Hands-off management, micromanagement and in-between – some thoughts on what they mean in practice 21

This is my 21st posting to an occasional series on better management practices to address the issues of how and when to actively step in, and how and when to step back as a manager and supervisor. And for earlier installments to this, see Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 4, with this series included in its Addendum Section.

I have been discussing the consequences that can and do arise from two distinctive approaches to management, that we all come to see in the course of our work lives:

• Positive and supportive, and with the supervisors involved actively seeking to provide the support and resources needed to get required work done, and
• What can best be considered adversarial supervisors who simply make demands and apply pressure to perform, taking a sink or swim approach to the people who would do that work.

And to bring this initial orienting note up to date here, I have discussed both of these extreme ends of a management style spectrum of approaches here, for both their obvious good and bad consequences and for their confounding complications to such understandings too. In that regard, see Part 20, for a contrarian discussion of the merits and impact of both of these approaches where their consequences can be more complex than would be initially expected. But that noted, adversarial supervisors and managers can and do come to be seen as toxic, in keeping with most initial understandings of that approach, and to all who they hold authority over. That does create negative impact, and at a significant level if these people hold real authority and with real reach for that.

• How and why is it that managers who pursue a more adversarial extreme there, can still be kept on and seemingly regardless of the consequences of their behavior?
• How can that approach even become a stable norm, for at least parts of a business and for specific managers of this type?

My goal for this posting is to at least begin to address the conundrums acknowledged in those questions. Then after completing that line of discussion, I will turn to and more fully discuss managers and management styles that fit more in the middle of the spectrum bookended by these two approaches (building from comments offered in that direction in Part 20.)

Setting that next to discuss set of issues aside for now, consider these enabling scenarios:

• Corporate cultures that accept that type of managerial behavior as a way to do business and certainly when the teams that report to adversarial, and even extreme adversarial managers get their jobs done on time and on budget, meeting their assigned goals, and without creating too much in the way of ripple effect complications elsewhere in the business while doing this.
• Individual more senior managers who at the very least turn a blind eye on how managers who report to them behave – and once again, as long as their teams are getting their work done and adequately enough so as to meet those managers’ performance evaluation goals when they face their own supervisors.
• And managers who are adversarial towards the people who report to them, can be all but obsequious to those who they report to. And that can mask their behavior toward those lower down the table of organization in the lines they work in, and particularly when more senior managers never interact with anyone at that business below the ranks of their own direct reports.

And I will add one more possibility to that list: a nepotistic possibility that I have seen in action that I have come to refer to as the embedded nephew problem. When it is family doing this, business owners can sometimes find it easier to simply turn a blind eye on problems of all sorts – this sort of problem included, simply trying to direct their problem relative into places at the business where they would do the least harm – if they are smart enough to attempt that.

There are other possibilities for how problem managers of this type to stay on, and against all apparent reason. I simply add that addressing this when confronted with it can call for active Plan B planning and execution on the part of anyone there who is being managed by this type of behavior, in order to limit the negative impact of it that they face, and certainly short-term. But possible lessons learnable opportunities aside (as noted in Part 20) working for toxically adversarial managers can have negative impact upon longer-term carrier path possibilities too.

On that note, I am going to turn to consider mid-spectrum managers in the next installment to this series, as promised above. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, with this put into its addendum section (and also see its Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3.) And you can also find this at Social Networking and Business 3 and its Page 4 continuation (and also see its Page 1 and Page 2), and at HR and Personnel – 2 (and see its Page 1.)

Dissent, disagreement, compromise and consensus 121 – the business context 70

This is my 121st installment to a series on negotiating in a professional context, starting with a focus on the employee-to-employee and employee-to-business side of that as found in more individual jobs and careers contexts. See Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 3 and its Page 4 continuation, postings 484 and following for Parts 1-51 for that side to this overall narrative. And in that context, I have also been discussing the business side of negotiating here. See that same directory Page 4, and its postings 535 and following for Parts 52-120.

I began explicitly focusing on communications and negotiating in a business in general in Part 93 after, and in follow-up to my offering a succession of discussions of more granular case in point scenario based examples. And as part of that, I have turned to and have been discussing this pair of more fundamental issues:

1. Working widely in and across a business, and networking up and down and across its table of organization in order to succeed there.
2. And the networking and communications and negotiating best practices that would be used there, as they can be fine tuned and used in the particular contexts of specific businesses.

To bring this initial orienting note up to date, I have been focusing on the first of those points and I continue doing so in this posting as well. And I ended Part 120 with this comment and question:

• This narrative up to here assumes that those who you would negotiate with and on both sides of the table are willing to act in good faith if they see others there are doing so. What if that does not hold true?

I begin addressing that set of issues here, the same way that I addressed the issues of adversarial negotiators in the immediately preceding installments to this series, leading up to here: by more explicitly considering what that key term, “adversarial” actually means in this context and certainly when it is stripped of its emotional and related baggage. And that led me to this approach to understanding and working with adversaries and seeming adversaries across a negotiations table:

• What do adversary and adversarial mean here? They can mean different than but not enemy, and certainly unless and until proven otherwise.
• Good negotiations are designed to achieve that more open understanding of the people to be negotiated with, and in spite of personality differences and other barriers that might separate you from them.
• And working with them in a negotiations process means moving that different towards similar, and that similar towards agreed-to same, and certainly on high priority issues and in addressing high priority goals.

