The Book of Agreement

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF
AGREEMENT AND RESOLUTION

Some people see things as they are and say “Why.”
I dream things that never were and say “Why not.”

-George Bernard Shaw

Congratulations on making the choice to read this book. You are embarking on a learning process that will make you conscious of the ways relationships, productivity, and collaboration are intertwined. This book will teach you a fundamental life skill that we were never taught. Not having this skill has been very costly. Some costs you are already aware of; other costs you will realize as you read. As you use, and continue to use, the book as a reference tool, please share its ideas with others. My vision is that by sharing ideas, we can shift from a culture of distrust and separation to one of trust and connection. You will find sections with sample agreements for (1) business organizations, including all levels of management and many facets of corporate life; (2) professionals, including realtors, therapists, consultants, contractors, physicians, dentists, architects, coaches, and lawyers; and (3) personal relationships, including spouses, significant others, children, and families. 2


Agreements for Results

I have not seen any written material that frames effective collaboration, high levels of productivity, and personal satisfaction as a result of explicit agreements. What makes our current perspective startling is that we have been crafting agreements, and the relationships they frame, from a context of negotiation-and the way we think about negotiation is nominally collaborative but essentially adversarial. We begin negotiating as if our collaborator were our adversary! This book sets forth an operative premise that we can arrive at a joint vision of desired results from the common ground that incorporates everyone's concerns. Working from this premise allows us to craft agreements for inclusive results based on a joint vision of outcomes rather than worrying about what can go wrong and focusing on protection.


Agreement Continuum Characteristics

See Table


The accompanying chart illustrates the continuum of agreements, from no agreement to a results-based agreement, and shows the different relationships that develop from the approach used. When we have no agreements, we experience a sense of chaos. Everyone, when operating from self-interest, is “doing their own thing” without a clear understanding of what others are doing, and the operative concerns motivating behavior.

I believe formal legal agreements have their origin in the hierarchy of the feudal system. It's not surprising that power and fear 3are infused in the process. We're using a way of thinking and processes derived from a historic context that is very different from the educated, technological world we inhabit. The same phenomenon and controlling values are embedded in the operation of our courts. That's why courthouses are generally not the place to go for justice. Isn't it time for a change?

The purpose of this book is to introduce you to the simple and powerful tools of agreements for results, whose purpose is to create collaborative partnerships. You will find templates you can use as guides for crafting your own agreements. The templates are taken from real client situations I have worked with over the past fifteen years. For privacy reasons names have been changed, and sometimes I have used composites because they are better examples. The book highlights:


The difference between agreements for results and agreements for protection
The Ten Essential Elements of agreements for results-what you need to fully discuss to create a covenant-based, heartfelt agreement
Templates of effective agreements for organizational, professional, joint venture, and personal situations
The value of constructing agreements for results
The perspective of seeing the construction of agreements through authentic dialogue as trust-generating success tools
Getting to Resolution

Conflict usually arises because our agreement was inadequate. We can eliminate a great deal of conflict if we begin with a solid agreement. In Getting to Resolution1 I provided the conversational Resolutionary Model2 for resolving conflict (Chapter 6 has a good summary). The model helps you understand that the final step in resolving any conflict is putting in place a new agreement that 4incorporates the terms of the resolution and redefines the business or personal relationship.

When we move into action before we have built the solid foundation of an agreement for results, we often end up in conflict that has a transaction cost attached to it. I call this the cost of conflict. When conflict surfaces, even when you had a good agreement, you pay the transaction cost. It includes direct, productivity, opportunity, continuity, and emotional costs:


Direct-cost of professionals to help resolve

Productivity-lost time from work or diminished capacity

Opportunity-value you might be creating

Continuity-the cost of replacing valued contributors

Emotional-dampened spirit and diminished life energy


If you can develop the ability to bypass the knee-jerk reaction in evaluating a conflict situation by thinking about winning, who's right and who's wrong, who's to blame, and who needs to be punished, then you can move straight from something that's not working to creating a new agreement for results. (It's challenging to change your thinking, but have patience with yourself!) Resolving conflict could be that simple. Until that time, you can use the Resolutionary Model to get to a new agreement when conflict comes up. I say when because no matter how good your agreement is, some conflict will surface. Some conflict is also likely to surface in building an agreement for a new project or relationship. The Resolutionary Model is useful in either context.


