Using the worksheet below, ask participants to record a few words or phrases they can say to themselves — and to the others involved — when they feel a conversation heating up and moving in an unpleasant and unproductive direction.

Worksheet

Many of us hear advice that suggests something like this: “When you get angry at a co-worker, and before you fly off the handle, take a deep breath.” 

Disagreement is not something to be avoided; a definite advantage in diverse workforces is, in fact, diversity of opinions and perspectives. Yet discussions that include disagreement require a bit of extra care. If not respectfully managed, these conversations can easily create tensions that become non-productive and have effects far past the initiating conversation.

In the space below, record a few words or phrases to actually say to yourself — and to the other person(s) involved — when you feel a conversation heating up and moving in an unpleasant and unproductive direction.

Share your results with a colleague.  See what questions or statements they use, and compare these to your own.

 Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to The Respectful Communicator.

Recommended Training Resource: The Respectful Communicator. With the increased diversity present in today’s workplace, the potential for miscommunication has never been greater. This program shows how taking a few extra steps can keep misunderstandings to a minimum.  Onscreen hosts and dramatic vignettes demonstrate five respectful communication guidelines that participants can put into practice immediately.

Group Instructions: Attempt to fill in your sheet by finding a person who can say “yes” or can respond appropriately to each question. Write their first name in the space provided. You may use each person’s name only once.

1. _________________________________________________ speaks more than one language. What languages are they?__________________________________________________

2. _______________________________________________has traveled abroad in the last year.

3. _________________________________lived in another country for a significant period of time.

4. ___________________________________________________ has experienced acupuncture.

5. ____________________________’s ancestors come from the same country as one of your ancestors. Which country? ____________________________________________

6. _______________________ likes to watch TV shows about science and/or nature.

7. ______________________________________comes from a family of 4 or more children.

8. _________________________________________ attended private school as a child.

9. _____________________________________________ reads one or more books a month.

10. ____________________________________________has an LP (vinyl record) collection.

11. ____________________________________________________ has more than 2 children.

12. ___________________________ enjoys gardening.

13. __________________________ works as a volunteer more than 5 hours a month.  The volunteer service they provide is ________________________________.

14. _________________________ plays more than 10 hours of sports per month.

15. __________________________ has more than 10 apps on their smart phone.

Recommended Training Resource: A Peacock in the Land of Penguins.  Diversity in the workplace is sometimes met with intolerance of those who are different, or unique. Using parable and animation, this entertaining program shows how an appreciation of everyone can help the organization move forward in a positive way.

Instructions: Below is a short case study depicting a common problem that might surface in an organization. Read the example and then circle things in the following list that a person could do to show initiative in getting the problem solved.

In doing your job, you find that there are times when it takes way too long to get things done. You have some ideas for streamlining certain procedures, but no one has ever really asked for your opinion.

What are your options?

- Quietly begin complaining to your co-workers that certain procedures are inefficient and hope that one of them will bring it up to their boss.

- Before the next team meeting ends, say that you have an issue you’d like to discuss about perhaps making some adjustments to certain procedures.

- Send your supervisor an email, asking to talk to her about some ideas you have for streamlining procedures.

- Send the President of the company an email, asking to talk to her about some ideas you have for streamlining procedures.

- Leave anonymous sticky notes with jokes about the inefficient procedures on the printer by your boss’s office.

- Begin changing the procedures yourself and see if your streamlining ideas work before you suggest them to anyone else.

- Ask 3-4 people on your team to try your streamlining ideas out; if they get good results, then you will bring the streamlining issue up at your next team meeting.

- Let it go; it’s not worth the effort to change things and the risk to bring it up and appear unhappy with the way things are, or stupid if your ideas don’t work.

- Talk with a mentor or veteran employee about your ideas; see if anything like what you’re proposing has ever been tried before and ask their advice about what to do next.

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to the video program Can We Count on You?

Training Resource: Can We Count on You? is a common-sense program designed to put people–especially those entering the workforce for the first time–on the path to becoming highly valued employees. It provides a basic overview of what it takes to be seen as accountable, focusing on 10 specific day-to-day workplace behaviors.