I take a similar approach here, with a corresponding consideration of what it means to negotiate in good faith. And I begin doing so by posing two set of questions, as here reedited:

• Does negotiating in good faith mean negotiating with consistency, so that others can know what they have to negotiate about as to goals and priorities? And does a failure in that mean having to attempt to “nail Jello to a wall,” for the failure of those who you need to negotiate with to decide what they are actually trying to achieve and avoid, and with this coming from their failure to clearly present any of that to you?
• Or does negotiating in good faith mean negotiating without being coercively manipulative and deceptive? Does its alternative of negotiating in bad faith mean not actually negotiating at all, and with effort by whatever means needed, taken to simply impose a one-sided resolution on all involved?

When people faced across a table are seen as negotiating in good faith, these issues do not come to mind. When those same people are deemed to be negotiating in bad faith, these issues come to assume paramount importance and with all of the emotional freight that that brings. And the worst possibilities that could come from facing those two bullet points and their issues arise when the distinction between them becomes blurred in the minds of the people facing this. The first of them arises from indecision and disagreement among people who are not actually organized enough or in agreement enough to be able to negotiate – yet. The second comes from much more organized people who are more interested in manipulating then in coming to genuine negotiated agreement. The distinction between these approaches can be difficult to see where both can engender anger and resentment. But for purposes of this line of discussion, let’s consider the possibilities of those points as being separate and distinct from each other and both in principle and in fact, and clearly so.

Let’s begin with the first of those points with its underlying disorganization and failure to bring matters into focus, and certainly into shared focus. And to take that out of the abstract, consider this scenario:

• You are helping to organize and lead negotiations over salary and compensation in general, and work conditions in general on behalf of the employees at a midsized privately owned business, and the owner of that business and their executive management team keep changing their demands and requirements and on everything. They cannot be nailed down as to what they might agree to. They cannot even come to agreement over where specifically to negotiate, and they have replaced their legal counsel several times recently, holding out promise of wanting to resolve these issues but never bringing what that means into anything like a clear focus. And at least some of what comes from them suggests a willingness on their part to cut the Gordian knot of this by at least selectively hiring and bringing in replacement staff, or at least supplemental new employees there. But none of that is being formally proposed or acknowledged.
• Which of the two good faith challenging questions, with their underlying bases, applies here? Is this all stemming from an inability of the people leading that business to make up their minds and come to agreement as to what they want, or is this the result of the mind set and approach inherent to the second of the above questions?
• Let me add one more detail to this scenario. This business is in real trouble. Its owner has been putting her own money into it, in an attempt to bring it through “a difficult period.” And she and her senior managers have been actively considering making significant changes in the business in order to make it more viable, long term. They have made every effort to hide their cash flow and other challenges and from their employees, their customers, and their suppliers and other supply chain partners, in hope of avoiding a loss of confidence from them that they fear could sink this business. But now they are being pushed into a position, from employee demands, to make specific changes that might or might not be sustainable, and at a time when they are still trying to navigate a path forward for the business itself, as a hopefully viable ongoing enterprise.

I would make two comments in response to this type of situation. The first is that it is definitely time for the owner of this business to take a deep breath and start telling her employees and others, the truth and in sufficient detail so that they can understand and appreciate the context that they seek to negotiate in. Pride, it is said, goeth before the fall (cribbing that from Proverbs 16:18-19 of the Bible.) Honest openness is needed here to cushion and lessen the damage from the landing there, or even prevent that fall.

And the second comment is that as this scenario shows, an appearance of a lack of good faith in negotiations and even in just starting them, need not necessarily mean that anyone is taking the malicious approach inherent to the second of those sets of defining questions.

• How can you as a negotiator facing this type of challenge, more effectively and quickly see where and how a question one scenario is shaping up to happen, or actively taking place with its positive resolvable possibilities?
• And how can this best be addressed to realize those possibilities?
• These questions apply to both sides of the negotiations table when they apply at all.

I am going to continue this posting’s line of discussion in the next installment to this series. In anticipation of that, I will approach these three bullet points and their resolution at least in part in terms of Plan B approaches, where having such options can in fact be reassuring to both sides, that a resolution of the issues to be negotiated is possible. I will address that set of issues there, assuming that good faith negotiations can be possible. Then looking further forward, that will lead me to the alternative possibility as addressed in the second of my good faith/bad faith scenario questions. I will, of course, address Plan B resolution approaches there too.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, and also see its Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3. You can also find this and related postings at Social Networking and Business 3 and its Page 4 continuation. And also see that directory’s Page 1 and Page 2.

Dissent, disagreement, compromise and consensus 120 – the business context 69

This is my 120th installment to a series on negotiating in a professional context, starting with a focus on the employee-to-employee and employee-to-business side of that as found in more individual jobs and careers contexts. See Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 3 and its Page 4 continuation, postings 484 and following for Parts 1-51 for that side to this overall narrative. And in that context, I have also been discussing the business side of negotiating here. See that same directory Page 4, and its postings 535 and following for Parts 52-119.

I began explicitly focusing on communications and negotiating in a business in general in Part 93 after, and in follow-up to my offering a succession of discussions of more granular case in point scenario based examples. And as part of that, I have turned to and have been discussing this pair of more fundamental issues:

1. Working widely in and across a business, and networking up and down and across its table of organization in order to succeed there.
2. And the networking and communications and negotiating best practices that would be used there, as they can be fine tuned and used in the particular contexts of specific businesses.

