The Thinking Behind The Tweet

Perfectionists and micro-managers illustrate interesting facets of the interplay between willpower and energy.

Perfectionists illustrate how misguided willpower has brought about the development of a bad habit that is impervious to willpower.

Micro-managers illustrate the same thing, with external focus.

Knowing it will require energy to break these bad habits, people need to take time outs to rejuvenate before attempting to reduce/remove these bad habits. 

Probably, most people should not work for powerful people. When I use the words powerful people, I mean people who:

• hold positions of power over us, 
• are driven to meet their goals [not ours], and 
• put lots of pressure on us as we try to do work for them.

In his book, 'Influencing Powerful People', Dirk Schlimm provides 16 major strategies and dozens of suggestions on how we can improve our ability to work with powerful people. 

He also advises, “Deciding not to work for or with a powerful person is not a sign of weakness but of wisdom.” 

That piece of advice triggered a memory - I once heard an educational guru speak words like, "People can behave in offensive ways, however, you do not have to be offended." The point was, some people behave in ways that others consider offensive. That's a choice they make. You have the ability to either be offended or not be offended by their behaviour. That's a choice you make.

I get that message and acknowledge it is accurate thinking and good advice. Here's an article I wrote on this topic a few years ago. 

While the advice is good, often, in real-life situations people cannot control their emotions and as a result they become offended when others behave offensively. Most people become offended when their powerful bosses behave offensively. The state of our emotions and our skills at self-control determine the outcome.

So, if we find ourselves getting anxious and stressed out because our bosses behave in ways that trigger our fears and bad emotional responses, we should remember Dirk's advice. 

“Deciding not to work for or with a powerful person is not a sign of weakness but of wisdom.” 

We can choose to not work for that boss.

This gives us at least 3 options:

1. Choose to learn Dirk's strategies and tactics for changing how we behave so we do better when dealing with powerful people.
2. Choose to follow Dirk's advice as captured in the above quote and stop working for the powerful boss.
3. Choose to carry on as is and continue to have miserable work experiences.

Clearly, that last option is the poorest of the 3.

Are you better off following prescribed step-by-step conflict resolution processes designed by 'the experts' or drawing on your innate talents to resolve conflicts? Perhaps, for some people, there is merit in using someone else's detailed approach. However, how often have you seen that work in real life situations?

We should draw on our innate talents to resolve conflicts.

I have never seen canned processes for conflict resolution work in real life situation. We cannot be someone else so what would cause us to think we could use someone else's approach to conflict resolution? To the extent we find ourselves in situations of conflict we know we are at least partially responsible for our predicament [if not fully responsible]. We didn't follow someone else's steps when we walked our way into the conflict situation...so, we should not expect to be able to follow someone else's logical steps to find our way out of the conflict situation.

Often, we find ourselves in situations of conflict because:

1. we lack self-confidence and, as a result of that, we behave either too timidly or too aggressively and

2. we are too lazy to figure out how to avoid conflict or nip conflict in the bud when we know it has commenced.

We are too tolerant of conflict.

Some people even promote conflict in the workplace because they view it as a good, healthy, and productive way to communicate, make decisions, and delegate tasks.

That's interesting in many negative directions!

The results conflict promoters achieve at their businesses prove it is a high-risk-low-reward strategy. If that strategy ever worked it certainly has fallen out of vogue in recent decades. For example, under our Bill 168, we want people to feel secure at work. I expect Abraham Maslow would have supported this approach.

The reality is, some people – mostly people lacking self-confidence - either enjoy conflict with others or see it as a necessary component of work [and possibly life]. What can we expect from these die-hard conflict consumers and conflict distributors? Certainly, we cannot expect them to buy into following someone else's prescribed steps for conflict resolution. These people cannot follow such steps because they lack the innate talents required to avoid or resolve conflict.

And, if people possess the innate talents required to resolve conflicts then they can and should find their own natural ways to avoid and resolve conflict.

Either way, there is no need for experts to prescribe conflict resolution processes. These prescribed processes do not work because people either cannot follow them or do not need to follow them.

People need to understand themselves, work continuously at building and maintaining their self-confidence levels, educate themselves about innate talents and interpersonal interactions, and exercise self-control. These are the routes that lead to conflict avoidance and conflict resolution.