Planning for every eventuality is one of the leadership factors taught at West Point. While it might sound contradictory, the best planning allows the greatest flexibility. No plan survives contact with the “enemy”— whatever form the “enemy” takes — be it time, budgets, competitors, or changing conditions. Planning for all contingencies establishes the competitive edge.

Communication and planning go hand in hand. A plan is only as good as the leader’s ability to communicate it to the team, and to receive information from the team as to whether or not things are going according to plan.

Also, learning from Failure is a key skill that must be understood and mastered by the cadets at West Point. A strong leader understands and uses the value of mistakes as a learning tool. He or she manages failure not by running from it or avoiding it, but by chasing problems and seeing how they can contribute to future success.

Activity Instructions:

The first part of the activity should be completed individually. The second part is a group activity. Tell participants they will have 15 minutes to complete the individual and group activities on the Worksheets. Ask them to choose a discussion leader for the group activity part of the Exercise.

At the 8-minute mark, suggest to the groups that they move into their group discussions.

Debrief the Activity (10 minutes)

Ask for volunteers to share any insights gained on the questions they reviewed individually. Prompt one or more participants to share how one or the other of the skill points makes a tangible difference in their department or organization.

For the group activities:

Ask one of the groups to discuss the relationship between Planning and Failure:

• How do they depend on each other?

• Is it possible to discuss one without the other?

• How do they connect in this organization’s environment?

Ask one of the working groups to share their ideas for a learning experience focused on Planning or Failure. If time permits, ask one of the other groups to share one of their ideas for a development experience on the other skill factor.

ASK:

When you think about it, discussing a failure with peers and subordinates is extremely difficult for any of us to do. Have any of you had experiences where discussing a failure has provided noticeable benefits to yourself or to the organization?

Worksheet: Planning & Learning from Failure

On Your Own

As a Group

Work together in your group to complete the following activities.

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to the video program Leaders of Character: Leadership - the West Point Way

Training Resource: At the US Military Academy at West Point, cadets are taught to lead with honor and character. Leaders of Character: Leadership - the West Point Way documents how it’s done and visits the workplaces of West Point grads who now apply these skills in the public and private sectors.

1.  When you say “I’m stressed out” or “I’m under a great deal of stress”, what do you mean?  What is the difference between stress and a stressor?

2.  Is stress always a negative thing?  Name some of the positive aspects of stress.

3.  Describe your own personality.  Do you recognize characteristics in yourself that cause you undue anxiety such as perfectionism, obsessiveness, competitiveness, fear of failure, etc.? How do you deal with these anxieties?  Is there a way to channel these personality traits into positive action?

4.  What jobs do you think are the most stressful?  The least stressful?  Why?

5.  Think of one or two situations that have recently occurred in which you felt “stressed out”.  Was it the situation or your own personality traits that caused the stressful situation?  Analyze if it was worth getting upset about, or if there was another way to react to the event.

6.  Are you able to control the pace of your work and choose how you will approach your tasks?  What steps can you take to bring more control to your job?  If you’re not able to change your job situation, what steps can you take to cope more positively with the inevitable stress?  (Time management, communication, assertiveness techniques, etc.)  Have you used these techniques or others to manage your stress level?

7.  Think about a situation when you were so fearful of the consequence that you were unable to act–missing a deadline to make your project better, changing your job, discussing a problem with the boss.  Then make a list of the worst possible scenarios that might have occurred.

8.  Have your multiple roles at work and home increased your stress level?  How might you resolve this conflict?

9.  Evaluate your style as a manager.  Examine the way you communicate, the demands you make, the expectations you convey, the nature of your criticism, the tasks you delegate. Do any of these create stressful situations for your subordinates or fellow team members?  If so, what can you do to reduce the stressors in their work lives?  (Regular meetings, more realistic deadlines, role clarifications, support system, etc.?)

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide for the CRM Learning video, Managing Stress.

Training Resource:  If you want to help employees make stress management a lifelong habit, the Stress Management Series will get them started in the right direction. Comprised of 5 programs, including Recognizing Stress and Resilience: Mastering Stress.

