Articles
The Art of Difficult Conversations: A Short List of Best Practices
The following are best practices I have learned over the years working with organizational/congregational leadership as they prepare for difficult conversations.
The challenge is how to increase the opportunities for these anxiety-producing interactions to yield positive results or, at least, how to increase the possibilities for better outcomes.
A Case Study on Strengths, Engagement, and Culture: What are we learning?
The culture you create matters: it either facilitates and supports organizational success or undermines and inhibits it. What’s more, your culture profoundly affects your employee’s wellbeing, either positively or negatively, impacting your organization’s effectiveness.
Gallup’s strengths-based, engaged approach is a response to enhance the workplace culture and the health and wellbeing of those in it.
From Dissonance to Resonance in Congregational Culture: Insights and Questions to Consider
This article offers insights and questions discovered in walking with congregations from conflict or dissonance to resonance and becoming a more creative, adaptive, resilient community. To take a congregation on this journey, leadership skills, competencies, and techniques are vital; however, the leader’s way of being and self-awareness, or emotional intelligence, is paramount.
An attentive process of assessment is essential for growth and success in walking with congregations caught in anxiety, dissonance, and conflict.
Anxiety and Conflict in Organizational life – What are the Costs?
Conflict can be delicious to people in a perverse way. Some enjoy it. In one organization with whom I worked, an employee described the situation, “Our homeostasis has been to stay in conflict. We are like a boat that has been rocked by the storm for so long that the storm has become our norm. We seem to enjoy it. That is the only way we know to be together and function as an organization/community. We need some calm waters for a period of time.” For some, conflict creates pseudo-relationships with allies against others (unhealthy triangles); for others it creates excitement; and for others, conflict is the way that they learned to relate from their family of origin.
An interview with dr. W. Craig Gilliam on Finding Healing and Peace of Mind in a Politically polarized climate
By Joe Iovino, UMC.org
Politics in the United States are polarizing. Public discourse and our social media feeds are filled with strong opinions from professional and amateur pundits.
These feelings of division are not unique to U.S. politics, however. United Methodists around the world know the pain of conflict within their nations, our denomination, churches, families, friends, groups, and sometimes within ourselves.
Divisions persist, but the Bible teaches that God created us to live in community and that Jesus came to reconcile us to God and one another.
Conflict can be a good thing!
Have you ever thought that conflict could be good for organizations and teams and an indicator of their health and well-being?
The Power of Questions for Leaders and for Life
Asking open, honest questions is central to good leadership, consulting, facilitating, and coaching. In fact, questions are core to the human quest.
Good questions can invite insight and wisdom from groups and individuals and change entire cultures and work environments. Asking honest questions at the right time is both an art and a science.
Responses to Various Levels of Conflict for Families, Teams, Organizations and Congregations
Conflict and disruptions are neither good nor bad, but simply a part of life in workplaces, social spaces, congregations, and families. When people are together, honest, and engaged with one another and their interests and passions, they have disagreements.
Building a Container for Robust Conversations
Having a strong container is essential to have robust, generative conversations, whether in businesses, communities, congregations or other social contexts. I liken the container to an old alchemist’s flask.
Meeting and Mismeeting:
Facilitating transformational communities/
conversations
Meeting and mismeeting are not only about how we conduct ourselves, but first and foremost, our way of being, the way of our hearts/souls toward others and Self, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, others and God, which begin with our own inner work, our spiritual and soul practices.
A Half-Fast Walk through Martin Buber’s Thinking
This essay is an overview of some of those thoughts that I find rich with meaning and substance to digest as ministers.
Leading Through Anxious Times and Situations: More Than Meets the Eye
While there are no simple check-lists or “how-to” answers for leading through anxious times and situations in congregational life, this essay will strive to offer insights to help clergy preach and lead in anxious times and settings, and do it in a way that lessens stress, increases the possibility of positive movement for the community and heightens awareness.
Conflict Resolution: Is that what we really want?
The problem with “conflict resolution” is that it creates or reinforces the notion that conflict is bad, sinful and destructive and should not exist.
Reflections on Leadership: Becoming a Shaper of Context
This article presents some insights into influencing an organization’s emotional field that I have learned, often by trial and error, in my 25 years of experience. The following questions are at the heart of this article: How do we as leaders become shapers of context rather than living at the mercy of it? What insights help leaders make this shift?
Moving from an I-It to an I-Thou Way During Times of High Anxiety and Conflict
People may not hear what we are saying because of who we are when we say it. The inverse is also true: sometimes we have trouble hearing others because of who they are when they speak. In other words, how we view others is how we treat them.
Principles and Values for Conflict Transformation and building a Culture of Collaboration, Peace, and Justice
The following articles are from Gallup®
How Employees' Strengths Make Your Company Stronger
by Susan Sorenson
People who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged on the job.
That's just one big finding from decades of Gallup research into human behaviors and strengths. That research has established a compelling connection between strengths and employee engagement in the workplace -- a connection that has the power to accelerate performance when companies work on enhancing both simultaneously.
The Right Culture: Not Just About Employee Satisfaction
By JIM HARTER AND ANNAMARIE MANN
Creating a great workplace culture that has star employees who know how to win new customers isn't about making employees happy or content -- and organizations falter when they think it is.
It's true that enthusiastic and energetic employees feel better about their work and workplace. But engagement is not determined by an abstract feeling. Measuring workers' contentment or happiness levels, as well as catering to their wants, often fails to achieve the underlying goal of employee engagement: improved business outcomes.
