PMI Global Insights

By: Susan Coleman, J.D., M.P.A.
Author, Speaker, Workshop Facilitator

Hello to all. I had the honor of presenting at the PMI Virtual Experience Series 2023 on March 23, 2023, a global event attracting more than 70,000 attendees on Gender, Collaboration and The Future of Work. Thank you for attending my session. I had a great time and hope you did too. You were a wonderful audience and your feedback is inspiring. Please stay in touch at the links above.

Here are responses to some of the Q’s I heard from you in the chat.

Question 1: Is Collaboration really needed in the GPT4 world?

What a great question!

My gut response -- not that I claim to have any real handle on what’s happening with AI -- is YES. ABSOLUTELY.

Theory is clear -- competition leads to competition and collaboration leads to collaboration. It’s the way it works. I see it all the time in my work (and life).

From what I understand about the GPT4 world, AI picks up the themes that we put into the digital universe. If we are putting in collaboration, that’s what it will give us back – and probably better than we could do it. If we are giving it competition – and by ‘competition’ I mean here of more of the toxic, dominating variety, that’s what AI will reflect back. And, again, my guess is AI will play this game better than we ever could. It gives me the creeps when I visualize this at its logical end – violence, combat, war -- frightening, Terminator type imagery. This inevitably ends in a lose-lose for all of us.

Black and white thinking about ‘free market’ v ‘socialism’ dumbs us down, just like extreme polarization does in all conflict. AI could be amazing – we just need to make sure, through our collective guiderails (i.e. government oversight) that it is serving the collective good as well as individual creators and operators. This, of course, is a more collaborative sentiment.

Question 2:  How do we handle the toxic individual in a negotiation?

Let’s start with ‘What is toxic’?

We hear more often ‘toxic masculinity’, but I think the masculine and feminine can be toxic at either end of the spectrum.

At the masculine end it is the hyper-masculine – all combat, war, domination.

At the feminine end of toxicity, it is codependency, accommodation, submissive.

Patriarchy – which is still the largest superpower on the planet, divides humans in half, with the feminine on one side of the equation and the masculine on the other. It reveres the feminine in principle but disparages it in fact (from family therapist, Terry Real.) Both men and women, in our culture, can often disparage the feminine and support the masculine. Especially in organizational life.

The problem with this is that humans need wholeness, and the world today, with an intense climate crisis bearing down on us, needs to embrace more of the feminine (caring, emotional intelligence, relationality.) And we need to do this with negotiation and conflict.

Good negotiation is about getting good results on the substance of what you want and preserving or maybe even enhancing the relationship with the other side in the process. Traditional gender roles (patriarchy) have given us some outdated ideas about who negotiates, what style is ‘good’ negotiation (its usefully pretty combat driven and patriarchal) The stereotype of the negotiator that is ‘all substance’ is more masculine (not necessary male) and ‘all relationship more feminine (not necessarily female). We all need both and we need to be able to balance these.

I hear sometimes ‘the future is female’. Well maybe, but in negotiation and conflict, I think it is fluid – the ability to know the range and use the range as is needed on your team or at your workplace. Having said that, I think we are done with the toxic ends of these ranges/spectrums – both the toxic masculine (patriarchal) and the toxic feminine (codependent.) It’s time to move beyond to a place where we can all be whole human beings.

I know many of you are interested in a more inclusive, diverse workplace. So am I. I believe it’s how you get the most innovation, creativity and fun for that matter.

As I mentioned in my talk, I have the privilege of being the steward of a beautiful piece of land. One of the things I have learned in caring for it is that I need to get rid of the invasive species. It turns out, the natural world is a great teacher. What happens with the invasives is that they come barreling in and take over the light, water and other nutrients and create monocultures. When you get rid of them a much more diverse community of native plants starts re-appearing. Miraculous, beautiful and metaphoric to human systems.

If you care about diversity, you need to care about collaboration. Collaboration is not easy. And it is NOT lose-win, (we women have been acculturated to this in many parts of the globe – makes us better servants v. leaders). It is win-win. That can be challenging sometimes. It’s easier, if you think you have the power, to simply dominate (more toxic). And that creates identity group polarization – and whichever group is dominant in that system (men v women, white v black, etc.) will prevail.

So, if we want a more collaborative, creative, diverse world, (and less toxic) we need to understand collaboration in all its complexity. It’s not easy!! It requires being firm, fair, not shying away from conflict and functioning with integrity.

Question 3:  How does one get to the heart of the underlying interests when the other party is not open /willing to share?

There is a saying – I’m not sure who said it first – Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, Jesus, Diogenes. In the past, I attributed it to British writer Oscar Wilde, but google shows how far it goes back and that, perhaps, there ain’t nothing new under the sun. Anyway, the saying is ‘there is a reason we are born with two ears and one, mouth’ so we listen more than we speak.

First, let’s be clear that negotiation is any time you are trying to influence a situation through communication. It’s not just the formal process of sitting down at a table to hash out a salary or a deal – though it is that too.

As I said above, there are some people who think of negotiation like a war. It’s combat time.

There are others who understand that you get a lot more with honey than with vinegar.

To negotiate collaboratively, you need to know your underlying needs and interests and those of the other side. Remember the orange? A lot of you liked that story – I know – it’s simple and makes the point well.

But if someone’s paradigm for conflict and negotiation is combat, whether or not they have more or less power than you, they will ‘hold their cards close to their chest’ and it may be difficult to know what they are really after. They also often throw out a lot of ‘fake news’ to confuse things – which is not helpful.

How do you proceed? You need to be a great listener, and sometimes a great investigator. What is making them tick? Can you reflect it back to them? Can you help them find a different way that will allow both of you to find a creative solution for you both.

Ladies, we have some real skill here in being able to intuit what’s really going on. We need to not be shy about using it and having confidence in our often very well-honed EQ (emotional intelligence).

Question 4 – Can we apply parenting skills to PM?

YES!

It seemed a lot of you resonated with my comments about parenting.

I remember asking my great gestalt organizational systems mentor/teacher, John Carter – “doesn’t it seem like a lot of organizational issues are Mommy and Daddy issues?” He said, ‘yup, they most definitely are, you just can’t talk about them that way.”

Collaborative systems start in the home and ripple up through the workplace and into the world.

I would dare say that if you are a great parent, you are a great manager and vice versa.

If you’d like to watch the presentation, it is available on demand through 31 January 2024 at no cost. Visit the PMI Virtual Experience Series for more details.