There is a better way to handle disciplinary issues, based on the organization’s need for top-level performance by all employees. When discipline is approached in a logical, positive framework, focused on bringing performance up to par, the emotion can be taken out of the equation and real improvement can be made. Every workplace is different, but the relationships between employees and their supervisors, and between employees and the organization as a whole, are based on a fundamental requirement: wages are traded for performance. When performance is not up to standards, it is the manager’s job to work with the employee to bring them back up to the required level.

Traditionally, we have focused on punishment as the most direct way to deal with performance problems. But this approach can backfire when applied to adults on the job, because it can be humiliating to the employee. And, if it is humiliating, the manager’s actions will lead to anger, resentment, and reduced performance – not the improvement they were hoping for. Every disciplinary action is different because you are working with unique individuals who have life experiences, expectations, and emotional needs you know nothing about. Managers need a process that allows for these circumstances, and for the employee involved to play a key role in the resolution of the problem. You also need a process that focuses on the issues, not the personalities involved.

The first step in a disciplinary process – and the only one this article deals with – is identifying the performance gap. By focusing on the gap between expected behavior and actual behavior, supervisors can take an objective approach to the problem, leaving the subjective and personal issues out of it. Emotional responses to employee problems cloud the issue and inhibit reaching the true goal: improved performance.

Activity: Identifying the Performance Problem

The most important part of identifying and understanding a performance problem is separating the facts from your judgments and opinions.

Listen to the difference in these two ways of describing the same problem:

• You are expected to complete and submit your daily production reports before leaving for the day.
• You’ve caused a lot of screw-ups on the second shift because of your lazy attitude toward production paperwork.

What is the difference between these statements?
• The first approach deals with the facts – behaviors that are observable.
• The second statement is loaded with judgment and opinion – subjective statements that attack the person, rather than focusing on the problem.

Looking at this situation, why might these production reports be important?
• They may affect other shifts, customer deliveries, the ordering of new parts, or other downstream processes.

So what is the real purpose of discipline in this situation?

Look for the following answer:
• To improve performance!

The purpose of employee discipline is to close the performance gap between what you need the employee to do and what they are actually doing.  Let’s see how we can apply this to our own employee disciplinary problems.

REFER to the Worksheet. Participants will work individually on this activity.
(Allow 3-4 minutes)

SAY:
The best way to identify an employee performance problem is by comparing the desired performance with the employee’s actual performance – what you expect versus what you’re actually getting.

Think about a current disciplinary problem in your department and the employee associated with it (no names please!).

• Describe the performance problem in section 1.
• List a few bullets or key words that describe what you expect from the employee in the left column of section 2.
• List what the employee is actually doing in the right column of section 2. In effect, you are performing a gap analysis.
• Think about the situation objectively when you fill in section 3. If the employee is not aware of the problem, you need to understand why. If you haven’t set expectations properly, your meeting shouldn’t be about discipline, it should instead be about making your performance expectations clear and then monitoring the results.

DISCUSSION
Go around the room, asking for examples of the participant’s disciplinary incidents.

WORKSHEET

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to the CRM Learning video program, Positive Discipline.

Training Resource: Positive Discipline.Users are consistently thrilled with this program’s ability to help managers overcome their reluctance to addressing performance gaps, engage in productive performance discussions and end up with positive outcomes.

The best leaders train and empower their team so others can step up and move projects ahead without hesitation in the leader’s absence. Here is a case study that can help leaders and managers think through the preparation, training and delegation necessary to be away from the office, using a very realistic scenario.

Explain that the participants are going to explore a case study in order to help them review the skills needed to plan for delegation. First, though, split the class into two groups (or let them self-select a group): Delegators and Delegatees.

Either aloud or individually, have everyone read the Case Study (see below). After everyone has read the Case Study, lead a discussion among the Delegator group on the following questions:

• What portions of the General Manager’s responsibilities can he delegate, and what portions should he “shelve” until his return?
• What skills are necessary to perform the delegated tasks?
• Among the General Manager’s staff, who might be a candidate for delegation? Why?
• What kind of support will the General Manager need to provide?