To bring this initial orienting note up to date here, I have been focusing on the first of those two points up to here and I continue doing so in this posting as well. And as a key part of that, I have been successively discussing a set of four topics points that focus on the impact of emotion and of confrontation in negotiations, as initially offered as a set in Part 117. I have addressed the first three of them up to here, and that has brought me to this fourth and final entry in that list, which I repeat here as:

• Crucially importantly to all of this, and underlying all of the above three points, this means entering into effective ongoing communications between what are at-least potentially adversarial sides where initial and early trust between them cannot be assumed as a given. Addressing this means more fully considering what adversarial even means, and certainly when considered more deeply than stereotypically.

In a fundamental sense, every negotiation process faces challenges that at least potentially fit that pattern – and certainly if talks break down in them. People negotiate to resolve disagreements and differences of opinion and of fact and in order to reconcile their collective meeting of needs and with what priorities. If everyone simply agreed up front and openly so, there would be no negotiations there, or any need for them. And this brings me to the crucially important second sentence of that point, and what the key terms adversary and adversarial even mean and certainly when they are addressed stripped of emotion with its biases and its more often unstated assumptions. My goal for this posting is to at least begin to address that complex issue. And I begin doing so by pointing to one of the most important and useful tools that you can bring to any negotiations table:

• Assume that others who you would negotiate with, and on both sides of the table, are willing to decide and act in good faith.
• But remain open to and aware of the possibility that this assumption can break down or simply be proven to have been wrong, and crucially importantly here, on either or both sides of the negotiations table – and from among your own ostensible allies there too.

Using this tool means making use of that awareness, using its initial assumption for the leverage that it can provide from how it can help to present you as being fair and willing to listen, and to come to good faith agreement. Importantly, the first half of that does not mean you’re being naïve. It simply means that you do not approach others, and even when you start out disagreeing with them, with a chip on your shoulder. It means you’re approaching them from a position of being willing to listen to and respect them and work with them. And if you can convey that effectively and convincingly and if you act accordingly, you have taken a big step towards achieving at least a significant part of your negotiable goals there. If you can convey that message you can avoid being seen, and simplistically so, as just an adversary and with all of the emotional and related baggage that that term can carry with it.

• Now, given that, what do adversary and adversarial mean here? They can mean different than but not enemy, and certainly unless and until proven otherwise.
• Good negotiations are designed to achieve that understanding of the people to be negotiated with, and in spite of personality differences and other barriers that might separate you from them.
• And working with them in a negotiations process means moving that different towards similar, and that similar towards agreed-to same, and certainly on high priority issues and in addressing high priority goals.

This posting’s narrative up to here assumes that those who you would negotiate with and on both sides of the table are willing to act in good faith if they see others there are doing so. What if that does not hold true? I am going to turn to and address that side to adversary and adversarial in the next installment to this series.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, and also see its Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3. You can also find this and related postings at Social Networking and Business 3 and its Page 4 continuation. And also see that directory’s Page 1 and Page 2.

Dissent, disagreement, compromise and consensus 119 – the business context 68

This is my 119th installment to a series on negotiating in a professional context, starting with a focus on the employee-to-employee and employee-to-business side of that as found in more individual jobs and careers contexts. See Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 3 and its Page 4 continuation, postings 484 and following for Parts 1-51 for that side to this overall narrative. And in that context, I have also been discussing the business side of negotiating here. See that same directory Page 4, and its postings 535 and following for Parts 52-118.

I began explicitly focusing on communications and negotiating in a business in general in Part 93 after, and in follow-up to my offering a succession of discussions of more granular case in point scenario based examples. And as part of that, I have turned to and have been discussing this set of more fundamental issues:

1. Working widely in and across a business, and networking up and down and across its table of organization in order to succeed there.
2. And the networking and communications and negotiating best practices that would be used there, as they can be fine tuned and used in the particular contexts of specific businesses.

To bring this initial orienting note up to date here, I have been focusing on the first of those two points up to here and I continue doing so in this posting as well. And I concluded Part 117 by offering these now-bullet point organized (and here-expanded upon) to-address next issues as a part of that still ongoing narrative:

• Timing in planning for and scheduling negotiations on issues that could become hot points of contention is a vitally important here. The issues and circumstances discussed in the past two installments primarily become emotionally charged and challenging in the way that I have discussed because addressing them and equitably so has been delayed and delayed until frustrations over them have reached a boiling point. Delays and an appearance of stonewalling negotiations can simply serve to give fuel to the buildup of resentments that the emotional contexts I have been writing of here, grow from.
• At the same time, it can be easy to try to set negotiations aside and simply hope that a need for them will somehow disappear on its own. Negotiations can bring uncertainty with them for what might come of them, and even fear of loss of control.
• Coming to agreement to negotiate, and scheduling that before crisis level tensions can force the issue: balancing the seeming imperatives of the above two points is an important first negotiating step in all of this, in and of itself.
• And crucially importantly to all of this, and underlying all of the above three points, this means entering into effective ongoing communications between what are at-least potentially adversarial sides where initial and early trust between them cannot be assumed as a given. Addressing this means more fully considering what adversarial even means, and certainly when considered more deeply than stereotypically.

