I’m here in Denver at the 2011 Worldwork Conference – 260 people from all over the world, learning about the planet and its vast problems, and also learning how to facilitate and resolve conflict. Today I’m part of the facilitation team. Sitting here over my coffee, getting ready for the day, I’m reminded of my post, “Leading Under Fire,”  which I originally called Game Day. I’m reposting it here, and I think I’ll also give it a re-read, reminding myself of all my good points, as I get ready for the day. Enjoy!

Read the full post here.

There’s been an explosion of reality TV contests –  the Next Big Whatever Star. While the chance to become a celebrity lures contestants, I think it’s the grueling rite of passage that lures viewers. Last month we had exams at the Process Work Institute, which were fairly intense 3 day affairs, with 5 different exams per student. It’s interesting that in the adult education field that I’m in, exams are controversial and their value suspect. And yet, there’s this fascination in watching these demanding and punishing contests.

Over the 20+ years we have been training people in Process-oriented psychology and group facilitation, we have gone back and forth between pass/fail exams in some form and a non-pass/fail system of using gates or benchmarks to pass through one phase to another. It seems every couple of years or so, we debate getting rid of exams. They’re an arcane gate-keeping system that does little to foster or measure real growth in knowledge, skills and ability. And yet we come back to them in some form or other. I think, beyond the test of skills and abilities, they offer an opportunity par excellence to stretch beyond oneself, and for that reason, they are hard to abolish. (more…)

What’s the solution for solving the health care mess? Global warming? The economy? OK, these are bad examples, obviously if we knew, and if it were that easy, they’d be solved. But the question I want to ask is, why do we wait to tackle our problems until they are so complicated, so messy, so escalated that they require Herculean efforts? (more…)

Just finished a weekend training seminar on bullying in Auckland, New Zealand. It was terrific to have so many participants there involved in workplace bullying and harassment work. What’s increasingly evident as I tackle this topic around the globe is the role of cultural attitudes. To adequately fight bullying, we have to reduce our cultural tolerance for abusive interaction. Many cultures deride sensitivity and praise people’s ability to “suck it up,” to be tough and strong, and not be “so sensitive.” The tough guy is a cultural icon, the action figure we admire and emulate. But to get underneath the problem of bullying, we need to value sensitivity and respect as much as toughness.

Randy Cohen, the New York Times’ ethicist, recently opined on the court ruling that ordered Google to release the name of the anonymous blogger whose site Skanks in NYC was devoted to slandering a fashion model:

Has anonymous posting, though generally protected by law, become so toxic that it should be discouraged?

This issue has gotten my attention as I’m preparing a workshop on Bullying in the Public Sphere. I often find myself drawn to read comments on news sites, drawn no doubt by the same impulse that makes me crane my neck as I drive by an accident. Unmoderated comment sections provide an un-chaperoned space for every adolescent impulse we’ve ever repressed. The comments rapidly devolve into nasty, name-calling, deliberately inflammatory and hateful. It’s this impulse (what possible evolutionary purpose might it serve?) that the mainstream media depend on for their fortunes, and is no doubt why there continues to be unmoderated comments sections after every article. (more…)

I just saw Frost/Nixon. It’s a brilliant, chilling insight into power and ambition. What struck me was the degree of self-awareness Nixon had. Albeit, this is a fictionalized account; who knows exactly what went on in Nixon’s mind? But in the film, he’s portrayed as a worthy opponent, a crafty guy who is keenly aware of his own ambition and thirst for power and knows what he needs to do to win. And yet he’s trumped by Frost, an unlikely winner, a breezy, somewhat superficial talk show host. But what Frost has going for him is his likeability. He’s affable, charming, and easy going. At first, it appears he’s easy prey for the cunning Nixon, but in the end, we have the ultimate story of a nice guy finishing first.

Likeability in my view is underestimated as a form of power, and yet, I think the ability to get along with people trumps just about every form of power. Friends, connections and being able to get along well with others is the ultimate affirmative action. In a Harvard Business Review article, (June 2005) called Competent Jerks, Loveable Fools and the Formation of Social Networks, a study found that likeability is so key, that people are more likely to ask for help from someone who may not know the answer but is likeable, than from someone who is more likely to know the answer but isn’t likeable. In Frost/Nixon the power of likeability is maginified by its contrast to the opposite: Nixon’s tragic flaw of not being able to manage social interaction, of creating conflict rather than smoothing ruffled feathers, as Frost did so brilliantly.

