part0024

Most of us spend eight hours a day, every day, at work. That’s usually more time than we spend with the person we’ve chosen to marry, let alone our friends or our family. Wouldn’t it be nice to enjoy good relationships with the people that we spend most of our waking hours with? Not only does having positive working relationships make life more pleasant, research has proven repeatedly that good working relationships lead to higher productivity and more workplace satisfaction. In a recent study of workplace dynamics reported in the Harvard Business Review , researchers found that “having a lot of coworkers who eventually developed into friends significantly increased employees’ performance, as judged by their supervisor.” 1

Too often at work we are only focused on getting our work completed. Ideally, we want to balance our time between our tasks and the relationships that help us get our work done.

Many people don’t see the value in building positive relationships at work, but let me ask you this: If someone who is a bit of a jerk asks you to do something for them, how quickly are you going to do it? If someone you dislike asks you for advice or help, how likely are you to give it? How much do you want to help this person succeed?

Now switch that around. If someone you really like asks you to perform a task, help out, or offer advice, how likely are you to do it? How much do you want to help this person succeed?

Most of us will agree that we’re far more interested in helping people we like and respect. If you can build positive relationships at work, you’re going to get more work done.

If you don’t want to become friends with everyone you work with, that’s fair, but at the bare minimum, it’s in your best interest to be professional and respectful. Professionalism is demonstrated by talking to your colleagues in a respectful tone, engaging in discussions with an open mind, and working effectively together. When you can do this, you get work done more easily, and you reduce your stress.

I work with a lot of teams that are stressed beyond belief. Most have high workloads and big demands, but their number one stressor is usually interpersonal relationships.

It’s tough dealing with other people all day long, especially when they aren’t people you would have chosen to spend a significant amount of time with. But we’ve got to find a way to make it work; otherwise, we are spending too much of our lives feeling stressed out. Think about the people who you work with; there are likely some who make you feel positive and energized and others that fill you with a deep desire to drink.

I’ve been very social and friendly all my life, but I never brought my social side fully into work because I thought it was unprofessional. Then I did a master’s degree in leadership and discovered all the research that shows the value of building positive relationships with people at work. I was encouraged by my professors to be as social and friendly in my workplace as I was in the rest of my life.

I started asking about people’s weekends, learning more about their lives and making connections. I shared more about myself and my life, and this invited others to open up too. I developed close friends. Work didn’t suffer for those ten minutes that were spent chatting in the morning or the extra fifteen minutes taken on a lunch break as we laughed about a meeting that went sideways. No, we connected in that time, and as a result, our work flourished.

We are social beings. We have a biological need to connect with other people. As Paul Zak explains, “The brain network that oxytocin activates is evolutionarily old. This means that the trust and sociality that oxytocin enables are deeply embedded in our nature. Yet at work we often get the message that we should focus on completing tasks, not on making friends.” 2

Not only is friendship a biological need, it helps us get our work done more efficiently. Gallup, a company that conducts research on employee engagement and organizational effectiveness, has designed twelve questions to help assess employee engagement. Gallup defines high engagement as “having a strong connection with one’s work and colleagues, feeling like a real contributor, and enjoying ample chances to learn.” 3 Their research has found that high engagement at work “ consistently leads to positive outcomes for both individuals and organizations. The rewards include higher productivity, better-quality products, and increased profitability.” 4

Our working relationships form 25 percent of what Gallup ranks on how engaged we are. A strong connection with work colleagues has a huge impact on productivity and engagement—research has shown that we will stay at a workplace longer and work harder when we have friends at work. Think about the people you look forward to spending your days with; they make it easier to get up on a cold and rainy Monday morning and make your way into work. In short, friends make everything more enjoyable, even the crappiest day at work.

A grandfather is talking with his grandson. The grandfather explains that we have one wolf living on our left shoulder and another living on our right shoulder and they are always battling for our attention.

One is a good wolf, which represents kindness, bravery, compassion, and love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents judgement, greed, hatred, and fear.

When it comes to how we treat others, one of our wolves is kind and compassionate and wants to connect with others; the other is judgmental and mean and values feeling superior over having meaningful relationships.

We all have our good days and our bad days, but let’s hope that we’re feeding the good wolf more often than the bad one. I don’t know about you, but I usually feel much better when I choose to be compassionate and kind rather than judgmental.