I have offered an at-least initial response to the first of these points in Part 118 and I began addressing the second of them there too. My goal moving forward here is to complete an initial response to that point and its issues and to continue on from there to address the third and fourth of them as well.

Can a need for negotiations simply disappear and go away on its own? Yes, obviously. But any such “resolution” is going to take form and take place outside of anyone’s control, or even influence. And such “default” outcomes rarely benefit anyone. So I am writing here in this posting progression, of empowerment. Emotion as a guiding voice cannot serve to empower where reason is needed, as is the case in any negotiations context. And simply pulling back and waiting for problems to resolve themselves on their own is not empowering either.

I drafted the above repeated third point of my list, in terms of how angry confrontation adds barriers to any real success in negotiating. But withdrawal and a sense of futility and resignation that can drive it, can create what amount to the same types of barriers there too.

Books on negotiating best practices often call for achieving emotional detachment and I have espoused that approach too, and when helping with negotiations – and not just when writing about them. That means setting aside anger and resentment and related emotions. But I add here, that means setting aside despair that anything good can be achieved, as that can arise for example, in the minds of people who face real power inequalities when facing others across a negotiations table. That can create all but insurmountable barriers to any possible negotiated success too.

• So I modify what I have said about the role of emotions in all of this. Cultivate and seek to maintain a sense of hope.

And with that, I am going to turn to the fourth and last of my above-repeated topics points, and the matter of what adversary and adversarial even mean here, in the next installment to this series. Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, and also see its Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3. You can also find this and related postings at Social Networking and Business 3 and its Page 4 continuation. And also see that directory’s Page 1 and Page 2.

Dissent, disagreement, compromise and consensus 118 – the business context 67

This is my 118th installment to a series on negotiating in a professional context, starting with a focus on the employee-to-employee and employee-to-business side of that as found in more individual jobs and careers contexts. See Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 3 and its Page 4 continuation, postings 484 and following for Parts 1-51 for that side to this overall narrative. And in that context, I have also been discussing the business side of negotiating here. See that same directory Page 4, and its postings 535 and following for Parts 52-117.

I began explicitly focusing on communications and negotiating in a business in general in Part 93 after, and in follow-up to my offering a succession of discussions of more granular case in point scenario based examples. And as part of that, I have turned to and have been discussing this set of more fundamental issues:

1. Working widely in and across a business, and networking up and down and across its table of organization in order to succeed there.
2. And the networking and communications and negotiating best practices that would be used there, as they can be fine tuned and used in the particular contexts of specific businesses.

To bring this initial orienting note up to date here, I have more recently been focusing on the second of those topics points. I focused in Part 116 and Part 117 on negotiating in highly emotionally stressed settings. And I concluded Part 117 by offering these now-bullet point organized (and here-expanded upon) to-address next issues:

• Timing in planning for and scheduling negotiations on issues that could become hot points of contention is a vitally important here. The issues and circumstances discussed in the past two installments primarily become emotionally charged and challenging in the way that I have discussed because addressing them and equitably so has been delayed and delayed until frustrations over them have reached a boiling point. Delays and an appearance of stonewalling negotiations can simply serve to give fuel to the buildup of resentments that the emotional contexts I have been writing of here, grow from.
• At the same time, it can be easy to try to set negotiations aside and simply hope that a need for them will somehow disappear on its own. Negotiations can bring uncertainty with them for what might come of them, and even fear of loss of control.
• Coming to agreement to negotiate, and scheduling that before crisis level tensions can force the issue: balancing the seeming imperatives of the above two points is an important first negotiating step in all of this, in and of itself.
• And crucially importantly to all of this, and underlying all of the above three points, this means entering into effective ongoing communications between what are at-least potentially adversarial sides where initial and early trust between them cannot be assumed as a given. Addressing this means more fully considering what adversarial even means, and certainly when considered more deeply than stereotypically.

My goal for this installment is to at least begin to discuss the first two of those bullet pointed issues. And I begin addressing them by pointing out the obvious. Competing sides tend to hold off negotiating until circumstances compel them to do so, or until they can gain what they see as advantage to do so where that can become possible. That second possibility acknowledged, negotiations are still rarely proactive, or at least entirely so. So this is all about timing in addressing issues and consequences that are already being faced, and that might be faced moving forward unless agreed to change can be arrived at and entered into.

And this is all about the issues faced too, where the explicit details to be negotiated and overtly so comprise only part of that. The fuller range of issues there includes ones that can perhaps best be expressed in question form. What, for example, if I and the people who I am actively working with on my side of the negotiations table arrive as what we see as a best possible agreement for the people who we represent, but that is turned down, setting all of this back to square one if not further back than that? What if we do reach agreement but it turns out that our side has achieved less and even a lot less than we expected, from how the terms of our negotiated agreement were framed and from the impact of subsequent developments –and even from ones that might have already taking form but that we did not fully see?

Are those two questions even realistic as sources of concern? That, in this specific context does not even matter. My point in offering them is that an issue that is always on the negotiating table and on both sides is the unknown, and both for the content of what might actually need to be negotiated and for consequences and potential fallout there.

And I have not even mentioned power asymmetries in this up to here. They can lead to delays in negotiating as well, adding to the stress and discontent that can build up until negotiations become compellingly necessary – and usually from pushback actions taken by the less empowered side there.