Now, ask members of the Delegatee group to imagine they are the Dining Room Manager. Then lead a discussion on the following questions:

• What portions of the General Manager’s responsibilities can he delegate to you, and what portions should he “shelve” until his return?
• What skills will you need to be able to perform those tasks?
• What would you gain from accepting these delegated tasks?
• What demands will be placed on you?
• What kind of support will you need from the General Manager? From other staff members?

Bring the whole group back together and ask:
• What did this case study bring to light for you?
• How will you plan and delegate differently the next time you will be traveling for work or on vacation?
• Would your employees know what to do if you were unexpectedly out sick tomorrow?
• How can you communicate ‘who is empowered to do what’ in your absence?

Case Study
In a medium-sized restaurant specializing in high-end seafood cuisine, the General Manager is responsible for all marketing, advertising, inventory, hiring, training, budget management and controls, reservation and private party booking, and security, among a variety of additional day-to-day tasks such as discipline, crisis management, and maintenance. Inventory and budget reports are due monthly, and the other responsibilities are ongoing, and constant. Working for the General Manager are:

• A Chef
• A Sous Chef (Assistant Chef)
• 12 cooks and prep-cooks
• A Dining Room Manager
• A Bar Manager
• A 25-member service staff that includes hosts, servers, bussing help and bartenders.

The Dining Room Manager has several years of experience, but has only been with the restaurant for three months. A new bartender has also just come onboard. She was a Bar Manager in her former job, but since there wasn’t currently a manager position available here, she accepted a bartender position. The Chef is creative, hard working, and an excellent cook, but inexperienced as a manager, and has recently lost two frustrated employees.

The General Manager has just received 2 calls: the first from a VIP client requesting that the restaurant host a private party for his company, with 250 guests and a budget of $20,000, to be held four days from now. The second call informed the General Manager of a serious illness in the family, and he will need to leave immediately for at least a week.

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide to the CRM Learning training program Delegating for Diehards.

Training Resource: Everest. See how a blind man’s quest to reach the summit was only possible through leadership and teamwork. When the climb leader had to drop out halfway up due to illness, you’ll learn how the other members of the team stepped up and made the climb a success.

Common communication tools used in collaboration are: active listening, questioning that reveals a willingness to understand (such as “What is it about this situation that bothers you the most?”), expressing your own concerns without being overly emotional, sticking to the issue at hand and taking responsibility for your role in the conflict.

Here is a quick role play activity you can use to help people practice using collaboration as a conflict resolution method.

Group Activity: Collaborating (35 minutes)

1) Before the exercise, prepare envelopes for each pair of participants. On the outside of the envelope, write a conflict situation that could conceivably occur within an organization (or within your organization, specifically). Inside the envelope, place two slips of paper. On Slip #1, list a job description for Employee #1, as well as an underlying concern for them in the conflict. On Slip #2, list a job description for Employee #2, as well as an underlying concern for them in the conflict.

2) Remind the participants that the skills of active listening and open communication play a key role in helping to uncover underlying concerns in a conflict.

3) State that the goal of the role playing exercise is to get the other party to move past his or her position, and into collaboration. To achieve that, they will need to discover the concerns that are fueling the conflict.

4) Ask the participants to pair up for the role playing exercise. Then pass out the envelopes that you have prepared ahead of the session. Before they begin, ask them to reflect on their positions. They should think about the level of assertiveness they need to bring in defending their position and how willing they will be to cooperate when it comes to meeting the other person’s needs.

5) Have the group begin the role playing exercise. Set a time limit of 15 minutes.

6) After the role playing is completed, ask the group to discuss their experiences. Were they able to identify the position of the other party? Were they able to reveal the underlying concerns? How? Were they successful in moving toward a collaboration? Why or why not?

Excerpted from the Leader’s Guide for the CRM Learning video, Dealing With Conflict.

Training Resource: Dealing with Conflict shows why “collaboration” – which includes getting to the heart of what’s most important to the other party — is typically your best conflict resolution strategy.

