CPAacademy.org Check-In | Episode 6: Michael Gregory

Jasmyn

My name is Jasmyn and it is my pleasure to interview Mike Gregory for this episode of our CPAacademy.org Check-In. So give you guys a little bit of background, Mike Gregory first learned about conflict resolution, negotiation and collaboration just a few minutes after he was born. When his twin brother Mark entered the world and he began to share the world with his other four siblings. He works with accountants, attorneys and organizations and leads many presentations with CPAacademy.org to demonstrate how to make uncomfortable situations comfortable at work, at home and in life. 

He does this by taking advantage of the collaboration effect. Now the collaboration effect enhances relationships, resources and revenues with over 25 years of management experience at all levels, working with neuroscientists as an avid researcher with 12 books and over 45 published articles with a BS, Ms an MBA, and with two little grandchildren that he has the pleasure of seeing weakly, Mike shares what he's learned, including valuable tools and techniques to apply the collaboration effects in work home and life, which minimize pain and conflicts. 

Even when we have to work with difficult people I should say, especially when we have to work with difficult people. I've been able to share this bio many many times whenever I'm lucky enough to moderate your courses Mike and I've learned so much from working with you. 

Now for today, I do have a few questions to guide our one-on-one time. So to start with, as we reflect on that bio I just shared, what else can you tell us about your background and how you became interested in conflict resolution and negotiation?

Michael Gregory

Well, I was an expert, expert witness in court. And he testified a few times in court and prepared dozens of times, then it became the manager of the group. And we actually grew the group from seven to 21 technical people plus support over a three year period, that I managed that group for over seven years. And back at that time, in my career, I would have said, You bite on on going to court, and you let go for one reason, that's the bite harder route to win the case. And that's where I was as a young guy, well, you can tell from my hair, I'm not a young guy anymore. And I learned along the way, there's a better way, a much better way. And a better way has to do with conflict resolution and mediation. 

So I took a course in the year 2000 Hamlin law school, it's now Mitchell Hamlin

Law School, located here in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul. And after he took the course, they came back in my assistant director, we had about 1200 employees. And my director said to different division leaders were fighting over budget go in and mediate that I did. And it worked. And he couldn't believe it. 

So he gave me some other things to do. So I got involved with equal employment opportunity and labor relations, grievances and different things. I was sent off to another district, about the same size, but 500 employees, and I was there for four and a half months. But unlike where I came from, where we had 30, unfair labor practices, EEO complaints, grievances, and things like that, this other location, about the same size, they had 310 times as many. Now after I was there for a week, the I went to the director, I said, I think we could address this potentially with mediation and conflict resolution. Director said, Well, if you can get senior managers, frontline managers and labor relations and equal employment opportunity, and you can get the union all on board, and HR, then you can try it. He didn't think I could get that to happen. And I did after about a week. 

And we did some testing, we did some pilots, and we expanded training, and we had different folks work on these things. And four and a half months later, we reduced that 300 to 30, we're still on agreed. And when you leave a district like that they have a coffee for you. And typically 20 people show up and lasts about an hour. And about half of those, about 10 of them are there because they want to be seen by the director in all honesty, and 10 are there because you make some friends over the course of four or five months. But when I left that district, it didn't last an hour and 20 people didn't show up. The last six hours and 400 people showed up.

That got me right here. It changed my life. And it made me say this working on conflict resolution and helping people to collaborate and mediation is my calling. And I've incorporated that into whatever I've done since. And later in my career with that organization, we trained some 2500 people out of about 100,000 employees on mediation and conflict resolution techniques. So I've now been doing this I've done over 2500 mediations negotiations are facilitations. And they're from issues up to a billion dollars to I volunteer regularly twice a month in housing court, in conciliation, court, neighborhood disputes in public housing. And I've mediated between gangs, I just do that for my own fun, because I enjoy doing that as a free thing. So that's what got me going on this. And that's what I do. And it's a passion for what I do today.

Jasmyn

Wow, Mike, that is such a big undertaking. And it definitely speaks to just the profound effect that you've had on all these people over the years. Of course, my first question is, you know, how the heck did you manage to do that, but to distill it down? I'll go to my my next question.

