gaining name recognition and getting credit. They are not going to share recognition with the team of other employees, which they see as “rivals” to the attention they seek for themselves. 

Two-dimensional leaders try not to delegate projects but dole them out piecemeal as chores and errands. II-D’s rarely assign work to an employee who gets to complete the project from beginning to end in a continuum flow process.  Consequently, assignments feel like odd jobs. 

Three-dimensional leaders delegate roles and responsibilities.  III-D’s master the art of delegation with accountability absent of micromanagement.  It is how they oversee organizations that are amazingly robust and healthy and which have a deep bench of those who competently can continue to move the operations forward.  Delegating responsibilities means people are assigned to fulfill roles and take charge of entire functions and processes.  They get the opportunity to become the “face” associated with the project.

By contrast, Carmazzi notes that those who deny others the fulfillment of these basic emotional needs are the “Need Suckers” and are operating from the "Reptilian Brain." They react like lizards, instead of acting intelligently. This happens often in organizations when these circumstances occur: 

·      Someone takes more credit than they should.

·      Someone makes decisions that affect you and you cannot do anything about it.

·      Someone doesn’t at least acknowledge your efforts or ideas because they think THEY know better.

·      Someone takes all the fun and diverse projects or tasks and leaves you with the mundane jobs.

The leaders and subordinates who do this in an organization are what Wallace calls one-dimensional leaders, who only care about themselves. Wallace notes that “One-dimensional leadership is about “me.” Two-dimensional leadership operates from an “us vs. them” perspective. Three-dimensional leadership creates a sense of "we are in this together."  It is the three-dimensional environmental leadership that Carmazzi and Wallace want leaders to strive for.  

Learn more by contacting Arthur Carmazzi at: http://directivecommunication.com/index.php  and

and Earl Wallace at: http://www.threedimensionalleader.com  

Are you dealing with an underperforming organization that needs change?

            It often is the leader’s responsibility to take on the challenging task of getting people to change – not necessarily the organization's mission, but how it goes about accomplishing it. To remain competitive often requires that organizations approach their missions differently to make appropriate adjustments to reach different customers and be more meaningful to the ones they have, so they remain loyal purchasers of goods and services.  Many organizations underperform because they continue to do what they always have done, so they continue to fail to accomplish what they had hoped to achieve. 

            Changing how we go about achieving our mission may require that workers do it with different technology that provides the means to accomplish the processes of manufacturing or service delivery.  If manufacturing, the workers have to learn to operate new machines and equipment. If your operations involve service delivery, employees may have to learn to operate new computer-information processing systems.  Professional level service providers, such as educators, may need to change how they relate to students in order for the latter to be able to relate to the lessons being taught.

            When we have learned how to learn, change becomes easier and more intuitive.  Generally, people do not change willingly. They change only when the pain of staying the same is perceived to be greater than the pain of changing. 

Pain can be unhappy board members, poor employee evaluations, red ink that stems from decreased sales as dissatisfied customers take their business elsewhere, loss of market share, and inefficient operations that fail to provide products at competitive prices or deliver them in timely and cost-efficient ways. In educational environments pain can be low morale and teachers feeling powerless to make an impact, poor student behavior, such as bullying, low-test scores, high absenteeism, parental disappointment, and declining enrollments.  For churches and not-for-profit organizations, pain can be the loss of attendees and skilled people who could be expert volunteer resources that make services and ministries robust, meaningful and successful. 

Pain can be high employee or volunteer frustration and turnover, so synergy is never obtained from ranks of experienced people. The drain of experienced employees or volunteers, who actually have been successful, results in institutional memory loss.  The organization begins to act like a stroke victim who cannot remember many functional activities and processes that made operations successful and which resonated with customers.

If organizations do not respond to these pain messages that should be sending signals to their headquarters’ central nervous systems, they will fail to obtain adequate funding that is the air and blood supply that keeps the organization alive.

Pain only can treated when it is acknowledged and its cause accurately is analyzed. Pain is but the symptom of organizational malady. Putting the patient on the path to a cure that treats the actual causes requires keeping in focus my three-dimensional mission, resources and context principles. 

My book at  www.three-dimensionalleader.com contains stories of leaders who addressed and overcame painful situations. Do you have a “pain of change” story?  Were leaders aware of what was going on?  Were you able to do anything to overcome it? 

This time of year, we tend to contemplate where we are going and where we have been, and we plan to make changes for the New Year. While the idea of change sounds romantic and fulfilling, change initiatives often fail. Change is stressful because learning is stressful.  My theory is that whatever one-dimensional leaders (those who only are focused on their own wants and whims) don’t understand, they fear, and whatever they fear, they try to ignore or kill. Two-dimensional leaders may sense the need for change, but because they fail to perceive accurately all the elements within the larger context, they may not fully embrace the necessary change nor follow through to see that it is implemented thoroughly.  Three-dimensional leaders are not change averse because they see the ten thousand-foot view of the context and why the adjustments are necessary to achieve desired outcomes, given the emerging or new environment. 