There’s a problem in learning theory called transfer. How does a student learn something and then transfer that knowledge or set of skills to the appropriate context? In common sense terms, how does book learning become a real world skill? I’m still waiting for algebra transfer to happen. My 9^th grade algebra teacher, Mr Eastman, really knew his algebra, but didn’t know much about transfer. I learned enough algebra to pass his Friday quizzes, but I still don’t have the foggiest idea what algebra is or the real life problems it’s meant to solve.

There’s also something called negative transfer. Negative transfer occurs when previous knowledge is incorrectly applied to new areas. In language, when one’s mother tongue interferes with the speaking of a second language, that’s a case of negative transfer. (more…)

When I started this blog, I didn’t want it to focus on current events or politics. But it’s hard, in these recent days, not to focus on the issues dominating the headlines. Is anyone else like me? I dread election years. I watch the news and debates out of sense of duty, cringing through them, and finding excuses to leave to the room. I hate the feeling of my lowest instincts being appealed to, my fears, prejudice and hatred being played like a violin. I am insulted by politicians who seek to flatter me or who expect me to admire their wit and cleverness when they mock their opponent. I hate them but I hate myself more for being susceptible to it.

As the nation was riveted this past week on the financial crisis and bailout, a tiny feeling of optimism crept in. The financial crisis requires real understanding, an intellectual grasp of an arcane, highly complex and completely opaque system. While the financial outlook may be grim, one silver lining is the opportunity for learning and a real engagement with issues beyond the usual Punch and Judy show that the media would have us focus on. (more…)

As promised, Iâ??ve been looking at abuse of power, including bullying, ethical violations, exploitation, and conflict of interest. These past few weeks, Iâ??ve been researching workplace and school bullying. I find the topic to be really disturbing. If the literature is accurate, itâ??s a far bigger problem than I realized. Thereâ??s even a newly coined term, bullycide, to describe children who suicide because of being bullied. Itâ??s pretty much accepted that most mass shootings at schools were caused by bullying: the shooters were all targets of bullies who finally snapped.

One of the big controversies in the topic of bullying concerns attribution, or the causes of bullying. Here the research splits into two camps. One camp attributes internal or innate causes to bullying, such as a personality disorder. The other camp points to external (or situational) attributes: upbringing and social forces, group dynamics, socialization, etc.

A lot of what Iâ??ve read on childhood bullying posits external causes to explain why children become bullies. Thus, prevention focuses on creating empathy in children, teaching conflict resolution skills, and raising children to feel empowered, responsible, and empathic. Workplace bullying, however, is often explained in terms of internal attribution such as an underlying personality disorder, and prevention focuses on law, workplace tolerance, organizational norms, and policies. In the literature, the terms psychopath and sociopath crop up frequently, even though there is no hard evidence that bullying is a mental disorder. Even so, the tendency to diagnose it persists. Bullying, like so many other things that fall outside the bell curve of acceptable human behavior, is medicalized.

We used to use moral discourse; now itâ??s medical or psychiatric discourse that banishes criminal behavior and violence to the margins. Putting things into the medical model, as an aberration or disorder, is a way of containing the anxiety we feel over the incomprehensible cruelty that humans are capable of. For instance, Hitler is often called a sociopath, and those who did his bidding are said to have fallen under his hypnotic spell. It may be clinically the case, but it also obscures the fact that Hitler had many helpers. Was every German who followed Hitler a sociopath, or an anomaly?

Foucault famously said, weâ??ve come to view criminal as â??a kernel of danger, representing a type of anomaly.â?? I call this the â??lone gunman theory,â?? which states: some deranged wacko unlike you and me is responsible. Yet the truth is, none of us is too far from bullying behavior. Milgramâ??s well known experiment which measured the willingness of people to obey authority, even when it conflicted with their conscience, shows how amendable we are to so-called sociopathic tendencies. Seeking the cause of bullying as an internal attribution might help create workplace and school guidelines to prevent and curtail bullying, but it wonâ??t do enough because the question itself reflects a worldview that bullying is not a feature of human experience but a deviation from it. If on the other hand, we saw it as a continuum of behavior we are all capable of, we would learn, from an early age, how to deal with those tendencies in ourselves and others.

