Why I Wrote Calming the Storm – Special Note: On September 20, 2024 Mediate.com is hosting a “Great Reads Book Club” event with Peter Adler discussing his new book: Calming the Storm: A Leader’s Handbook for Managing Unproductive Conflicts – Details and Register Here.
From the Publisher: If you are a leader—in any sense of the word—or aspire to be an effective one, the world desperately needs you. Perhaps you are an elected or appointed official. Or you run a library. Or you coach a Little League team. While leaders do many things, a major cornerstone of effective leadership is conflict management.
Filled with many engaging stories and examples, Calming the Storm: A Leader’s Handbook for Managing Unproductive Conflicts presents seventy-five short and quick guidelines for getting past useless arguments and taming cranky issues. Conflict management expert Peter S. Adler brings decades of national and international experience that will be useful for all types of leaders in the public, private, and civil sectors who need to negotiate considerations, calm frictions, mend fences, and facilitate cooperation. This practical book provides a reservoir of ideas that can be used and adapted for diverse, individual situations.
Our stories make all of us who we are and also make the world what it is. Our stories reflect joy, pathos, brilliance, tragedy and heartbreak and out of those tales, smaller or larger truths leak out. There are grand, sweeping story clusters like law, science, math, or music. Then there are the smaller everyday tales we mediator types trade in when we step into disputes to try and help.
The stories that interest me most these days are about the link between leadership and what we have learned over the years as mediators. I have been paying closer and closer attention to the specific things leaders do when confronting conflicts — the good, bad, wrong-headed, or even ugly “moves” they make and how we, as mediators, might coach them to do better.
The big stories about leadership abound. Some say it is about charisma, the “divine spark”. Others believe it comes down to traits acquired by nature or nurture. A third story argues it is something that happens when the right people, issues, and moments converge. My favorite idea has always been from Winston Churchill: “Leadership is just moving from failure to failure…with enthusiasm”.
What I know is this. It doesn’t matter if you are an elected or appointed official, manage a grocery store, or head up a little league baseball team. You are a “leader” and somehow you have to perform. Leaders have to help people embrace purpose and inspiration. They need to have strategy and make decisions. They must hire, nurture, and sometimes fire others. Leaders have to calculate risks and grapple with financial fliuctuations and always, they have to steer through some internal or external crisis.
One small corner of each of those larger leadership roles is “Conflict Management,” a humble, unheralded job that sometimes matters greatly. It is also not for everyone. Steve Jobs said if you want people to like you, don’t be a leader, sell ice cream. I have always intuitively felt we ADR people exercise our own odd form of leadership when we do our work but we know our involvements are transient. Most of our efforts are time-limited and not much remembered.
On its face, Calming the Storm: A Leader’s Handbook for Managing Unproductive Conflict is a simple manual with 75 specific ideas and tips in 15 different sections that can help tame ordinary and sometimes extraordinary problems. Each section focuses on themes that leaders might be more mindful of if they want to calm a particular storm in their enterprise. It has sections like “Help Rivals Find Sweet Spots, “Grab that Sudden Innovation Inspiration and See if it Fits”, and “Find Facts (Together)”.
And for those who like to read beyond the specific ideas, each section has an epic and enduring story which inspired me and brackets a smaller problem I worked on.
The answer is we desperately need better equipped leaders because the times are more fraught. The world is always a nervous, twitchy place but it is getting more dangerous. Events move faster and misinformation and disinformation ricochet at warp speed. Suddenly, stories amplify and polarize and the electronic locker room fills with verbal nose-pulling, face slapping, and towel-snapping as toxicity flies through the ether and people threaten each other with violence.
For the past 30 years, many of my professional peers and I have spent inordinate amounts of time acting like religious zealots evangelizing people to bring their disputes to our tables. That passion keeps rolling as newbies join our echo chamber and become new missionaries. (We are, of course, preaching to the choir even if it is good for choirs to try and stay in tune.) Needed now is what development agencies used to call “Technology Transfer,” moving our insights, practices, and techniques out to others.
These past decades, a huge amount of energy has gone into what my colleague Ann Gosline calls “field-i-fication”, trying to build a profession or guild out of the many diverse sources, tributaries, and rivers our practices have evolved into. We keep pondering the different styles of practice (Robert Benjamin calls them “The Cults of Mediation”), how best to respond to high emotion, and now the uses of artificial intelligence.
If you remember, ADR started as an ambitious but ambiguous socio-legal movement propelled in great part in 1976 by the Pound Conference on the Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice. Like other successful change efforts, it followed an S-Curve. On S-Curves, events start slowly, accelerate as a new idea gains momentum, then acquires serious traction when demand for something new to “correct” an old problem gets popular. As thought leaders and notables pick up on the new notion, political jurisdictions are pressured to respond to demands for change. Eventually, a movement goes mainstream, transforms, dies.
The wedding of mediation and the law has a few issues of its own and it isn’t always an easy marriage. Still, it seems to have worked.
The collateral ambition of influencing political cultures has not gotten as far. There are small bright spots: Smarter stakeholder initiatives; requirements for better public meetings; the use of mediators and facilitators for difficult planning efforts. But can we do better?
I don’t have all the answers but instead of imploring people to schedule their problem at my office, I want to help actual or aspiring leaders in all three sectors — public, private, and civic – to do it themselves and adopt the best of our tools and techniques into their own day-to-day work.
For leaders of any sort, human storms are inevitable . Some are just a bit of rain, wind, and complaining that flashes in and out as a kerfuffle and is hardly remembered later. Others are stiffening onshore winds that can build into a tornado or Cat-5 gale with 150-mph winds that leave damage and pain in their wake.
By Peter S. Adler
Rowman & Littlefield, Jul 30, 2024 – 224 pages
If you are a leader—in any sense of the word—or aspire to be an effective one, the world desperately needs you. Perhaps you are an elected or appointed official. Or you run a library. Or you coach a Little League team. While leaders do many things, a major cornerstone of effective leadership is conflict management.
Filled with many engaging stories and examples, Calming the Storm: A Leader’s Handbook for Managing Unproductive Conflicts presents seventy-five short and quick guidelines for getting past useless arguments and taming cranky issues. Conflict management expert Peter S. Adler brings decades of national and international experience that will be useful for all types of leaders in the public, private, and civil sectors who need to negotiate considerations, calm frictions, mend fences, and facilitate cooperation. This practical book provides a reservoir of ideas that can be used and adapted for diverse, individual situations.
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