Negativity Self-Evaluation

Where do you rate on the negativity scale? Score yourself on a scale of 1 to 5 for each question, and try to be honest with your answers.

   1                     2                        3                           4                          5
Never             Seldom             Sometimes                 Often                    Always
                                                                                                                                                                                                   

1. Do you come into your workplace feeling enthusiastic and confident?                 _____
2. Do you focus on your goals even when you’re having a bad day?                        _____
3. Do you look for positive solutions when things don’t go your way at work?          _____
4. Do you set a good example for co-workers?                                                     _____
5. Do you communicate well with your colleagues?                                               _____
6. Do co-workers feel they can come to you for help?                                            _____
7. Are you satisfied with the quality of work you do?                                              _____
8. Do you find healthy ways to relieve stress?                                                       _____
9. Do you collaborate with others to meet the team’s and your goals?                     _____
10. Are you open to changes in your routine or environment?                                  _____
                                                                                                                Total  _____

Scoring
If your total is under 25, you are highly susceptible to negativity and may be affecting others with your attitude.  Continue to evaluate your performance on the job.  If you can’t break the pattern of negativity, ask for outside help from a supervisor, a friend or Human Resources.

If your total is between 25-35, you’re on the borderline; you can fall victim to negativity, particularly during stressful times.  When feeling pressured, give yourself a negativity “spot check”.  Ask yourself if your work is up to par, if you are snapping easily, or whether your co-workers are acting differently towards you.  These could all be signs that you need to take a deep breath and re-evaluate your attitude.

If your total is over 35, you probably don’t succumb to negativity often.  But, you may not be completely immune to it.  Think about how you interact with colleagues, especially when you’re stressed. People probably look to you as a model for positive behavior, so make sure stress doesn’t get the best of you.  And, if you see others inciting a climate of negativity, try to help the person(s) find a positive solution or encourage them to seek assistance.

Debrief – The Attitude Adjustment Plan
Here are several good steps to take whenever you feel yourself becoming negative. (If you’re a manager or co-worker who needs to point out negativity in another person, see the special Note at the bottom.)

Take responsibility for your attitude and acknowledge the difficulties your negativity is causing.
Without an honest acceptance of the responsibility for and impact of your attitude, there is no motivation to change.  

Practice “responding” rather than “reacting” to situations.
A reaction is often an instinctive, unproductive way of dealing with difficulties (negative people often “react” by blaming others for problems without seeing the part they’ve played in creating the problem).  On the other hand, a response requires thoughtful consideration of:
      - how can I take control of the situation vs. being a victim of the situation?
      - what productive strategies and actions can I take?

Attempt to identify underlying causes for the negative attitude.
Try to uncover some of the reasons behind what you’re feeling. Is there a higher amount of stress than usual in the workplace?  Are there unresolved issues with co-workers?  Have you been feeling undervalued or overworked? Could family problems, debt, or illness be a factor? 

Address the situations that cause stress.
Once you see what is causing the problem, try to find a workable solution and look for ways to prevent similar situations in the future. If need be, talk it over with another person.  It’s amazing how an outside perspective can shed light on things.  If there are conflicts you don’t feel comfortable handling on your own, ask a supervisor or HR person for assistance.

Note:  If you are in a position of pointing out another person’s attitude problem, make sure you do these things in addition to suggesting the actions listed above:
     - discuss the problem in private
     - begin by giving positive feedback
     - handle emotionally charged subjects with sensitivity
     - focus on performance, not personality

Based on material in the Leader’s Guide for The Attitude Virus: Curing Negativity in the Workplace.
© CRM Learning.

Need help in this area? Bad attitudes in the workplace can spread like a virus and infect everyone in the whole organization. With CRM’s The Attitude Virus program, help employees learn to spot unproductive attitudes in themselves and others, and counteract them with positive behavior.

• • This activity runs more smoothly if you prepare a Summary Sheet in advance, preferably on a flipchart page or a whiteboard. See below for an example.
• • You will need help displaying the results of this activity. Identify a participant in advance who can help you quickly, accurately and legibly tabulate the responses on the flipchart sheet that you have prepared.

