Reframing Change: How to Deal with Workplace Dynamics, Influence Others, and Bring People Together to Initiate Positive Change

A highly practical guide to help leaders make intentional choices and draw on their assets, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to influence others, bridge differences, and initiate positive change. Reframing Change: How to Deal with Workplace Dynamics, Influence Others, and Bring People Together to Initiate Positive Change is based on the premise that if people act with integrity and learn to develop positive workplace relationships, a ripple effect can engender similar changes in the organization as a whole. Of extraordinary value to leaders, middle managers, and management students, it is a fresh and practical how-to manual for putting new ways of thinking to work in an organizational setting—one that backs its advice with results from a rapidly growing body of rigorous social science research. Organized around a series of essential skills, Reframing Change shows readers how to test assumptions about others, clear negative emotions and augment positive ones, build effective relationships, bridge cultural differences with people, deal with difficult situations, and initiate change in work environments. This advice is driven home with the stories of real people in real situations that explain key underlying principles, with a single storyline running through each chapter.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments 1 Matt's Story: An Introduction to Conscious Change Plan of the Book Why This Book? 2 Testing Assumptions Mental Models: Short-cuts to Perception Being in the Answer Making Up Stories Being in the Question Choosing to Test Assumptions Retraining Neural Pathways Building Positive Emotions 3 Clearing Emotions Emotions and Feelings The Emotionally Flooded Manager The Myth of Suppressed Emotions Preventing Self-fulfilling Prophecies Clearing Emotions: The Process What Results Can You Expect? Other Sources of Help Building Positive Emotions 4 Building Effective Relationships Powerful Listening Inquiry Openness Giving Feedback Receiving Feedback Seeking Feedback What If the Other Person Really Is the Problem? 5 Bridging Differences Dominants and Nondominants Dominance Dynamics Dominants' Blind Spots Acute Awareness of Nondominant Status Dominance Dynamics at the Organizational Level From Guilt to Learning and Contribution Bridging Differences: Antidotes to Dominance Dynamics 6 Conscious Use of Self Get Your Emotional Attachments Out of the Way Accept Responsibility for Your Own Contribution Maintain Integrity Focus on the Other Person's Strengths Adopt a Learning Orientation Seek to Understand Others' Perspectives Recognize Your Own Power and Use It Responsibly 7 Initiating Workplace Change Steps for Initiating Change Moving Forward: A Sequence of Small Wins 8 Matt's Story Redux Focusing on Strengths Being in the Question Building Relationships and Bridging Differences Seeing Situational Factors, Not Just Individuals Clearing Emotions Changing Workplace Dynamics and Relationships through Changing Oneself Allowing the Unexpected to Emerge Conclusion: Sustaining Hope Appendix: Principles for Conscious Change Index

About the Author :
Jean Kantambu Latting, Ph.D., is an organizational consultant and codirector of Leading Consciously. V. Jean Ramsey, Ph.D., is codirector of Leading Consciously and retired as a professor of management from Texas Southern University in Houston, TX.

Review :
Consultants Latting and Ramsey draw from industrial and organizational psychology, social work, education, and marketing in these guidelines for improving interpersonal relationships in the workplace. The authors take care to include only ideas that have been supported by academic research, borne out by their own experiences as consultants, and reported as useful by their students and clients. The techniques described will help leaders, middle managers, and management students harness the power of self-change, test assumptions about others, clear negative emotions, bridge cultural differences, and deal with difficult situations. An ongoing story, based on real conversations between consultants and clients, students and instructors, and between colleagues, illustrates key principles. Boxes are included summarizing recent research supporting the techniques.