Ike Lasater

Mediator, Trainer, Coach

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New Book:Collaborating in the Workplace: A Guide for Building Better Teams

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Published by PuddleDancer Press, Ike’s newest book, Collaborating in the Workplace: A Guide to Building Better Teams provides practical, step-by-step exercises that you can use to develop crucial skills to help you and your teammates connect with each other in ways that foster superior collaboration.

“A wonderfully practical guide for building teams and getting the best out of everyone.  If you are looking to build collaboration in the workplace, start by reading this book!” —Daniel L. Shapiro, PhD., author of Negotiating the Nonnegotiable

“Comprehensive, focused, and immediately useful, Collaborating in the Workplace is a highly practical synthesis of current research on what makes an effective team. Our work teams found Lasater’s exercises to be simple and easy to follow. This guide should be recommended reading for leaders and team members alike.” —- Lu Qing, President, DongFeng Nissan University, DongFeng Nissan Passenger Vehicle Company, Guangzhou, China

“This important book addresses the interpersonal skills needed to be a productive team member with a simple eloquence that is practical and easy to follow. If you are concerned about your ability to play well with others…do read this book! You’ll learn everything you need to know to get along and add value to your team.”—- John Ford, Author, Peace at Work: The HR Manager’s Guide to Workplace Mediation, founder of The HR Mediation Academy

Buy your copy today!

Team Work In Action

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I have spent the last 15 years offering workshops to the general public. These workshops have been  based upon the psychological and brain science research of the last several decades, as well as the insights developed and articulated by Marshall Rosenberg, PhD, which he called “Nonviolent Communication (NVC).”  During this time my focus was to develop, with John Kinyon, eleven maps for navigating conflict, and the nine skills necessary to use these maps (see www.MediateYourLife.com).

More recently, I have realized how important it is to introduce the understandings articulated by Marshall Rosenberg into the business community. This is because, in our modern times, businesses and organizations are influential agents of worldwide change. How business organizes itself, and how the latest trends of management are adopted, impacts not only the employees of these organizations, but their families and where these families live.

My recent trip to Taiwan, PRC and South Korea confirmed this belief. As part of this trip, I spent three days facilitating a team effectiveness training in Taipei hosted by the CP Yen Foundation. The participants were professionals such as CEOs, HR managers, school counselors, coaches and group facilitators who work in corporate or organizational environments. They seemed eager and excited to learn how to enhance team effectiveness in their organizations. After the Taipei workshop,  I spent three days facilitating another team effectiveness training at the Dongfeng Nissan car manufacturing plant in Guangzhou where the leadership of the training center has, for the past two years, vigorously offered NVC trainings that have resulted in 1000 employees being trained. I was gratified to hear from several of the these participants that the workshop helped them advance from a theoretical understanding of NVC to a practical way to integrate NVC in their day-to-day interactions.

I take Dongfeng Nissan car manufacturing plant as a heartening sign that it the insights developed by Marshall Rosenberg are more becoming more readily accepted in the mainstream business world.

Another sign of this acceptance is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s drive to incorporate more empathy in Microsoft’s culture.  As part of this initiative, one of Nadella’s first acts as CEO was to request that the company’s leaders read Rosenberg’s book, Nonviolent Communication. Nadella’s emphasis on “the kinds of soft skills that are often derided in the cutthroat world of corporate politics” is credited  in large part with a $250 billion increase in Microsoft’s market value in the 3 ½ years since he became CEO. (see “Satya Nadella Rewrites Microsoft’s Code,”Fast Company,09.18.17.)

My belief is that teams can more effectively use team members’ individual knowledge and skills through collaboration. Self-connection, and connection with others, is the foundation upon which collaboration is built. Team members need to be connected with themselves in order to be connected with others. Out of connection with others, we develop mutual trust. And out of mutual trust, collaboration grows and thrives. Often, the most effective strategy for connection is empathizing with yourself  in order to create self-connection, and empathizing with another person in order to connect with them. NVC can contribute by offering a learnable system that teaches how to empathize.

Recent data shows that collaborative activities are increasingly at the core of modern business life, and that both business profitability, and employee satisfaction and retention, increase when teams collaborate more successfully. What’s more, a team that collaborates well leads to a collective intelligence that is more than the sum of the parts, and thus generates higher quality decisions and wastes less time and resources. The innovative team of the future is one where the skills of collaboration are vital to its success.*

 

 

*I have written about this topic at greater length at the following link: White Paper: What Makes An Effective Team? Learning the Necessary Skills for Successful Collaboration

 

 

Collaboration Through Connection

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Collaboration grows out of connection. Because connection (and thus collaboration) is ephemeral and cannot be coerced, we get lost when we think we can get what we want in the world by forcing others to bend to our will. Therefore, whether we are parents, leaders in our community, team members at work, political or military leaders and actors, attempting to get what we want by imposing our will does not give us the results we want in the end. By using force, we perhaps can get someone to do what we want them to do, but we can’t get them to do it for the reasons we want them to do it.

And so I return to this concept of connection, from which comes trust and from trust, collaboration.

Connection begins with myself, without which I’m not able to connect with others. So it follows, that, at the first indication that I’ve become disconnected from myself, I want to focus my attention on reconnection. There are a number of strategies you can use to create self-connection and in later posts I will discuss those strategies, as well as how to become quickly aware when you have become disconnected from yourself.

Similarly, at the moment we discern disconnection from another, I suggest immediately shifting our focus to re-creating connection. This connection with others, whether they are friends, partners, children, co-workers or strangers will give you a better chance to get what you want in the present moment, and on a larger scale, create what you want in the world and have the impact that you want. It is this connection that is the gateway to true collaboration.

(Read more about the power of connection in my book From Conflict To Connection:Transforming Difficult Conversations into Peaceful Resolutions, the latest in the Mediate Your Life series, A Guide to Removing Barriers to Communication

 

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An Operating Manual for Our Time

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We are not given an operating manual for our lives when we are born.

This was strongly brought home to me recently as I held my two newest grandchildren, born within two weeks of each other. Aside from the basics of filling their diapers, nursing, crying and sleeping, they have to learn everything else.

There are many unconscious processes that must mature as the child grows into adulthood. As biological beings, all of these processes have evolved since the first spark of life. We have not only been evolving as biological beings, but also as thinking idea machines. Richard Dawkins used the term “memes” to refer to these bits of culture that multiply by spreading from mind to mind.

We humans have learned by these evolutionary processes to cooperate and collaborate. In each generation, we are at the learning edge of our expanding envelope of awareness and understanding. We have learned to cooperate within a group, but always in reference to “others” and “outsiders,” hence the truth of bromides like “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Over the recent millennia, humans have looked to religion to explain the world in which we live and how to conduct ourselves. And before that, the more obvious and distinct forms of myth and storytelling provided some guidance. Now, we are in a new era where we are able to winnow out, using the scientific method, myth and superstition.

Now, we are facing challenges that do not have an in-group and an out-group. Challenges such as climate change and, I would argue, religious fundamentalism.

In this blog, I will explore what I would include in an operating manual in this new era, when cooperation and collaboration are essential to continued human existence.