Introduce Activity/Give Instructions

Pass out the Handout and Scoring Sheet to each participant.

REVIEW the instructions on the Handout, and explain that their opinions—the way they label the behaviors— will be anonymously collected, summarized and then discussed with the group.

The Handout asks what category each of 20 behaviors belongs to:
Clearly ethical, clearly unethical, or some shade of gray.

ALLOW participants 5 – 6 minutes to work through the list and categorize each of the behaviors as E, L, M, D, or U.

Once participants have finished filling out the Handout, direct them to summarize their own results on the Scoring Sheet.  Participants should not write their names on this scoring sheet when they turn it in to the facilitator.

ALSO MAKE SURE participants understand that they are to list the actual numbers of the items in the boxes, rather than a count of how many items they labeled in each category.  (This makes it possible to tabulate the responses.)

Sample Summary Sheet: Flipchart/Whiteboard

In advance of the session or while participants are working on their Handouts, prepare your whiteboard or flipchart page to display a summary of the data.

Directions: Set up a flipchart sheet or whiteboard as shown below (this table has been shortened to save space). Summarize the participants’ responses (from their Scoring Sheets) by placing tally (or hatch) marks in the table below.  Tally marks will enable the group to see the patterns of the responses.

Item	E	L	M	D	U
1
2
20

Polling Activity Debrief

Collect all Scoring Sheets and summarize them on your whiteboard or flipchart. When the participants’ individual tallies have been recorded for all to see, proceed with the debrief.

ASK:

• • What makes categorizing some of the behaviors difficult?  Which items were difficult to categorize?
• • Can a behavior be “slightly unethical?” or “Close, but not quite unethical?”
• • What criteria did you use to categorize your choices?  In other words, as you grouped the behaviors on the list, what were your choices based on?

               Possible examples of criteria:

•            • Would the violation be discovered?
•            • Were people emotionally affected?
•            • Were significant dollars involved?
•            • Would this behavior physically harm anyone?
• • Do you think people consider impacts or consequences when they are making their choices about ethical issues?  Which impacts make the most difference?

Discuss the results displayed on the flipchart summary. Look for certain item numbers.  Were most of the behaviors listed as E or U, or were many more listed in the gray columns?  ASK participants what patterns stand out for them.

POINT OUT items (behaviors) that have the widest range of responses.  Have the group discuss why these items might have received the range of responses they did.

SUGGEST that a possible explanation for items having a range of responses (tally marks in several categories) or items where a large number of responses labeled the behavior as M is that the organization’s policies and guidance on these behaviors might not be clear enough.

As time permits, discuss other patterns participants see in the responses. It’s likely that very rich discussions will occur around the issues raised by this exercise.    

MAKE ONE OR MORE OF THESE KEY POINTS:

• • As we gain experience in the workplace, we tend to see things less often in terms of black and white.  Where we draw the line between right and wrong tends to become a bit blurry.
• • When right and wrong become blurry — when we are operating in the gray zone — we should fall back on the guidance of our experience, or the guidance of rules, procedures, and laws for direction.
• • It’s not possible for organizations to guide every specific behavior, or to have a rule or regulation to cover every situation. That’s why it comes down to the individual and to his or her choices.
• • Employees need to understand the intent of the organization’s code of conduct, and have an understanding of its values (and for the organization to have clear values).

Handout: Ethical Polling

Directions: What category does each of the behaviors on the list belong to?

Polling Scoring Sheet

Directions: Write the numbers of the items on the Handout that fall into each of the following categories. For example, if you marked items 4, 7 and 12 as E (Ethical), write 4, 7, 12 in the large box on the E (Ethical) row.  Do the same for each category (E, L, M, D, U).

 Please hand this form to the workshop leader after recording your responses.
Do not write your name on the form.
 

This activity is excerpted from the Leader’s Guide for the video training program Ethics 4 Everyone.

Need more help in this area? Ethics 4 Everyone provides a powerful ethics overview for any type of organization. In just 15 minutes, viewers see why focusing on ethics is key to organizational and individual success. They are also given an ethical action test, tips for solving ethical dilemmas, and more.