Passion and Learning Communities

Another of my colleagues wrote a terrific post on self-regulation. Just reading about what she experiences plants a seed in my thoughts, and boom it flowers quickly into something that (I hope) is worthwhile. 

She deals with and teaches adults in theater. I deal with adults in the refining industry. There would seem to be many relevant tie-ins between the two. 

Often I find in our discussions that I tend to think about my organization's leadership training courses. These are field workers who are doing such a great job that their organization decides to invest in them by sending them to our a one or two-day course in leadership fundamentals. 

In our first course, one of the most difficult modules for us to pass on to these leaders is the module on conflict management. So much of conflict management is self-regulation. Being about to be moderate in your passions, to see two sides of the same issue and be empathetic and understand why there is conflict. This is step one that we try to teach. It’s tough because so many of these learners come from backgrounds where this wasn’t taught. Like she wrote about her learning cohort, in the theater, these men and women can be passionate in their views, even more so if they have years and years of field experience as most of these leaders do. 

In most cases, what we find, is that they have never seen or been taught any other way. They grew up as young field techs and their leader was passionate, yelled, and jumped on them with shouting to get the point they were trying to make across. So naturally, when these techs have a chance to lead they model their behavior off of the leaders they’ve seen in the past. I know that when our learners leave our course we haven’t done much to change how they deal with conflict, despite our best efforts. 

Hopefully, though we have started them down a path where they can be open to other ideas and new solutions to deal with problems that they didn’t have before. I’d like to think we allow them to begin the process of realizing self-regulation and moderation of emotions might have a payoff in their lives if they give it a try.