I am going to continue to address the second of those topics points in the next installment to this series, but from the perspective of challenging its premise and finding ways to be more proactive here. Then after completing that line of discussion, I am going to turn to and address the third and fourth points of the above topics list.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, and also see its Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3. You can also find this and related postings at Social Networking and Business 3 and its Page 4 continuation. And also see that directory’s Page 1 and Page 2.

Hands-off management, micromanagement and in-between – some thoughts on what they mean in practice 20

This is my 20th posting to an occasional series on better management practices to address the issues of how and when to actively step in, and how and when to step back as a manager and supervisor. And for earlier installments to this, see Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 4, with this series included in its Addendum Section.

I have been discussing the consequences that can and do arise from two distinctive approaches to management, that we all come to see in the course of our work lives:

• Positive and supportive, and with the supervisors involved actively seeking to provide the support and resources needed to get required work done, and
• What can best be considered adversarial supervisors who simply make demands and apply pressure to perform, taking a sink or swim approach to the people who would do that work.

Up to here, I have focused essentially entirely on the beneficial consequences of more supportive management and the detrimental side of its adversarial counterpart, and particularly where that means facilitating and supporting employees and teams of them or not, where they would need help from higher up on the table of organization. Facilitating access to in-demand but limited supply bottleneck resources is an example of where this becomes important, on the positive side. And I have also touched on how others in a business respond to managers who take a more extreme managerial style position towards the unsupportive and dismissive end there, of what is in fact a supportive to adversarial management style spectrum here. Then, at the end of Part 19 I raised the issues of exceptions to this de facto supportive is good and adversarial is bad approach to thinking about this type of management spectrum, and how people fit along it according to their more routine patterns of decisions and behaviors. And that led me to these points of concern:

• We all grow and develop from facing and working our way through problems and challenges that we confront. If a manager in effect takes care of everything, all of the time in smoothing the way for the members of the team that reports to them, how and when will they get to develop the skills needed to manage any of this on their own? In other words, can a manager be too positive and supportive for anyone’s good, and certainly for those who report to them?
• And alternatively are there more positive and even long-term beneficial consequences from working for an adversarially difficult boss?

This addresses management style impact and its consequences. But even when adversarial here can have a golden lining, long term, most senior managers evaluate and performance score more junior managers who report to them on a more here-and-now basis. Looking forward in this overall discussion, I will address the issues of managers who tend towards the adversarial extreme there, but who are simply being kept on and regardless of what does and does not happen as a result of that. How can that approach become a stable norm, for at least parts of a business?

But setting that next discussion step aside for now, I begin here with the first of the two contrarian consequences bullet points just offered, and by noting that both in fact point to aspects of those management styles that do not usually come to mind for anyone facing them, and certainly routinely. And I begin that by posing two simple questions. How do employees who become managers and who pursue management styles that fit the positive and supportive end of this spectrum, learn how to be so effectively supportive? And why do they go to the extreme end of this spectrum for this, when they do in looking out for their teams?

There are no single valid answers to those questions, but to cite a context that is both realistic and that answers both – they learned how to reach out to find and secure the resources that they need (and with time that the teams they will lead, need), and they learned how to effectively network and build support systems that can enable this and themselves, from having worked for “sink or swim bastards” who gave them no alternatives to that if they were to succeed at all. And they vowed, and early on to never subject anyone who might report to them to the type of stressful abuse that they faced and daily from their early career adversarial anti-role model.

I have often said that we can learn our strongest and most enduring lessons, and our most insightful ones from the negative and problematical examples that we face and have to find ways to successfully work with, or past or through. Think of my just offered explanatory scenario for how a manager can come to be too supportive, as one of learning a partial lesson there, where they overlook the fact that the managerial torment that they faced when working as a hands-on employee, or perhaps as a low level manager, forced them to gain skills and experience that have held them in good stead, even if that was not an easy process.

Looked at from this perspective, mid-spectrum managers can be better for the people who report to them than end point extreme managers are and for either end of that management style spectrum.

With that, I am going to turn to the question of how adversarial end of the spectrum managers can be kept on and even advanced to positions of greater power and responsibility in businesses. I will simply state here in anticipation of that line of discussion that that is complicated, but it raises important organizational questions. And I will turn to and address this in the next installment to this series.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, with this put into its addendum section (and also see its Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3.) And you can also find this at Social Networking and Business 3 and its Page 4 continuation (and also see its Page 1 and Page 2), and at HR and Personnel – 2 (and see its Page 1.)

Dissent, disagreement, compromise and consensus 117 – the business context 66

This is my 117th installment to a series on negotiating in a professional context, starting with a focus on the employee-to-employee and employee-to-business side of that as found in more individual jobs and careers contexts. See Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 3 and its Page 4 continuation, postings 484 and following for Parts 1-51 for that side to this overall narrative. And in that context, I have also been discussing the business side of negotiating here. See that same directory Page 4, and its postings 535 and following for Parts 52-116.

Note: Most of the time, negotiations are carried out without they’re bringing up strong emotional baggage. But that can and does happen so I am offering this series installment with that type of possibility in mind.

That said, I began explicitly focusing on communications and negotiating in a business in general in Part 93 after, and in follow-up to my offering a succession of discussions of more granular case in point scenario based examples. And as part of that, I have turned to and have been discussing this set of more fundamental issues:

1. Working widely in and across a business, and networking up and down and across its table of organization in order to succeed there.
2. And the networking and communications and negotiating best practices that would be used there, as they can be fine tuned and used in the particular contexts of specific businesses.

