Getting To Agreement

We all theoretically recognize that everyone has the right to their own beliefs. But in situations where we have great passion (or the moral high ground, as we would like to believe) we have difficulty being generous with those who disagree with us. Wouldn’t it be nice to persuade others to see the world as we see it? What’s causing the disparity between ideas, goals and convictions?

Beliefs

People’s viewpoints, values, and world view come from their core beliefs, acquired through the experiences of our lives: from parents and education; religion and what we do for a living; what our parents taught us (implicitly and explicitly) and what we learned from friends. The conglomeration of these experiences create our political views, who we marry, how we raise our children, how we view the world, how we behave in relationships and where we live. I remember in 2000 I called my then-28-year-old son – living in the swing state of Colorado – on election day. I casually asked him what he was doing that day. He replied:

“You wouldn’t be calling me to ask who I’m voting for, would you?”

“Um, well, maybe.”

“Mom: You dragged me to rallies and marches, made me hold signs and go to sit-ins, and had activists over for dinner who became our friends. How could I vote differently than you?”

Our beliefs become the foundation of how we decide/act/live/socialize daily, making it so endemic that it’s hard to fathom that anyone would think differently. As a result of our orientation, anything said outside our beliefs gets runs the risk of being disrespected, disregarded, and discounted, and we often disenfranchise those who don’t believe or act as we do. Those of us who have strong beliefs about the environment, for example, may become angry when others don’t believe we are harming the earth. But if it were so obvious to everyone, if everyone shared the same beliefs, we would all be in agreement.

And so we attempt to persuade those who haven’t yet ‘seen the light’ to agree with us. But getting into agreement with folks whose ideas run counter to our beliefs is difficult: regardless of how rational our argument or the source of data we share, we are heard through biased ears.

Hearing Agreement

It’s possible that by pushing our own agendas and not focusing on what might be common values and consensus, we are perpetuating harm and causing others to defend their beliefs. Isn’t there a middle road to agreement?

Change needs consensus: win-win is key (we know there is no such thing as win/lose). To enable change and facilitate agreement, we must discover common beliefs. NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) does this by ‘chunking up’ – looking at a broader view beyond biases to more generic beliefs. So instead of focusing on Global Warming, for instance, a chunk up might be discussing ways to diminish natural disasters so less people will be harmed.

A key elements to facilitating agreement is hearing without bias. I’ve just published a book called What? Did you really say what I think I heard? that explains how difficult it is to effectively hear others without the filters, biases, assumptions, and triggers that maintain our world view.

What if we enter conversations listening for common values instead of the typical focus on differences? What if we live with Ands and not Buts? What if we listen for words or ideas that would enable working collaboratively, or finding win/wins? If all we change is how we can hear each other to enable agreement somewhere, we might just be able to discover places of agreement and help us all make the world a better place.

But listening without bias isn’t natural or easy. Hence I’ve made What? free to enable everyone to share the material and begin discussing how we can disengage from our listening biases and wend our way to agreement. Get the book on www.didihearyou.com. For a more robust solution, contact me at [email protected] and we can discuss how to use the learning tools I’ve developed to both assess and guide you and your colleagues through change and choice.


About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

To contact Sharon Drew at [email protected] or go to www.didihearyou.com to choose your favorite digital site to download your free book.

Corrective Action Program Best Practice 11 – Check for Duplicate Condition Reports

StrategyDriven Corrective Action Program ArticleLeaders valuing continuous performance improvement encourage employee engagement in the corrective action program as a primary input to organizational learning and growth. Combined with a low reporting threshold, these organizations process numerous condition reports every day, some of which will be duplicative when an adverse condition is observed and reported by more than one person.

Each condition report filed requires the expenditure of resources to investigate, prioritize, and resolve. Duplicative condition reports result in the expenditure of resources with no organizational value added. To ensure this does not occur, checks for duplicate condition reports should be performed as early in the process as possible and, when found, duplicate condition reports should be eliminated.