The next thing I wanted to touch on actually is a session that we have here you have a really popular webinar on CPAacademy.org called "How to Handle Uncomfortable Situations Effectively." With that in mind, how do you approach mediating uncomfortable situations between parties with very different perspectives and values?

Michael Gregory

Well, you have to understand it's all about relationships where 98% emotional and 2% rational let that sink in. 98% emotional and 2% rational I've been working with neuroscientists now for over 10 years. When I first heard that as your analytical guy. I couldn't believe it. But I've now gotten a tremendous amount of respect for that. If I just asked you how much is two plus two, everyone that's listening says the number four you gave yourself drop of dopamine in your brain to reinforce it. Yep, I meant to, I emotionally agreed that I can do this. 

So I look at this as it's about relationships. And when they say relationships, and we've been in a discourse with one another. It's how do you build trust where people don't have trust and where people are angry with each other. in a professional setting, I'm often involved with experts. So there's two experts on both sides, and each have attorneys there and their decision makers of the firm. And I start off by saying something like that they both come in to fight. And they start off by saying something like, tell me something positive that's happened to you in the last 30 days. And he might say something work wise, as you know, something personal has happened to you. 

And an actual story with a case, one party said, Well, I'm a grandfather for the first time, he said, My wife and I are very excited about this, our son adopted a biracial child from a different part of the country. And this is our first grandchild. And we've been with that child every weekend for the last four weekends. And it's just very cool. And the other expert came through and said, Well, I have two daughters. One's a senior in high school, and one's a sophomore in senior applying to six colleges, and universities. And she got into her first choice this last week, and the younger one is just living vicariously through older sister, and she just loves what's just happened to her older sister. Well, it took the tension in the room and brought up way down. What we're talking about is relationships and values. And relationships can develop in a matter of seconds. 

So like I give the example working with the IRS, when you call the person up, listen to the tone of their voice, and respond to that tone. We know that 7% of the attitude has to do with the words 38% of the attitude has to do with the tone. But then 55% has to do with body language and facial expression. So if we're on the phone, at least we have tone. And then the person answered the phone and they said something like Mike Gregory badge number 4166732, can I help you? 

And I listen to the tone and respond and CPA responded and said Are you doing okay? There's a pause on the other end? Yeah. Okay. That sounds like it isn't the best thing. So I've had better days. But then they had the conversation. And what this IRS representative did was said, if you don't get I don't have the answer to your question, I'm gonna send you this first person, if they don't have the answer, come back to me, I'm going to send them, I'm going to ask them to send that call back to me. That happened a second time. And that happened a third time. And it took 45 minutes. And eventually that was answered in the CPS and I couldn't believe I finally got to the right person. And I said, Did you know that IRS person got in trouble, because they weren't supposed to be on the line that long. But they did that because you built that relationship. 

Or think when a nurse walks into a room, they have to build relationship with that person in seconds. So it's about relationship, and finding common values that we have with others and building trust. If you work on the elements that we got to come back and build trust, and what are the values that we've had with each other. And think of the the conflict we're in right now. And we'll be late to get to a situation where we can at least work with each other. We may not be best buddies going forward, but can we work with each other. So so much of it has to do with building relationships, listening actively.

We tend to when somebody else is talking to not listen, but to tell them what we want to tell him. We want to interrupt. And I'm suggesting you know, the other person's talking. You want to use an acronym of PAST: paraphrase, ask open ended questions. Summarize, suspend your own judgment, that's hard, suspend your own judgment, empathize with them, and do not offer advice and do it for 10 minutes. It's really hard. But really listen, and if a person has been listened to, they're more apt to listen to you, then you can educate them the way they want to be educated. So those are the broad concepts that I talked about. And there's a lot more detail to it. But those are the broad concepts I talked about. And it's making use of something called the collaboration effect.

Jasmyn

Wow. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. And very interesting the way you broke that down and how to break down those barriers and be more personable. I think that's especially relevant in today's technical world. At CPAacademy.org We're all interacting remotely, and that personal touch can easily be lost or overlooked. So thank you for that reminder. 

Now, the next thing I want to cover is the fact that this month is Mental Health Awareness Month. a very important initiative all year long, but this month in particular CPAacademy.org is spending some special time bringing more awareness to this topic. Let me know if you have any thoughts on how we can use negotiation and conflict resolution skills to support mental health and well being in the workplace. 

