Relationships may be the single biggest contributing factor for our quality of life. It’s strange, then, that we mostly leave the health of our relationships to chance. Nobody teaches us how to be a good colleague, or sibling, or friend, or partner. This means that when there’s a tension or a rupture, we tend to default to whatever relationship habits we’ve inherited or defence mechanisms we’ve adopted to protect ourselves. In other words, we are reactive, rather than conscious, about how we respond.
Over the last fifteen years of training others to distribute leadership and collaborate more effectively, I have learned that relationship skills are even more crucial when you take away traditional management hierarchy. Seeing as we don’t typically learn these skills in our education system or workplaces, I want to share some of the principles and practices I’ve found most helpful.
A mindset shift
We need a mindset shift from seeing relationships as fixed to seeing them as something that can be upgraded or repaired. The first step in upgrading our relationships is to see ourselves as co-producers of them, rather than consumers or victims. We don’t need to watch helplessly as the good ones wither, and we don’t need to abandon or compromise the ones that have gone off the tracks.
Rather than relating to the word relationship as a noun, it might be more helpful to think of it as a verb: relationshipping. Relationshipping is a practice. It’s a mutual commitment.
What makes a good relationship?
I recently interviewed Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit and more recently How To Work With (Almost) Anyone. He told me that a good relationship has three qualities.
Safe
Amy Edmondson’s work around psychological safety tells us that safe here doesn’t mean nice, it means: “A belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and [it] is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”
Vital
This is about having the right balance of support and challenge. As Michael puts it:
“You need to be able to step out to the edge of what you know and how you feel. You need to be willing to maybe raise a challenge, to disagree, to have some form of healthy conflict. You need to be able to step into ambiguity and navigate that with that other person. Good relationships have this mix of safe and vital.”
Repairable
Michael read a lot of relationship experts in writing the book, everyone from Esther Perel to Dan Siegel and the Gottmans, and they all agreed on two things. One: the relationships that get repaired are the relationships that thrive, grow and become stronger. And two: most of us suck at repair.
Fighting the good fight
Part of the reason that so many of our relationships aren’t as good as they could be is the way we relate to conflict. Erotics of Liberation has made a free quiz (complete with fun memes) to help you identify which conflict archetype you are. I tend to skew towards People Pleaser, but I'm working on being more forthcoming about my needs and feelings, and engaging with conflict head-on instead of retreating to my own cave to process it alone.
Coming back to Michael’s word vital, what I’ve learned is that healthy relationships are ones where we are able to bring up tensions, face them together, and hold each other’s needs with challenge, curiosity and care. If it’s smooth sailing, that’s not a good thing. The relationships where I have the deepest trust and where I’ve grown the most are the ones where we have weathered the storm together. Where one of us has cared enough about the relationship to dare to bring something up, or dared to sit in the fire of another person’s needs or disappointments in order to restore the trust.
Interaction scripts help interpersonal risk-taking
Bringing up tensions or even just having a conversation about our relationship can often feel like some combination of vulnerable, sensitive or scary. Our brains are built to protect us from perceived threats, so any conversation with an unpredictable outcome sets off alarms. Years ago I read in Matthew Lieberman's book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect that we can't actually tell the difference between social pain and physical pain. No wonder we avoid these conversations. And because we avoid them, we never get better at them.
So what can help us be more brave?
Michael Y. Lee’s research points to interaction scripts: simple, agreed guidelines for a conversation, what we'll talk about and how, that make it safer and more normal to take a risk with each other.
In Tuff, we have developed a version of an interaction script called a Pebbles Conversation. We have made a commitment to each other that the moment any of us experiences a pebble – a small, interpersonal tension in the way of trust and openness – we ask to have a Pebbles Conversation with that person. It follows a sequence of steps: the invitation, bringing up the pebble, handing over to the other person, listening so the other person feels heard, and then co-creating agreements or next steps to improve the relationship. As someone who tends to avoid conflicts, it took me several years before I initiated my first Pebbles Conversation. But now I see that what I excused as me being accommodating or flexible was actually me withholding opportunities for my relationships to strengthen.
Start as you mean to go on
Michael offers another interaction script in his book which is the framework for a Keystone Conversation, a conversation about how we can best work together before we start working together. A Keystone Conversation generates shared responsibility and “creates permission to continue to talk about the relationship in the good times and (crucially) the hard times ahead.” It involves five essential questions:
The Amplify Question: What’s your best?
The Steady Question: What are your practices and preferences?
The Good Date Question: What can you learn from successful past relationships?
The Bad Date Question: What can you learn from frustrating past relationships?
The Repair Question: How will you fix it when things go wrong?
Stay out of the Drama Triangle
One final thing on this topic of relationships for me is the vision of us all owning our conflicts more. I worry that as a species we are becoming more and more fragile, exposed to less difference thanks to our tailored algorithms and increasingly insular lives. HR leaders have been telling me how overwhelmed their teams are with grievances and complaints, and managers are finding themselves increasingly being pulled into conflicts between two or more team members.
In my conversation with Michael, we talked about how dysfunctional The Drama Triangle is. And not just the obvious positions of Victim or Perpetrator. In the past, I often found myself in the Rescuer role, spending evenings on the phone with colleagues in conflict, listening to them, comforting them. Looking back I can see that although this was well intentioned, it was really toxic. It was exhausting for me, and I wasn’t empowering my colleagues. As Michael puts it: “Rescuers create victims. Rescuers create perpetrators.”
Strengthening relationships
A few months ago, I fractured my toe. Once it had healed, I went to a physiotherapist because I was still scared to put my weight on it, even though the X-ray proved it was fine. She told me that not only was the bone healed, but the repair process had made the bone thicker. It was actually stronger than my other bones. I no longer needed to relate to it as fragile. Now I see that relationships are the same. When we heal a fracture in our relationship, it doesn’t just reset it. It strengthens it.
So my invitation is for all of us to start to change how we see our relationships. In any moment when we see our relationship isn’t as good as it could be, we can make a choice to upgrade it. If we have conversations about the relationship from the start, and if we bring up tensions early when they are just small pebbles in our shoe, we’ll be more equipped to handle the bigger conflicts when they inevitably arise. These conflicts are not signs the relationship failed. They are vital signs. And they are opportunities to grow.
Related resources
A guide for running a Relationship Retrospective on your romantic relationship by Alanna Irving (my boyfriend and I try to do this every month, though it could be used for any relationship you care deeply about)
Hi, if we haven’t met yet, I’m Lisa Gill. If you liked this post and want more:
My podcast, Leadermorphosis
My book, Moose Heads on the Table: Stories About Self-Managing Organisations from Sweden
My company, Tuff Leadership Training (where you can learn and practise, among other things, a Pebbles Conversation!)
The line about mistaking conflict avoidance for being accommodating really stayed with me. Silence can preserve calm in the moment while leaving the relationship with no way to understand what is actually happening underneath. I also liked the image of the small pebble. Addressing it early feels much less dramatic than waiting until the whole way of walking together has changed.
Such a great article. Really resonates. Thanks for sharing. I'm currently practicing Gottman at home and at work😂. It's been really helpful to have the structure even if it feels a bit unnatural at first.