Leadership

In 2020, IIRP Vice President for Administration Linda Kligman, Ph.D., received her doctorate in Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in Ethical and Creative Leadership and a specialization in Martin Luther King, Jr. Studies. Her dissertation,Widening circles: A Grounded Theory study of workplace leadership, received two honors from Union Institute and University: The Marvin B. Sussman Award for originality, interdisciplinarity, and social relevance in scholarship; and the Virgil A. Wood Award for excellence advancing the legacy of Martin Luther King. Linda has been invited to be the Social Justice Speaker at Union’s Spring Residency. Her thesis has been made available for free download.

When I came to work at the International Institute for Restorative Practices in 2010 it was a profoundly different experience for me. My

The IIRP Graduate School sponsored the December 2020 WOBI (World of Business Ideas) digital event on the theme of emotional intelligence in leadership. Featured speaker Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., who wrote the bestselling bookEmotional Intelligence (1995), joined IIRP President John W. Bailie, Ph.D., to discuss why emotional intelligence is more important now than ever, not only for business leaders but all of us.

It was an honor to speak with Dan Goleman. His work on emotional intelligence has been a tremendous influence on my personal practice as a leader. Dan’s thinking has also been foundational to the work of my institution, the IIRP Graduate School — the world’s first graduate school wholly dedicated to the science of relationships and community.

As the COVID-19 crisis deepens across the country and around the world, most of us are settling into a life characterized by physical distancing and sheltering in place. The IIRP has been receiving numerous inquiries and requests about how restorative practices can be applied to help. Overall, we know that people are the experts in their own communities; in fact, we look forward to people sharing their experiences so we can all learn. (Our social media platforms are already available as a place to share, and we are currently developing other meaningful options.) However, we would like to share some principles derived from restorative practices that might help us frame appropriate responses in our families and work, and with our friends and community.

While the coronavirus is a medical issue, a large part of what we are experiencing is a social crisis. Therefore, the relevance of consciously being relational becomes even more important. As many restorative practitioners

IIRP partner Lutheran Community Care Services (LCCS), of Singapore, is determined to spread restorative practices across the entire island republic. “Our goal is the universal application of restorative practices everywhere,” declares Justin Mui, Director.

They're making great progress, introducing the practices to more than 45 organizations, including the Housing & Development Board (HDB), the State Courts, the prison system and religious organizations.

The HDB provides public housing to 80 percent of Singapore's population, with a mixture of Chinese, Indian, Malay and Filipino residents. Restorative practices helps bridge cross-cultural differences and tensions and resolves neighborhood disputes that would have gone to the State Courts.

Sometimes a colleague needs to decide: it’s time to grow, or time to go.

In the previous article, Seek Problems, Not Solutions: Leading Conflict Principle 8, I discussed why most leaders avoid disruption and seek stasis in relationships.

Instead, the article recommended that leaders seek the broken places and underdeveloped areas of organizational relationships and culture.

Huge performance dividends are paid to leaders that engage the sharp edges of workplace culture proactively, boldly and strategically. That, in essence, is leading conflict.

Here’s an example.

Many years ago, I was helping to develop a new unit in my organization. The business was growing rapidly and we hired several new staff to meet the growing demand for our services.

One new staff member had a

The following blog post is from IIRP President Dr. John Bailie's website Leading Conflict: How to Fight at Work, a series of articles about how leaders can improve relationships to help their organizations thrive.

It’s tempting to believe that conflict in relationships is a complicated topic. Complicated is actually easy. A complicated problem implies a lower bar for success. We expect less measurable positive outcomes.

When a problem with another person is seen as complicated we have many reasons to think about it some more, delay action and hesitate to say what we are really thinking. Why be hasty? After all, it’s complicated.

However, the vast majority of interpersonal conflicts, whether at work or in our personal lives, are not inherently complicated. They are often painful to face and endure, but that’s not the same thing as being

My recent article, Grow in Public: Leading Conflict Principle 6, made the argument that a deliberately developmental culture is only made by cultivating deliberately developmental people.

A deliberately developmental organizational culture persistently pushes team members to the edges of their current competencies. By definition, that is not a place where most people feel comfortable. Fear, insecurity and conflict live in that place. It’s a reach into the unknown.

How do you get your team to go there? The first step is to convince them that no one will be asked to journey alone. You’ll go together.

Image by oliver-cole @ unsplashSometimes doing something “close” to right isn’t good enough.

As a father of four I find myself increasingly making use of dad sayings that I learned from my own father when discussing life’s most important matters with my children and others.

Mind you, when these pearls of wisdom were dispensed to me as a young man, I rolled my eyes, scoffed or otherwise convinced myself that my father’s sage advice somehow didn’t apply to me. We all think our own ethical dilemmas are special, especially when we are teenagers.

Current events have put one saying at the forefront of my mind over the last year.

If my dad asked me how I did

IIRP Latin America is providing processes to help people cope with stress and fear during times of great turmoil in Central America.