Contents

Part I contains an explanation of agreements for results, along with templates and the principles on which they are based. The principles provide the logical and theoretical foundation from which the 5Ten Essential Elements arise. Chapter 3 contrasts collaborative agreements for results with agreements for protection.

Part II consists of agreement “forms” for many aspects of organizational life. Given the flattened, self-directed, entrepreneurial, globalized, virtual world we live in, these agreements are becoming increasingly important.

Part III contains samples for professional and business relationships. It addresses consumers of services and their service providers. The goal is to demonstrate the value of agreements that detail anticipated results and mutual promises and, most important, that clearly manage expectations about the nature of the relationship and set forth specifics about the promised performance of the “professional.” This can be especially comforting if you've never been involved with the particular kind of service before.

Just as the traditional parameters that govern organizational relationships have changed, so have those that govern personal and family relationships. It used to be that the nature of the relationship implied a set of expectations. Those implied expectations have broken down because everyone has the freedom to negotiate and articulate the unique parameters of personal relationships. Some possibilities for individuals and families are contained in Part IV.

Part V contains an implementation plan. The material of this book is not intended as an intellectual, academic experience. To understand and not use it is a waste of time. This part of the text provides a plan by which you can take control and put in place detailed agreements in all areas of your life. In Getting to Resolution I showed you how to get out of trouble once you're in it. This book is about staying out of trouble. More important, it's about thriving. It provides practical tools that can enable everyone to realize their vision through using the detail and power of agreements for results.

The book contains templates that may seem similar. That's because over the past fifteen years I was personally involved with them. As you begin working with the principles, ten elements, and samples, please stay mindful of the ways they must be modified to 6reflect your unique circumstances. These agreements are simple. They return us to fundamental basics we know to be true. You might say agreements for results represent a return to a “new old paradigm,” the one that was in place before we all started acting like lawyers negotiating for protection. The agreements in this book reflect what we left behind as we became “sophisticated.” My experience tells me we need to go back to these deeper fundamental truths. Although they are simple, they are not easy. The challenge is to make sure you have an agreement before you move forward.


Contexts

It is important to remain mindful of the context in which you are operating. Different rules, standards, and expectations are present in different situations. To have successful collaborations, we need to have awareness of the accepted operative standards and the ways in which they are changing. There was a time when, in most contexts, even without a clearly articulated agreement, widely accepted parameters provided standards and boundaries. We had sets of shared expectations about the way things were supposed to be, both in the business world and in our personal lives.

That has changed. In both business and personal situations, we are living in a world of globalization and free agency. Given a lack of universally accepted standards, every context opens the potential to craft an original articulation of what the terms are. The good news is that we have the freedom and privilege of “making it up” each time. The bad news is that with this freedom comes the responsibility to do so. And that requires focus and attention. The material in this book is simple to understand, but it is not easy to implement. We are not in the habit of taking the time to craft agreements for results, and most people don't even know what they are.

The contexts addressed in this book include business organizations, 7government, the nonprofit sector, and changing personal demographics.


Business Organizations

Agreements for results provide a clear path to follow and a road map to desired results. This is true for senior executives, for the employment relationship, among team members, for joint ventures with external organizations, and for projects of all kinds. Although this need has always been present, agreements for results are particularly important in the world of knowledge workers who are engaged in intellectual and creative projects for which there is no prescriptive path.

Historically, people went to work with the following mantras: (1) do what you are told; (2) don't make too much noise; (3) wait your turn and after thirty-five years retire from the same company where you started; and (4) pick up your gold watch at your goodbye dinner.

Organizations had multiple layers. The idea of a good “self-starter” was someone who did not have to be told what to do each morning. If you showed up dressed and groomed properly each day, you had a good chance of having a job for life. That was my observation of the AT&T culture when I went to work for Ma Bell in 1981. Things have changed-more than a little! We have undergone dynamic shifts in our organizational life. Over the past fifty years we have changed our predominating organizational culture and structure because of:


The explosion of knowledge workers
The end of the “job”
Downsizing and rightsizing (whatever the euphemism is for layoffs)
Reengineering
Self-managed teams and organizations 8
The flattening of organizational structures
Technology and the Internet
Telecommuting
Unprecedented stock market participation
Stock options
The concept of free agency
Brand “Me”
The learning organization
Merger mania
Golden parachutes
Executive MBAs
Employment litigation
“Projects” as an organizing principle
Dot.com mania and its ongoing aftermath
The workplace as primary community
People relying on their “work family”
The virtual organization
Individuals as consultants or independent contractors
The growth of contract employees
Recession
Given an evolving workplace of knowledge workers with fewer rules and greater autonomy, people need navigation tools. In addition, the breakdown of the restrictive hierarchy and the evolution of project teams provides a need for tools that will help us create structure for each cross-functional project team of which we are a part. Along with the freedom to do it our way comes the responsibility to make sure it gets done-on budget, on time, and with the requisite amount of innovation. Crafting an agreement for results at the beginning of a project provides the structure that is essential for success. 9