Sometimes we have to fight against our natural tendencies in order to feed the kind and compassionate wolf. It’s usually our first reaction to judge others, rather than to give them the benefit of the doubt. As Stephen M.R. Covey writes in his book The Speed of Trust : “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.” 5 When a coworker is late on a deadline, you judge them harshly for the result. When you are late on a deadline, you know that you were late because you had a number of other pressures on your time. What would it feel like to extend the same level of understanding to one another as we do to ourselves? That good wolf might just get a little stronger, making it easier for us to keep feeding it.

We tend to make quick judgments about one another, and we filter all of our interpretations and interactions through those judgments. This doesn’t help us work more effectively with others. It’s one of the reasons that building friendships at work helps us to be more productive—we are less likely to judge people who we know and trust.

In all your relationships at work, whether with friends or your most difficult colleagues, I suggest you take the approach of replacing judgment with curiosity. Every time you notice that you’re having a judgmental thought, remind yourself that you don’t know what’s really going on for that person and replace your judgmental thoughts with curiosity. Everyone has circumstances that we know nothing about.

Over a decade ago, I worked with someone who was incredibly difficult to deal with. I was not getting my work done because I was avoiding him. I found him unfriendly and unreasonably abrupt and irritable. Then I found out that his son was dying of cancer. That changed my story about him completely. I had new compassion for him, and I understood the source of his behavior more.

We all have things going on in our lives that stress us out, break our hearts, and make life difficult. Many times, our coworkers have no idea. It’s entirely possible that you don’t know what is happening in the lives of those people that you find difficult.

When we have made up our minds about people, we are filled with judgment and frustration every time we deal with them. But if we can remind ourselves that we don’t know the whole story of what’s going on for another person, we can be more open and engage with them from a place of curiosity rather than judgment.

When I’m at work, I’m quite good at noticing when I’m making an assumption and reminding myself to be curious. In my personal life, I occasionally fall down on catching my assumptions. For some reason, I often assume my seven-year-old son is up to trouble of one type or another—usually by trying to get around his limit of sixty minutes of screen time per day (I know, I’m sure all the research shows that I’m destroying his brain, but that screen time is keeping me sane). My assumptions are correct 80 percent of the time, and he’s snuck onto a phone or an iPad to play a game, but the 20 percent of the time that I’m wrong—wow, do I ever damage our relationship.

He blows up, asks why I don’t trust him, and gets quite justifiably angry. I think a lot of adults probably feel this way when they’ve been unfairly judged; we just don’t express it as clearly as my son does. I’m getting much better at using the skills of open-mindedness and curiosity that I bring to my work relationships in my personal relationships as well.

The other day I came downstairs and saw my son on the phone. Rather than jumping to the conclusion that he was playing a video game, I asked him what he was up to. “Just checking the weathercast, Mommy.” He held the phone up to show me. I smiled because I hope he never stops saying weathercast. We both had a much better morning than if I’d jumped to assumptions.

Last year, I was called into work with a highly dysfunctional team that was having a lot of conflict and not functioning effectively. They weren’t getting their most basic tasks done, let alone working as a team.

We did an exercise in which each person shared one story from their childhood in an effort to help the team members understand one another better. After people got some insight into their peers, it changed the dynamics of the group for the better. Knowing a bit about each person’s childhood helped the team members see why some people were more emotional than others, why some people struggled with authority, and why others were unusually critical.

Doing this exercise helped team members have more compassion and less judgement of one another. They also took each other’s behavior less personally and worked harder to reduce their impact on each other.

It’s unlikely that you will know the reasons why someone is being difficult, but if you can cut them some slack and remind yourself that you don’t know the whole story, you can be more open and less frustrated with them, which can make your life easier. When we stop judging one another, we build stronger working relationships, which decreases our stress and increases our productivity.

Nearly two decades ago, I was training for a mini-triathlon. I’ve always been a good swimmer, but I bike more slowly than most people run, and running just about kills me. It was quite the feat I was trying to pull off. I’d signed up for it thinking that it would force me to exercise which would help me manage my stress. Unfortunately, it didn’t inspire me to exercise and I just became more stressed out by the training I wasn’t doing, until a few weeks before the mini-triathlon when I kicked it into gear because I didn’t want to make a complete fool of myself.