Bullying is abhorrent, but it is not an aberration of the human condition and calls for no special explanation. We all have bullying impulses â?? whether or not we act on them, or more accurately, to which degree we act on them. Bullying is defined as the use of power to hurt, demean, ridicule, abuse, torture, mistreat or exploit someone else to promote oneself at the othersâ?? expense. Is it not in our human nature to want to get our way no matter what? To exploit anotherâ??s weakness for our gain? To use emotions – pressure, guilt, threats â??to get our way? Isnâ??t mocking someoneâ??s point of view in public a form of bullying? When I tune in to Fox News or CNN, and watch political pundits hammering away at each other, or read comments on my favorite blogs, I find it rife with bullying.

The Workplace Bullying Institute has a simple explanation for what causes bullying: bullies bully because they can. There is a German expression: Gelegenheit macht Diebe (Opportunity makes the thief) There is opportunity and reward for those who use power to exploit others for their own gain. So bullying as a behavior cannot be addressed in isolation from the school, organization or society that promotes and rewards that use of power, competition and exploitation. Bullying is a use of power, and a poor one at that. If there is a disorder at play, it might just be a social one to which weâ??re all prone to varying degrees.

Iâ??ve got the task of developing a performance evaluation process with and for faculty at the Process Work Institute. Weâ??re a small training institute, and while we have had many different forums for feedback and evaluation, weâ??ve not created a standardized process that is tied to accountability.

Itâ??s a tricky process. As a colleague pointed out, itâ??s been a steep learning curve. Weâ??ve run into many snarls en route to developing this performance evaluation procedure. The topic is a minefield, on both sides, for the evaluated and the evaluator. For starters, itâ??s basically about being judged â?? am I good or bad? And trust. Can I trust whoâ??s evaluating me? What about the disgruntled colleague or student who has it in for me? Or that the feedback is filtered through the personality of the other person, complete with their values, beliefs about me, biases, etc. And of course, now that we are moving towards performance evaluation as mandatory, it raises the twin issues of motivation and resistance. Whatâ??s in it for me? Why should I jump that hoop? And do these standards relate to my own personal growth goals? And probably one of the biggest difficulties is that, like any tight knit organization, we sit comfortably in a single loop learning style â?? we have our way of looking at things and doing things, and when it comes to performance evaluation, we can police ourselves thank you very much.

But of course we canâ??t. And we know that. So we want the opportunity to reflect on ourselves, to a degree. Because itâ??s also human nature to bristle at anyone who points out any kind of flaw, even if they call it a â??challengeâ?? or â??opportunity.â?? We know negative feedback and criticism, no matter what perfume it has on.

I could write volumes on this, and others have, better than I can. So, the point I want to focus on is the question of accountability. Why do we, or does any organization, need evaluations, and accountability procedures? Why does bureaucracy have to intervene here?

As I ponder it, I think the real meaning of performance evaluation is a cost analysis: does what you add to a group outweigh what you cost your colleagues, customers, and organization? That sounds harsh to think that who we are has a price tag, but it does. Mostly, we add value. But itâ??s often hard to see the price others pay in getting along with us. Even our talents come with a price. I have a great talent at seeing the bigger picture, and this comes with the cost of frequently neglecting details and making small mistakes that definitely cause some teeth grinding downstream. Or, if I am difficult to collaborate with, I make the atmosphere tense, if I derail the conversation, neglecting the deadline that the other team members are trying to meet, I cost those around me in terms of energy, emotional wear and tear.

The problem isnâ??t what we cost; the problem is not knowing that cost, and not taking measures to reduce the difference between our value and our costs. For instance, if I am sloppy with details (as I am), and I send out information with the wrong date, this means that the office staff or my organizer has to spend extra time chasing me down to correct dates, sending out corrections, and responding to questions because people have been misinformed. In order to mitigate that cost, I need to do something â?? apologize, offer to help write the emails or mail out the corrections, or offer to pay extra money for the extra time involved. If I donâ??t, if I just assume someone else will clean up that mess, and anyway, mistakes happen, then laws, regulatory agencies, performance reviews, police forces, etc., spring up to fulfill the function I neglect.

Whatever we miss doing for ourselves, we outsource to another body. But this escalates the problem, and brings in force or power of some kind. If two people canâ??t resolve a fight alone, then a third party comes in to resolve it for them. When we outsource it to another we use power in place of natural consequences.