Violence boiled over in Nicaragua in April 2018. Citizens protested government social reforms and police responded with extreme brutality. The newspaper La Prensa reports 351 dead, 2,100 injured, 329 imprisoned and 68 tortured.

The country has since become polarized. There have been waves of anarchy: looting, arson and violent conflict, even among families.

AMOS, an NGO that delivers health interventions in Nicaragua (http://www.amoshealth.org), is helping its staff and clients deal with this nightmare.

IIRP Latin America first provided circles training for AMOS in 2009. They took to the process immediately, and it has

Managing is about overseeing processes, plans and systems. It’s about keeping things, often created by others, running.

Leading is about engaging and becoming immersed in the nuanced and complicated lives of real people. Leading is envisioning, building and sometimes breaking things on purpose. Leadership helps a team manifest ideas and aspirations.

Management and leadership skills are both essential for a healthy organization, but they are not the same thing. In some organizations, the assignment of these tasks is rigid and highly concentrated into specific job roles.

A nuclear power plant has a very high percentage of people whose job it is to manage a finely tuned system of fixed processes and procedures. In other settings ...

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Empathy is overrated. I know this is heresy. Before you light your torch and grab your pitchfork, hear me out.

We live in a world suffused with psychological language. Even in fields that are not traditionally considered to be “touchy-feely,” leaders are likely to be expected to know how to increase their team’s emotional intelligence, help employees build emotional self-management skills or increase a sense of belonging and community.

This is good. My “day job” is focused on teaching others these skills. In fact, my institution has helped lead the creation of an emerging social science entirely focused on how to strengthen relationships between individuals as well as social connections

The IIRP's second president, John W. Bailie, Ph.D., continues to explore the issue of conflict in the workplace on his personal blog Leading Conflict. With this piece, he launches a new series of articles to "explore some of the most common behavior profiles that persistently generate toxic conflict and provide tips on how to respond to each."

In the article Creative vs. Toxic Conflict at Work, I discussed one of the key features that distinguishes toxic conflict from creative conflict.

Creative conflict is rooted in the dynamics between people. In creative conflict, the motives and goals of group members are

In my previous article, Conflict: Love It and Lead It, I said:

The highest performing groups learn that they need group members who are willing to lead conflict – not just manage it or resolve it. Within the roots of conflict lie the life blood of creativity, possibility, self-knowledge and group evolution.

Working with troubled youth and coaching leaders is pretty similar.

I’ve done both, and I find it much easier to work with a drug-addicted or gang-involved teenager than with a CEO. Teenagers tend to be pretty blunt and upfront with their opinions, emotions and motivations. Even with the “toughest” kids, once you learn how to get through the thick outer shell, you usually find a whole lot of raw emotion and realness. On the other hand, adults (especially professionals and leaders) typically have much more complicated methods to hide, mask or otherwise obscure what’s really going on inside. It’s checkers vs. chess. Sometimes it’s checkers vs. 3-D underwater chess.

In Joseph Campbell’s seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he discusses how life’s tragedies remind us of that which is fragile and life’s comedies remind us of that which is invincible within us and around us. It is only by grasping the reality of both aspects of our personal story that we come to know ourselves and to fully understand others. Even in restorative conferences held in the wake of serious offenses such as murder, victims who choose to participate commonly report that they came to see the offender as an imperfect and broken human being, instead of an all-powerful monster. More than any other method, humans use storytelling and voice to make sense of emotionally

Via Boston Public Library.Columbia Teachers College has made a commitment to offering restorative conflict resolution practices to master's-level students at its New York City Summer Principals Academy (SPA). For the past two summers, IIRP President John Bailie, Ph.D., and Provost Craig Adamson, Ph.D., who are now adjunct faculty at Columbia, have co-taught “Basic Practicum in Conflict Resolution.” This three-credit course is geared to help aspiring school administrators primarily serving diverse urban populations communicate effectively, build relationships and meet the needs of their

Proficiency in giving constructive and effective feedback is a core skill for anyone in a senior leadership position, but what about those times when you need to challenge a superior?

At Maranatha House Aged Care Facility, staff take a restorative approach to help residents “live life my way made easy," to paraphrase the organization’s motto.

Nursing homes, even very nice ones, tend to regiment life for their residents based on the rhythms established by the institution. But General Manager Debra Wells says the idea is to “deinstitutionalize” the system and “put residents in charge.” Rather than having to live each day by staff routines, residents at Maranatha, in Wellington, New South Wales, a town and rural region of about 10,000 people located 225 miles from Sydney, Australia, are greeted with choices and conversations that allow them to express their needs.

In May and June, the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) participated in three important national conversations on major issues facing the nation’s communities, colleges and schools.

“Restorative practices is very much becoming accepted as an emerging social science,” comments IIRP President John Bailie, Ph.D. “Some of the best minds around the country accept that our field has some of the most innovative and promising solutions to civil society’s biggest challenges.”