The Government

At one time, the government was a great place to put in your time and collect a pension. This is no longer true-certainly not since the “reinvention of government” and for quite some time before that. Although not on the leading edge in the same way as for-profit business, the government has experienced significant performance pressure over the past twenty-five years. Everyone is demanding better and more sophisticated service. Given the breakdown of traditional family structure and religious institutions, more and more people look to government agencies to provide support services and a social safety net. Because of the increased demand for services, government has been adopting many of the same management innovations to improve productivity and service as the private sector. Given the introduction of performance management, the needs for tools that foster collaboration are not much different in the government from in the private sector.


The Not-for-Profit Sector

The proliferation of NGOs has been dramatic during the past few decades. Many NGOs have been formed to take up the slack on the edges of the social-assistance capacity of government. Everything has become professionalized, and the huge growth in professional associations and industry groups reflects the appetite for resources. Some of the NGOs are similar to the government when compared to the for-profits. They are just behind the leading edge in terms of management practices, but they are reorganizing rapidly so they can provide the service demanded by leading-edge professionals.


Changing Personal Demographics

The structure of our society has changed profoundly. The images of a white Protestant mom and dad with two kids; an extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents; and a house with a 10picket fence are history. We have changed, in many ways, the context in which we live. Some of these contextual changes include:


Breakup of large, extended families due to patterns of education and mobility
Mobility, as people make choices or are transferred by their organizations
Changing ethnic and racial demographics (confirmed by the 2000 census)
Breakdown of traditional religions
The Sixties revolution, including recreational drugs and the sexual revolution
Higher levels of college, graduate, and professional education
Tolerance for group homes, communal living, out-of-wedlock children
Genetic engineering, biotechnology, and the explosion of psychotropic drugs
Increased levels of prosperity
Embracing alternative lifestyles and redesigning the concept of family
Globalization
As our context changed, there arose a need for dealing with all types of freedom. This means that there is a need to articulate rules as you go along or face the conflicts uncertainty will bring. These changes have left implicit standards in the dust. In the negotiated world we inhabit, we need the tools to craft agreements for results that will lead the way to the desired outcomes. Living in a virtual, Internet, flattened, self-managing world of free agents, with new forms of business and personal relationships, we will need new ways to express joint vision and articulate parameters and boundaries of new forms of collaboration. In some sense the only rules of collaboration that exist are the ones you define for the particular transaction. It's 11so important to have a method that will take care of collaborative transactions because today every transaction is collaborative.

The Book of Agreement cuts through to the core of what gets in the way of the highest levels of performance and productivity. It helps you elegantly create joint vision and quiets the internal voices of dissonance and conflict (mind chatter) that get in the way of real partnership. Max DePree (author of Leadership Is an Art3 and Leadership Jazz4) was the CEO of the Herman Miller Company when it was consistently voted one of the best organizations to work for in America. He believed the success of the organization was due to relationships based on covenant. Agreements for results are a path to relationships based on covenant.


Summary: Formal legal agreements have their origin in the hierarchy of the feudal system. It's not surprising that power and fear are infused in the process. We're still using a way of thinking and a process derived from a historical context that is vastly different from the educated, technological world of today. The purpose of this book is to provide simple and powerful tools to arrive at agreements for results. You will find templates you can use as guides for crafting your own agreements. The book explores:


The difference between agreements for results and agreements for protection
The ten essential elements of agreements for results-what you need to fully discuss to create a covenant-based, heart-felt agreement
Templates of effective agreements for organizational, professional, joint venture, and personal situations
The value of constructing agreements for results
The perspective of seeing the construction of agreements through authentic dialogue as trust-generating success tools
Understanding context is a critical part of working effectively. 12Business, government, NGOs, and society in general have changed a great deal in the last fifty years. Many of the accepted norms have changed. In many places there are no norms. That's why it's critical to define norms for your unique “transaction.”


Exercise: What's different about the world you live in today from the way it was ten, twenty, and thirty years ago? How are you personally impacted by the changes?