To bring this initial orienting note up to date here as I continue this narrative, I began addressing the issues laid out in the following to-address list in Part 116:

• This means finding and implementing ways to deal with potential emotional barriers, away from the negotiating table itself and through side conversations and related means.
• It means finding ways to redirect or stop emotional outbursts when they do arise during direct negotiations, so as to limit the damage they can bring and without taking sides.
• This is a situation where it can be necessary to in effect put now-derailed negotiations on pause and with a goal of getting them back on-track again, as an essential immediate remediative step. And this is where you need to reach across the table to find someone who is listened to there who can and will help you to achieve this.

I offered an at-least initial response to the first of those points in Part 116. My goal here is to continue from there, addressing the second and third of them. And I begin doing so by acknowledging the obvious. This second point, to focus on that, represents what can easily become a disaster scenario.

It can be taken essentially for granted, that people are not going to show strident emotional outbursts at a meeting as if in a vacuum. This only really happens when emotions are running high essentially all around, and when the issues under contention are flash points of difference and at least between some of those on both sides of the negotiating table. So an outburst of this type from one participant there can easily set off reactive outbursts from others as well. At its worst, I have seen this bring a meeting to a chaotic close and in a way that has called for calming separate meetings with individual participants, away from that table in order to even restart overall discussions.

If others do not just pile on with their own emotional freight in this, and if there is at least someone on the other side of that table who can help step in to calm matters down, then it might be possible to simply call for a brief break, meet with the participants who are upset and move on. But this is a circumstance where it is essential to have a Plan B ready and with the calming and reassuring side meetings cited above, added in as a preparatory part of that. And with this I note that I have, of necessity been addressing the third of those points as well here. Point 2 raises the challenge and Point 3 is oriented towards helping to bring it under control. Note: I did not say resolve it there, as any real resolution for this type of challenge is only going to come from resolving the core hot point issues that are being negotiated there in the first place – to the extent that this can be accomplished.

People bring their personal and interpersonal histories with them and to all that they do: negotiations included. This is true for the contexts that everyone at these negotiations brings with them. This is true for what they will bring with them moving beyond these negotiations too and certainly if the trust building efforts of these sessions cannot help to reduce longer term disagreements, misunderstandings and animosities.

I end this posting on that note and by pointing out a truism. Negotiations are not about bringing people on opposing sides of a table together so they can become friends – even if they can leave these encounters feeling more respect for those they have been opposing. Negotiations are about bringing people together so that they can find ways to work together better, and to accommodate each other on what were points of contention, that have now hopefully been resolved at least in their currently addressed specifics.

I am going to step back from the stress test challenges of highly emotionally charged negotiations as I have been discussing them here, in the next installment to this series. And my goal there will be to discuss the issues of timing and of moving towards and entering into negotiations before anything like the challenges addressed here can arise. And yes, the issues and challenges discussed here and in recent installments, have in large part been about negotiations way too long postponed, giving fuel to the buildup of resentments that the emotional contexts I have been writing of here, grow from.

Timely negotiations and effective ongoing communications between at-least potentially adversarial sides, can prevent the issues that I have recently been addressing here from arising to a crisis point. I will turn to and discuss this set of issues starting in the next installment to this series.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, and also see its Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3. You can also find this and related postings at Social Networking and Business 3 and its Page 4 continuation. And also see that directory’s Page 1 and Page 2.

Dissent, disagreement, compromise and consensus 116 – the business context 65

This is my 116th installment to a series on negotiating in a professional context, starting with a focus on the employee-to-employee and employee-to-business side of that as found in more individual jobs and careers contexts. See Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 3 and its Page 4 continuation, postings 484 and following for Parts 1-51 for that side to this overall narrative. And in that context, I have also been discussing the business side of negotiating here. See that same directory Page 4, and its postings 535 and following for Parts 52-115.

Note: Most of the time, negotiations are carried out without they’re bringing up strong emotional baggage. But that can and does happen so I am offering this series installment with that type of possibility in mind.

That said, I began explicitly focusing on communications and negotiating in a business in general in Part 93 after, and in follow-up to my offering a succession of discussions of more granular case in point scenario based examples. And as part of that, I have turned to and have been discussing this set of more fundamental issues:

1. Working widely in and across a business, and networking up and down and across its table of organization in order to succeed there.
2. And the networking and communications and negotiating best practices that would be used there, as they can be fine tuned and used in the particular contexts of specific businesses.

To bring this initial orienting note up to date here as I continue this narrative, I began discussing negotiations and the negotiating process as they take place in the context of strongly held and expressed emotions in Part 115, as a continuation of an above Point 2 framed discussion here. I raised a particularly troubling and disruptive real world example there, for how it ended that negotiations session and I add here, for how it threatened ending those negotiations entirely. But I primarily addressed these issues from a more general and even abstract approach where I focused on learning from the emotions in play and their causes, and on both sides of the negotiations table as a source of insight that can be built from.

My goal here is to at least begin to take that out of the abstract by addressing some of the particular issues and possibilities that enter into that, in real world contexts. And this brings me to the to-address note that I offered at the end of Part 115, which I repeat here as an at-least rough outline of what is to follow, which I edit and reorganize in bullet pointed list form here as.

