Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Dealing with difficult personalities

[Catya Belfer-Shevett (catya]

> She disagrees with most of the decisions the group made before she got
> involved, and quite a few decision we have made since she got involved.

While it won't help you with this person in particular, we have a "rule" 
that by signing on as an associate you are agreeing to support all previous 
decisions of the group.  Our membership requirements (in which i just found 
a couple mis-links i need to fix) are here:
http://www.mosaic-commons.org/official/requirements.html

Are you guys doing consensus decision making?   Do you have a process in 
place for voting if you can't get to consensus?  (i.e., if she's the only 
one who thinks it's too expensive to hire an outside facilitator, can you 
override that...)

In terms of helping with her in particular - do you have a conflict 
resolution process in place?  If not, you should probably set one up. 
(Ours isn't out on our website yet, it's in draft form.)

Perhaps a small group meeting with her and whatever members feel most able 
to stand up to her / address thigns with her is in order, to talk about 
whether this group is the right fit for her?  If she's got such a need to 
have her vision be the vision of the group, starting her own separate group 
might be a better way to go for her.

There IS room in communities for people who are frequently dissenters - our 
group makes rather a lot of decisions over my orange card, and i'm often an 
outlier in terms of being on one end or another of a given spectrum.  I'm 
also one of our "burning souls", on the coordinating team, and a very 
productive member of the community.

On the other hand, part of the reason that this works is because i DON'T 
expect the group to share all of my vision, or that we'll do what I want 
all the time.  I do expect that the group will support the vision we've all 
agreed to, etc, which is a different thing.

Good luck with it,

        - catya
                         ____
Catya Belfer-Shevett  ____\  /      Interested in
catya [at] pobox.com       \  / \/      Cohousing in MA?
www.catya.org          \/       www.mosaic-commons.org
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