I invite attendees at the National Conference to begin a dialog with me and their colleagues about using CPS in the workplace. Here are some questions that have been asked of me so far, and my responses.
Q: Managers have been dealing with challenging staff forever without CPS, often effectively. Why do we need CPS? What has been wrong with what we've been doing?
A: The CPS philosophy informs us that the manager’s explanation of a staff’s behavior, attitude, etc. will guide his or her intervention with that staff member. Conventional wisdom tells the manager that staff’s challenging behavior is usually designed to get things or avoid things, such as getting attention or avoiding work. Flowing from a conventional explanation like this, a conventional response to such behavior would be to ignore it or try to motivate more compliant behavior. There certainly is a logic to conventional wisdom and some value to the conventional response if conventional explanations are correct. Staff generally do respond to consistent rewards and punishments and also to being ignored (which is a form of punishment). These approaches can work. They just don’t work as effectively in most situations as a transparent, systematic, and collaborative method of conflict resolution. And they definitely don’t tend to work in the most challenging of circumstances and can in fact be counterproductive.
Q: It sounds like CPS will take a lot of time to do. Is it really worth it?
The short answer is “yes, it is worth it.” There is an investment of time needed to execute Plan B properly, but the investment will pay itself back many times over. Problems that get buried or superficially dealt with keep on recurring. Each time they pop up the manager using a Plan A or Plan C approach may spend less time on them than when using a Plan B approach, but over the long run the time and energy spent on reoccurring problems add up.
Plan B consists of two phases. In the first phase, the manager and staff member form a collaborative relationship. They take turns working towards a mutual definition of their problem. This definition serves as the basis for entering into the second phase, which is negotiation and problem solving. The first phase generally takes a lot longer than the second. It’s a lot like painting a room in a house. To paint well, two-thirds of the time needs to be spent prepping. Only one-third of the time will actually be devoted to applying the paint. The same holds true for two people trying to solve a problem . It is the “prep work” that makes the difference between an effort that lasts and one that just buys a little time until the next conflict. Although the first phase of Plan B is broken into three steps, it is often necessary to go back and forth between steps to complete this prep work. Plan B should be thought of as a process, not a technique.
Q: What is the single most valuable benefit from using CPS?
A. Step 1: Observe out loud. STOP. Listen. The beauty of Step 1 is that at least 50% of the time I do this step properly I find out that the feelings and perceptions that had led me to believe there was a problem were inaccurate. The work environments we work in are complex and our inner life is complex, so it is common, not rare, that managers will be missing an important piece of information or inaccurately read the intentions or emotions of a coworker. Doing Step 1 properly and finding out there is no problem to work on has saved me on many occasion from looking dumb and saved my staff the time and trouble of working through a conflict with me that would have proven itself to be non-existent.. By making a neutral statement of the situation and then shutting up so staff can speak, this affords the manager the opportunity to gather new information and to abort an unnecessary conflict resolution process before it even starts.
Q: What is the single biggest mistake I can make in putting CPS to use with my staff?
A: CPS may be simple to understand and relatively easy to execute, but there are no shortcuts. If you don’t do each step of Plan B and if you don’t do them in order, you will fail. I understand that you may not believe me when I make this statement. That’s natural. We all love shortcuts. At some point, for any number of reasons, you will take a shortcut and find out for yourself that your efforts are not succeeding. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous: work the steps. Over the long run, Plan B takes less time than either Plan A or Plan C because it gets the job done. With Plan A or Plan C, it is more likely that the problem will be recurrent.
Q: For what kind of conflictual situations should I use CPS?
A: You are faced with a wide range of employees and a wide range of situations at work. Some staff and some conflictual situations are difficult, others are relatively easy. Even though CPS was designed for the more extreme circumstances, I use CPS almost every week in situations that are relatively tame with staff who are generally pretty easy to work with. If you save your CPS skills for only the most challenging situations and people you won’t get very good doing CPS. It takes a lot of practice. Furthermore, if you use CPS as your standard approach to conflict resolution, when you are faced with a difficult situation, you will be more skilled and prepared to deal with it. Your response pattern will be automatic and effective.
Q: Should I always use Plan B?
A: Tacked to the wall next to my office desk are the words to the Kenny Roger’s song, The Gambler:
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away and know when to run
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealing's done
Know when to walk away and know when to run
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealing's done
These lyrics remind me that there is no one strategy that works in all situations. In some situations it will be Plan A. It some it may be Plan C.
Q: Phase II of CPS (negotiation and problem solving ) sounds a little murky to me. Could you be more specific about how to do it?
A: I can not provide an easy to follow, stepwise roadmap for you to follow for this phase of CPS. Phase II does not lend itself to that kind of approach. The process is more circular than linear and the variations are endless. What I can do is provide general principles to follow and a few illustrations.
q Base your negotiation and problem solving activities on the specifics learned during Phase One.
q Create an opportunity for your staff and/or you to develop or enhance interpersonal and other skills. The solution represents a learning opportunity for both of you.
q The solution should provide an opportunity for incremental learning. We generally learn new skills best when they are broken into bite size pieces.
q Keep your solution(s) in your back pocket. Give your staff the first opportunity to propose a solution. If your staff has a better or equally good solution, go with their solution, not yours.
q Resist turning negotiation and problem solving into a process of determining who is at fault. Just as gravity pulls fruit downward from the tree when it separates from the limb, the natural tendency in such dialogues is to drift towards assigning blame. Neither you nor your staff are immune from this tendency. The best you can do is to be aware of it, consciously try to avoid it, and when if happens anyway, recognize this has happened and pull out of the dive.
q A satisfactory solution is any solution that you and your staff agree is both realistic and mutually satisfactory. The test of whether you are ready to conclude that you have arrived at a solution is that what you are ready to agree to meets both of these criteria.
q To the extent it is possible, frame your discussion of the problem at hand in such a way that the solutions you both arrive at and the new problem solving skills your staff develops can be generalized to other situations.