• This means finding and implementing ways to deal with potential emotional barriers, away from the negotiating table itself and through side conversations and related means.
• It means finding ways to redirect or stop emotional outbursts when they do arise during direct negotiations, so as to limit the damage they can bring and without taking sides.
• This is a situation where it can be necessary to in effect put now-derailed negotiations on pause and with a goal of getting them back on-track again, as an essential immediate remediative step. And this is where you need to reach across the table to find someone who is listened to there who can and will help you to achieve this.

I begin this overall line of discussion with the first of those points, and by repeating the plaintive angry, anguished rhetorical question that I cited in Part 115 for how a deeply involved and committed member on the other side of a negotiating table asked it, and with strident insistence: “what do you want me to do, kill my children?”

That type of outburst would be enough to end any negotiating session and immediately so; it did there and it was very difficult to restart that process with that question in the air. Look for signs that such conversation ending emotions and their outbursts might be likely. And be ready to call for a break in that negotiations session: a time out that can start before that type of outburst can actually erupt out, if possible. Call for an opportunity for both sides to discuss among themselves, what has already been raised. And say that you need a break now, putting any onus there on yourself if need be. Then try to calm things down if this is developing on your side of the table. And reach across to whoever you see as being calm and effective as a communicator and as a negotiator on the other side of the table if need be, as an informal aside conversation. And couch this in terms of you’re trying to work collaboratively with them to help everyone achieve as much of their goals there as possible and as amicably and smoothly as possible.

A goal there is to take any potentially disruptive emotional outbursts away from the table so their negative impact can be minimized and so ways can more easily be found to move past them. That said, this is not always going to be possible. And that brings me to the second bullet pointed to-address issues that I raised above, and the issues of dealing with acrimonious and potentially show stopping outbursts when they happen at a negotiations session anyway. I am going to turn to and discuss that in the next installment to this series.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, and also see its Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3. You can also find this and related postings at Social Networking and Business 3 and its Page 4 continuation. And also see that directory’s Page 1 and Page 2.

Dissent, disagreement, compromise and consensus 115 – the business context 64

This is my 115th installment to a series on negotiating in a professional context, starting with a focus on the employee-to-employee and employee-to-business side of that as found in more individual jobs and careers contexts. See Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 3 and its Page 4 continuation, postings 484 and following for Parts 1-51 for that side to this overall narrative. And in that context, I have also been discussing the business side of negotiating here. See that same directory Page 4, and its postings 535 and following for Parts 52-114.

Note: Most of the time, negotiations are carried out without they’re bringing up strong emotional baggage. But that can and does happen so I am offering this series installment with that type of possibility in mind.

That said, I began explicitly focusing on communications and negotiating in a business in general in Part 93 after, and in follow-up to my offering a succession of discussions of more granular case in point scenario based examples. And as part of that, I have turned to and have been discussing this set of more fundamental issues:

1. Working widely in and across a business, and networking up and down and across its table of organization in order to succeed there.
2. And the networking and communications and negotiating best practices that would be used there, as they can be fine tuned and used in the particular contexts of specific businesses.

To bring this initial orienting note up to date here as I continue this narrative, I began addressing the second of those points in Part 111. I have focused on negotiating best practices in that overall context so far, and I will continue to do so here and with a goal of discussing networking and communications per se, in the negotiating context that I am developing here. I focused on goals and priorities and on distinguishing between specific issues and endpoint goals in Part 114. And I said that I would turn to and address the issues of emotion as that arises and plays out in all of this. And I begin doing so by openly acknowledging that at least some of what I will offer here would qualify as rank heresy according to most business negotiating books that are out there on the market. And I begin clarifying that claim here by noting that:

• Most books on negotiating advise you and strongly so to simply step back from emotion and to dampen it down and set it aside. That way you can negotiate on the actual issues and with a clear(er) and hopefully more objective head.
• Yes, ultimately you have to do that and you have to be able to do that. But use the emotion that you might feel here, and that others on your side of the table might be facing as a tool: as a source of real insight before you seek to quash it. And look to and learn from the emotional components of what those on the other side of the negotiating table are showing you, and use that as a perhaps invaluable source of insight too.

What are emotions, and strongly held and expressed emotions in particular in this context? They are road signs that point to the fact that there are very important issues that have to be addressed and effectively so, but that have not been put on the table … yet, and certainly with any clarity. And at least as importantly, they arise where unresolved but here-pertinent past history is coming back to haunt current negotiating efforts.

• We cannot change our pasts, our histories. But we can, perhaps find a way to face them and their then-unresolved issues and in ways that can lead to positive paths forward in our here and now, that can do better.

Emotions and certainly strongly antagonistic ones, can and do keep the issues that have to be resolved out of focus, as past is selectively remembered, and as our present is not fully looked at from this, and for how all of this blurs together. See the emotion that arises here, and emotion that would create barriers to our negotiating successfully in particular, as sign posts pointing to those gaps in understanding and in possible shared understanding. Acknowledge that emotions are acceptable: that we all feel them and that we have a right to, and that they can be grounded in genuinely important issues that at the very least need to be acknowledged – even if the past that has led to them cannot be changed for them. And couch this in terms of those on your side of the negotiating table wanting to make a genuine effort to do better now.

• This, of course calls for you addressing all of this from a more emotionally detached position yourself, so you do not get caught up in the miscommunications and the misunderstandings embedded in the emotion-driven reactions and responses that have to be dealt with here, that might be taking place seemingly all around you .