Michael Gregory

Well, I'm going to give a couple of sources and I'm going to share some things with you. The couple of sources are the Mayo Clinic, and put in mental health and stress and topics like that they have some great information for you that's medically sound. The second is the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and putting key topics there as well. And they provide information to you from neuroscientists that can help. 

But when I think of conflict resolution, and I think a mental health, something I learned from another person, Dr. Terry Wu is from Vanderbilt University. He has a whole program on the stress response, and I heard him give a presentation once. And he talked about a dozen studies. And after he was done, I said, this is what I heard you say in terms of a summary. I gave that to him and then he said, Yes, I'll incorporate this in my introduction and my conclusion on the stress response.

But the stress response boils down to three things. Control, predictability, and progress, control, predictability and progress. We want to be in control. So think about, do I control this or not? If I don't, I have to let it go that I don't control that. But what do I control? And if you're a micromanager, you love it because you feel like you're in control if you're the micromanaged you hate it, because you're not in control. So what can you do to focus on what you really can control, and how about help others with what they can control and not be angry about the things we can't control. 

The second is predictability. We like rituals. So when you get up in the morning, and you go into the bathroom, and you're brushing your teeth and getting ready for the day, you can look at the mirror, look in the mirror and think about what are the things I'm grateful for. For me, I'm legally blind. So I take my glasses off, I can't see. But I can see my smile. And that's about it. But I think about what I'm grateful for. And I start off with my spouse. And I think about my kids and my grandkids, I think I'm warm and dry, have enough food to eat, I looked down, I got water, I have clean water there, the world doesn't even have clean water, I have hot clean water, you do this, you produce certain chemicals and hormones in the brain. If you do this for a few minutes, it stays with you for up to eight hours. So we want to have predictability and rituals. 

And the third is progress. And oftentimes, we're working on some big project feel kind of overwhelmed. If you break it up into a lot of small parts, and you celebrate those I'm on a board on several boards. On the boards I was on we had six items to try and accomplish in a two hour period. And I was there with the six members of us on this board. And one of the folks there was from the University of Minnesota. And she's an organizational development specialist specialist. That's her specialty area. Well, each time we accomplished one of these six tasks, she paused for us and said, All right, so we celebrate that. All right. So you know we did this, it's kind of hokey, we're on a little group here of six people. Okay, all right. Well, we did that I'm just telling you doing that is not just an OD specialist, organizational development specialist telling us to do it, it's what we're doing there is we're making progress, and we're celebrating that progress. 

So to reduce stress, think about the things you control, and those that you can and those that you can't, and think about predictability, and how important that is. And also to provide that to others with what you can do to help to reduce that question with others, and then taking progress. And there's a serenity prayer out there that says, God, grant me the serenity, to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the ability to know the difference. That's kind of where you can help reduce your own stress with those kinds of things.

Jasmyn

Wow, good stuff. Just really important, like you said, to take advantage of the awareness of what's in your control and what's not. And being able to put your energy towards the right things very important. Really appreciate all these really sage reminders of how we can take control of the situation, how we can take the power back and make the most out of a uncomfortable, tricky or sticky situation. So it's really, really, really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts about this.

Before we close out our interview today, are there any other final remarks or any comments or tips or tricks you want to share? 

Michael Gregory

No other comments, no other tips. I'll just come back and say Jasmyn, you're a pleasure to work with. I really appreciate making presentations with CPAacademy. You're all very professional. So as you think about this with getting along with others, I've given you some sound bites to think about. You may want to check out some of the courses here on CPAacademy and I wish you well with our mental

Health Month here in dealing with issues related to mental health. 

Consider those sources I brought up earlier with looking at the Greater Good Science Center and the Mayo Clinic. But take it a day at a time. Do your best and have fun along the way. And don't be afraid to laugh every once in a while. There we go. 

Jasmyn

I love it. I love it. Yeah, well, definitely be sure to share the links below to access all the resources that Mike just mentioned. And of course, don't be shy. Come on back over to CPAacademy.org to check out our future webinars, including his webinars that he has scheduled throughout the remainder of this month and all throughout in the future. 

Mike, I just really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and your gifts, with myself with our members with our audience all over the world. And just thanks again.

Michael Gregory

My pleasure. Thank you, Jasmyn, have a great day.