Unlocking a challenging situation…
Challenging people and situations are common place in business.
Most of the time it is not being able to see what is driving the person’s behaviour. We have different values to each other. The classic iceberg aptly shows how behaviour is seen and our attitudes, skills and values that make our personality are hidden until we choose to share.
My own personal iceberg would look as follows:
If one of my values is good manners my behaviour is altered by whether I receive good manners from others or not. Values are hard wired and are put in place between the ages of 0-7 years old by our parents. Light heartedly when you meet me, you have no idea that I gained the hostess badge at Brownies. Attitudes are very different to our parents generation and currently I have a poor relationships with cyclists in Surrey on Sundays.
If you cannot identify why you have a clash with an individual as you have no clue as to what is in their iceberg, then you might have to probe around the situation or incident that is giving you both a challenge:-
- What is it about? SITUATION
- What do you truly want? REFRAME
- What about it is important to you? VALUE
- What will you do when? ACTION
- What else? SUPPORT
First step is to be clear on the situation and as quickly as you can move the person to a solution mode by reframing what they want to achieve. Value as we know will be driving their behaviour so we can identify what is important to them. The questions have momentum so you need action and support.
This blog was the basis of a breakfast seminar run by nuggets last week, please do let bev@nuggetsoflearning.co.uk know if you would like a workshop in your organisation.