Barbara Coloroso, a parenting expert, uses the concept of natural consequences in parenting. Rather than controlling behavior through force or might (â??Do so because I say so!â??) children should learn that what they do has consequences for which they are responsible. You throw a cigarette butt out your house window and start a fire next door that threatens your home as well. You see and experience the consequences of your action, and are forced to take steps to counter it. But we seldom have that proximity to the effects of our action. We have lost contact between cause and effect. So laws are created that replace natural consequences with force. Donâ??t do this because the government says so. Now itâ??s impersonal, and there is no longer a reason attached. The violator, the one who throws the butt out the window, whether he obeys the law or not, is still dissociated from the loss of habitat, cost to taxpayers, homelessness, and the myriad issues caused by that one action.

Getting back to the issue of performance evaluation â??I donâ??t deal with my sloppiness, and eventually the office staff complains. So a new law gets posted: if you make a mistake on your dates, you are responsible for making the correction, or something like that. But now itâ??s bureaucracy, an arbitrary law. I might improve, but I probably wonâ??t. Even more significantly, I havenâ??t become more aware of what I cost.

I believe this is one of the reasons evaluators chafe at their role. Not only because they may not be trained for it, but also because they are recruited into the role because the person isnâ??t evaluating themselves sufficiently. The function really belongs to the one being evaluated. Thatâ??s why, in the way we do feedback at the Process Work Institute, we make a big point of training the ones giving and getting feedback to take the other roles.

The one receiving feedback should already know that feedback â?? itâ??s only coming to them from the outside because they somehow missed it. Feedback we donâ??t know about ourselves catches us by surprise, and is the worst kind. It hurts the most to receive criticism about something we donâ??t know about ourselves. But we should. We should be in touch with our cost, and have a sense of how we are received. On the other side of the equation, giving feedback is hardest when the person receiving it doesnâ??t already know about. Itâ??s for these reasons that the real learning involved in evaluation is less about substance (what should I focus on) and more about the process (Do I already know this, and if not, why not?).

And the big question is, why donâ??t we? Thereâ??s been a lot written about this, especially recently. Itâ??s a well know problem in social psychology that people chronically overrate their performance (unless they are  depressed). Cornell psychologist David Dunning, PhD. is one of the top researchers in this field. Heâ??s found that in North American culture, people overestimate their abilities, and that the least competent performers inflate their abilities the most. No one really knows for sure why this is the case. People are definitely prone to bias. They overrate the particular areas they excel at, and minimize the importance of those areas they donâ??t excel at. For instance, people with verbal ability would overestimate the role verbal ability, in contrast to mathematical ability, plays in intelligence. Or task focused people would rate task orientation as the most important leadership trait on a questionnaire about what makes a good leader.

Another reason we donâ??t see ourselves more clearly is due to fundamental attribution error, meaning, we tend to give credit to ourselves for a positive outcome, and lay the blame elsewhere for a negative outcome. Additionally, we seldom receive accurate feedback about ourselves. People tend to give each other more positive feedback to their faces, but say negative things behind their back. Finally, people lack the information they need to fully assess themselves; the paradox is that our incompetence makes us incompetent to accurately judge ourselves.

But another reason is that we donâ??t see ourselves as part of the whole. Itâ??s one of the reasons we struggle to see the environmental impact of our decisions, or the nutritional and health impact of our behaviors. Social marketers who try to educate the public about health issues such as skin cancer, AIDS awareness, smoking, and drunk driving, have to contend with this problem a lot: How do we get people to relate to the consequences of their actions? In organizations, how do we get people to identify with the organizational itself, not just their job, team, or silo?

Power is used as the intermediary between people, between individuals and whole. Rules and law force us to be responsible to each other, to think of the whole when we have lost our ability to do so. Weâ??ve made a big leap from performance evaluation to politics, but I think the common denominator is the essence of organization – association and affiliation. When we donâ??t affiliate with others, we outsource that task to the government or bureaucracy, and then inveigh against its restrictive rules and regulations. But we can and should police ourselves, not out of a sense of duty or morality, but out of the sense of connection and community. It reminds me of how Gandhi understood freedom â?? not as the ability to do whatever you wanted, but as liberation from the prison of dualism â?? that we are separate from each other. Democracy has always been a tension between its two parts: demos (people, community) and kratie (power, law). While we struggle to comprehend community, to identify with the demos, we depend on kratie, the power to force affiliation, but in the absence of heart, it becomes mere obedience.