Cooperation and Sympathy Honed Through Conflict

More than any other adversity I can point to, dealing with the facility being paid to care for Granny through the first six months of 2020 - and being barred from even visiting her through most of that - gave me perspective for sympathy. In complete transparency, I’m developing some of that perspective as I share this. That’s one more example showing the importance of constantly mining our previous challenges for the seeds of equal or greater benefit still hidden in them!

Cooperation was the thing we needed from that organization most, and it was something we just weren’t getting. One thing I’ll be clear about here is that most of the folks who were involved in day-to-day care weren’t blatantly negligent; they were just stretched far too thin. In the two and a half decades I’ve studied John Maxwell’s work, I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard him say, “Everything rises and falls on leadership.” That was indeed the case there, with one caveat: I refuse to refer to the people who were in management and executive roles there as leaders. They certainly had authority, but they were not making a positive impact and they were not earning influence with the teams they were responsible for. For good measure, I’ll share what the CEO told us one more time: “We couldn’t hire more ($12-14/hr) employees even if we wanted to…”

Like the manager experienced when I encouraged to (finally) hold his team member accountable, realizing any perceived friendship that may have existed only went one way, all hope of cooperation from decision-makers in that organization evaporated when we began asking them to live up to what they were being paid for - and what was required of them by state regulations. However, caregiving adversity forges the exact relational traits needed for values-driven leadership. Conflict becomes a competitive advantage in trust, empathy, and cooperative power - we just needed to figure out where that competitive advantage was going to show up.

Throughout Leveraging Leadership Growth, I shared story after story detailing the opportunities I’ve had to grow - personally and professionally - by learning from the amazing people who have filled the various stages of my life. We had to face the reality that the facility being paid to care for Granny just wasn’t going to be what she needed for the rest of her days, unless they killed her through their under-staffing or sheer neglect before we could identify an alternative. Once we came to terms with that, we began leveraging every relationship we could in uncovering options. It worked, and we’ll look at exactly how that unfolded next. First, though, I want you to assess a recent scenario where you had to advocate for someone - be that an individual or an entire team - by holding another person (or organization) accountable to meet expectations. Where did cooperation lag? Was the party avoiding accountability less sympathetic than you would have expected them to be? We can’t control the actions of others or the outcome of many situations, but we can absolutely control our own action. What’s one step you can take to strengthen the action you take the next time you’re in a position of advocacy?