Change is tough on us all because it requires work and learning, or skull sweat, to obtain and digest new information and respond to it appropriately.  Learning is stressful because it involves digesting new and unfamiliar material; it requires assimilation of information that may not be similar in format, structure, or in computer software that is familiar to us.

Few of us like being in situations that make us feel uncomfortable—like we are the proverbial “fishout of water.” Learning is like that. To learn often requires us to leave the comfort zone of the pond we are familiar swimming in to cross over unfamiliar territory to get into the next body of water.  To stretch my analogy a bit further, since fish don’t have legs, we can feel like we’re flopping around over the information and context until we make progress in understanding and negotiating them to feel like we are swimming comfortably again. We tend not to like change, because it is fraught with uncertainty.  Because we tend to associate change with emotional and psychological discomfort we may resist it.

Learning how to learn, however, requires us to develop intellectual processes that help us to cycle quickly through any negative impressions we associate with change, so we can get on with taking the actual steps required to achieve it.  

Learn more about how to change and get organizations to change at www.ThreeDimensionalLeader.com

The gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia can be interpreted that voters want government leaders who will focus on the mission of strengthening our economy, rather than on pursuing policies whose support is split along party lines.  Great outcomes result when organizations obtain synergy from diversity.  "Synergy" is when the output is greater than the mere mathematical sum of the combined individual parts.  

“The most effective and potent leadership is that which rallies people with diverse skills and backgrounds to focus upon a common mission.” By contrast “the one-dimensional leader is thinking only about his or her own wants or desires and is unconcerned about what the organization needs.”   (The Three-Dimensional Leader page 43 and 45)

The republican victories in the Virginia Lt.Governor and Attorney General races are strong indications that people in America are concerned about pragmatic issues that relate to the health of our economy and job creation, which the democratic party seems willing to sacrifice to pursue ideology.  Underscoring this is how in the northern New York State 23^rd congressional district a conservative candidate lost to a democrat by a slim 4% margin, even as that democrat was endorsed by the republican candidate, who withdraw from the race due to lack of support.   

These elections inform us that despite how a majority of Americans voted for a democratic president a year ago, they are rejecting that party’s one-dimensional control and rush into passing partisan legislation such as Cap and Trade and Health Care Reform, where the processes to implement them are vague; their promised outcomes are unlikely; their unintended consequences are unknowable, and the costs definitely are extremely high both in terms of taxes required to support them and the job losses we would incur upon their implementation. The regulatory burdens accompanying these initiatives will place undue pressures upon small businesses and will have a negative impact on the competitiveness of our large corporations. 

“Three-dimensional leadership is so potent because it works well with and obtains synergy from others in the team environment. The winning organization generally is the one that achieves synergy by getting its players to work well together to collaborate as a team rather than act as independent agents on the field.” (The Three-Dimensional Leader page 52and 76)  Americans need a strong economy and a degree of health care reform.  It only will be accomplished when our government leaders obtain synergy from the diversity that is within both the democrat and republican parties.  

Earl C. Wallace

Government only can solve its challenges to reduce deficits and lower taxes by providing effective management of its mission to provide services. The problem is that government programs are run by politically appointed leaders who actually have little background in what they are tasked to manage.   A deeper problem still is that elected leaders must rely upon their inexperienced politically appointed and largely ineffective leaders to make determinations about how to reduce expenses while fulfilling the mission. 

What often is perceived as a lack of political-will or a political stalemate to manage budgets based upon rational formulas of credits and debits, really is indecisiveness stemming from ignorance of what the actual mission of each government organization is, what resources really are needed to accomplish them and what context has to be negotiated to deploy resources appropriately so they are positioned to accomplish the mission as circumstances change. 

Government leaders make mistakes early in their tenures by packing out organizations’ highest paying and most influential decision-making positions with other politically appointed people who know less about accomplishing the mission than they do.  Thus from the politician, to their politically appointed commissioners and directors, and to their politically approved deputies and assistants, the organizations tend to be run by the blind leading the blind, leading the blind.  This is not a formula for effective efficiencies.  

Yet it is these expensive ranks of political appointees that the politicians and their commissioners and directors insist they need for government to run effectively. 

The challenge with government policies crafted by leaders who have the least institutional knowledge of the systems they oversee, and the least experience negotiating the context in which the missions must unfold, is that they design programs and initiatives that often have unintended consequences that they are ill-equipped to manage.  Within the private sector, the realities of consumer choices provide disciplines, such as the loss of customers and income, and rewards, in the form of more customers and income, which, incidentally, require more management skills to keep up with demand while maintaining quality, efficiency and cost effectiveness.  Government, however, ignores such realities and blithely continues on courses of action oblivious to the elements within the context to which other sectors of our economy must respond.   

Given these realities, should we support the growth of government to expand its control over health care or any other parts of our economy?