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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

There are lots of excuses for no success, but very few reasons

People who do not succeed have one distinguishing trait in common. They know all the reasons for failure, and have what they believe to be air-tight alibis to explain away their own lack of achievement.

Some of these alibis are clever, and a few of them are justifiable by the facts. But alibis cannot be used for money. The world wants to know only one thing – HAVE YOU ACHIEVED SUCCESS?

A character analyst compiled a list of the most commonly used alibis.

As you read the list, examine yourself carefully, and determine how many of these alibis, if any, are your own property. Remember, too, the philosophy presented in this book makes every one of these alibis obsolete.

  • IF I didn’t have a wife and family…
  • IF I had enough ‘pull’…
  • IF I had money…
  • IF I had a good education…
  • IF I could get a job…
  • IF I had good health…
  • IF I only had time…
  • IF times were better…
  • IF other people understood me…
  • IF conditions around me were only different…
  • IF I could live my life over again…
  • IF I did not fear what ‘THEY’ would say…
  • IF I had been given a chance…
  • IF I now had a chance…
  • IF other people didn’t ‘have it in for me’…
  • IF nothing happens to stop me…
  • IF I were only younger…
  • IF I could only do what I want…
  • IF I had been born rich…
  • IF I could meet ‘the right people’…
  • IF I had the talent that some people have…
  • IF I dared assert myself…
  • IF I only had embraced past opportunities…
  • IF people didn’t get on my nerves…
  • IF I didn’t have to keep house and look after the children…
  • IF I could save some money…
  • IF the boss only appreciated me…
  • IF I only had somebody to help me…
  • IF my family understood me…
  • IF I lived in a big city…
  • IF I could just get started…
  • IF I were only free…
  • IF I had the personality of some people…
  • IF I were not so fat…
  • IF my talents were known…
  • IF I could just get a ‘break’…
  • IF I could only get out of debt…
  • IF I hadn’t failed…
  • IF I only knew how…
  • IF everybody didn’t oppose me…
  • IF I didn’t have so many worries…
  • IF I could marry the right person…
  • IF people weren’t so dumb…
  • IF my family were not so extravagant…
  • IF I were sure of myself…
  • IF luck were not against me…
  • IF I had not been born under the wrong star…
  • IF it were not true that ‘what is to be will be’…
  • IF I did not have to work so hard…
  • IF I hadn’t lost my money…
  • IF I lived in a different neighborhood…
  • IF I didn’t have a ‘past’…
  • IF I only had a business of my own…
  • IF other people would only listen to me…

IF * * * and this is the greatest of them all * * * I had the courage to see myself as I really am, I would find out what is wrong with me, and correct it, then I might have a chance to profit by my mistakes and learn something from the experience of others.

For I know that there is something WRONG with me, or I would now be where I WOULD HAVE BEEN IF I had spent more time analyzing my weaknesses, and less time building alibis to cover them.

This piece was written in 1937 by Napoleon Hill in his immortal book, Think and Grow Rich. This could have been written yesterday and been almost as current. The word ‘alibi’ has been replaced by the word ‘excuse’ but the meanings remain the same.

What’s your excuse for not achieving more, and how can you turn that excuse into positive action? Just a thought.

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.


About the Author

Jeffrey GitomerJeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].

Leadership Inspirations – Reputation

StrategyDriven Inspirational QuoteEither a good or a bad reputation outruns and gets before people wherever they go.”

Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield
(1694 – 1773)
British statesman and man of letters

Corrective Action Program Best Practice 10 – Everyone Can Submit a Condition Report

StrategyDriven Corrective Action Program ArticleAdverse conditions and opportunities for improvement present themselves at unpredictable times and in unexpected places; possibly observed by only a few or one. Furthermore, an organization benefits most when its workforce contributes the full measure of its intellect and creativity. Thus, it is critically important that everyone, including contractors, be able to submit a condition report.


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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.