I have been approaching all of this here from a higher level, largely abstract perspective, though I have been writing it with a very specific, very real negotiations failure in mind that I once became caught up in. (One of the people representing one side to this debacle: an attorney who was personally involved there literally said, and with real anger and anguish in her voice “what do you want me to do, kill my children?” That, needless to say, effectively ended that negotiating session.)

With that real world impetus for my addressing these issues in mind, my goal in this posting has been to build a foundation for taking what might be considered a contrarian approach to actually facing, understanding and working with emotion in negotiating contexts, and particularly where highly impactful issues are at stake, and in ways that can bring strong emotions into those negotiations.

I am going to continue this line of discussion in the next installment to this series, and with a goal of at least briefly touching on some of the implementation details of this. And in anticipation of that discussion to come, it will mean finding and implementing ways to deal with potential emotional barriers, away from the negotiating table itself and through side conversations and related means. And it will mean finding ways to redirect or stop emotional outbursts when they do arise during direct negotiations, so as to limit the damage they can bring and without taking sides. (Yes, this is a situation where it is necessary to in effect put now-derailed negotiations on pause and with a goal of getting them back on-track again, as an essential immediate remediative step. And this is where you need to reach across the table to find someone who is listened to there who can and will help you to achieve this. I will delve into issues of this type in the next installment here.)

Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, and also see its Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3. You can also find this and related postings at Social Networking and Business 3 and its Page 4 continuation. And also see that directory’s Page 1 and Page 2.

Hands-off management, micromanagement and in-between – some thoughts on what they mean in practice 19

This is my 19th posting to an occasional series on better management practices to address the issues of how and when to actively step in, and how and when to step back as a manager and supervisor. And for earlier installments to this, see Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development – 4, with this series included in its Addendum Section.

I have been discussing the consequences that can and do arise from two distinctive approaches to management, that we all come to see in the course of our work lives:

• Positive and supportive, and with the supervisors involved actively seeking to provide the support and resources needed to get required work done, and
• What can best be considered adversarial supervisors who simply make demands and apply pressure to perform, taking a sink or swim approach to the people who would do that work.

And I have presented and discussed these approaches as representing what amount to end points on a management style spectrum. Then in Part 17, I added an organizational approach spectrum that runs from open to closed. I focused there on lines of authority and on how they can be open, or compartmentalized and closed. But certainly at the extreme ends of that spectrum, open and closed also correlate with the sharing of information: of business intelligence, and of other resources as well, and with that definitely including the accessibility or lack thereof of limited supply bottleneck resources.

I began coordinately discussing these two spectrums of decision and action, and of organizational oversight, opportunity and access in Part 18. And in that context as briefly sketched out there, I noted in passing that while supportive and adversarial manages can get essentially the same work performance results when all is proceeding normally and when there are no resource access problems, differences can arise when combinations of these challenges do.

I said that “positive and supportive supervisors, and their adversarial counterparts might face different results as far as popularity contest and similar considerations are concerned.” But I said that baring specific challenges, they should at least usually reach their goals with comparable success. And I begin the main line of discussion for this posting by explicitly noting a key word from the immediately preceding sentence here: should.

Difficult managers: people who are challenging and unpleasant to work with and who others come to distrust for what they will do next and how, can in effect make the organizations that they work in more closed at least for themselves. This means less willingness on the part of others outside of their direct supervision to accept authoritative decisions reached by such managers and certainly without confirmation. And going beyond that, this means less willingness to go out of the way to help or to offer resources to them, and certainly proactively and voluntarily. And with time this is certain to lead to at-least cumulative low level reductions in their managerial and team performance. And if such a manager’s own supervisors and higher-ups on the table of organization are observant and if they care, such managers can only blame their problems on their subordinates and others so many times, before those around them start to look at them too for this.

This all comes to a head where the disruptively novel has to be managed and resolved and particularly where doing so would hold high priority. Positive and supportive managers who build bridges and both with their own team members and with other stakeholders and potential stakeholders around them, build supportive networks from that, that when needed give them more flexibility in how results there would be judged. This can mean more flexibility in being supported in making Plan B changes if unexpected challenges arise in handing such tasks.

Yes, adversarial managers, and even ones with difficult personalities and poor communications styles can succeed – under favorable circumstances. But their approaches can be brittle and subject to breakage too.

I have been writing here of general principles and of generally observed patterns of ongoing performance results. Are there exceptions to this as presented here? Yes. And I am going to turn to and address some of them starting in the next installment to this series. And in anticipation of that, and in challenge of what might be construed from what I have been offering here, I offer this thought for further consideration:

• We all grow and develop from facing and working our way through problems and challenges that we confront. If a manager in effect takes care of everything, all of the time in smoothing the way for the members of the team that reports to them, how and when will they get to develop the skills needed to manage any of this on their own? In other words, can a manager be too positive and supportive for anyone’s good, and certainly for those who report to them?

And looking forward, I will also address the issues of managers who tend towards the opposite extreme there, simply being kept on and regardless of what does and does not happen.

Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, with this put into its addendum section (and also see its Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3.) And you can also find this at Social Networking and Business 3 and its Page 4 continuation (and also see its Page 1 and Page 2), and at HR and Personnel – 2 (and see its Page 1.)