I did primarily run-walks for my training, working my way up to the five kilometers I would need to be able to run. One day I was jogging my first five hundred metres and feeling pretty good. I could tell that I’d improved (because I could actually jog five hundred metres), and I was faster than I’d ever been, which was still really slow.

I saw someone running slowly towards me and I thought with jubilation, I’m running faster than her! As we grew closer to one another, I saw that she was an acquaintance. I knew she was pretty fit, so I felt extra good that I’d been running faster. We jogged slowly in place and had a quick chat. She was training for a marathon and was at the end of a thirty-kilometer run!

A very profound insight hit me then. We never know how far another person has run. We only see them at a particular point in their lives, and we make all kinds of judgements based on what we see. We don’t know what their childhood was like or what griefs and challenges they’ve encountered along the way.

One thing that I have learned over many years as a consultant is that people are complicated. The employee who stays for an extra hour to help you out might be the same employee who is stealing from the company. The coworker who is always ready with a joke and makes everyone happy cries himself to sleep every night and fights depression, so he can come to work every day.

We are all complicated and imperfect. Be compassionate with yourself and with your coworkers. Let go of the stories and judgments you have about the people you work with, recognize there are many things about them you don’t know, and keep on open mind and a compassionate heart.

When you are compassionate, not only will you be happier, your relationships and interactions will be much easier. That will reduce your stress and increase your productivity.

Do you want a simple way to significantly reduce your stress? Just start accepting people as they are. Forget wishing they’d be more communicative (or less) or more organized (or less) or more friendly (or less). Just accept everyone in your life—coworkers, managers, friends, family members, children, your accountant—exactly as they are without wanting them to change. You can’t change people, so stop dreaming about it and watch your stress plummet.

Plus, they’ll like you more. Who doesn’t want to spend time with people who accept them? You don’t even need to express your acceptance to the other person. You just need to feel acceptance, and it will change the way you interact with that person. Can you imagine what it would feel like to stop hoping another person will change and being disappointed when they don’t?

I’ve been practicing accepting people as they are, and I tell you, it’s liberating. I’ve stopped hoping my highly disorganized client is going to magically become better at organizing courses. Instead, I’ve started sending her super-specific details and double-checking our event plans. I’m doing it with grace and ease because I’ve accepted her as she is. I’ve stopped trying to rush my five-year-old daughter in the mornings and then getting upset when she digs her heels in and moves at the pace of a sloth, screaming, “I don’t like to be rushed.” She doesn’t like to be rushed. I’ve accepted that. Now I just wake her up fifteen minutes earlier.

I recently worked with a client who had a very demanding manager who never offered praise or positive feedback. Ellen was a very competent project manager in her midforties who worked for a large organization. She’d had great career success, and she knew she was good at her job. Ellen felt valued and appreciated when she received acknowledgement, positive feedback, and kudos. Her manager didn’t meet this need at all.

Ellen explained to me, “Whenever I’ve finished a particularly challenging project or gone above and beyond, my manager doesn’t even mention it—not even a thank-you, let alone acknowledging what good work I’ve done. She just starts talking about the next project.”

“So frustrated. I mean, how hard is it to point out a few good things before moving on? I gave my manager the feedback that I felt more engaged when receiving positive feedback a few months ago. She smiled and said she knew she was bad at giving positive feedback, but she was working on it. Nothing has changed since then.”

“No.” Ellen shook her head. “It’s clearly just the way she is. I’ve told her what I need, and she’s not able to do it. I’m not going to bring it up again.”

“Here’s the thing. Your manager doesn’t naturally offer praise. It clearly has nothing to do with you since she’s indicated that she’s bad at it. You’ve asked her for what you need, and you’re not getting it. You can either go back to her and explain the negative impacts of her not responding to your feedback, start looking around for a manager who is going to give you the positive feedback you need, or accept the reality of who your manager is, without expecting her to be any different.”

Ellen laughed, “Well, I know I’m not comfortable having another conversation with her about my need for positive feedback, and I generally like working for her. And I love my job, so finding another manager isn’t appealing. I guess that leaves accepting her as she is.”

She agreed to try it, and the next time we met, she was far less frustrated and irritated. She was able to focus on her manager’s strengths and what she appreciated about working for her, rather than feeling irritated that she wasn’t getting any positive praise. We also talked about ways for her to meet her need for positive feedback, and she made more time to connect with her clients as they often provided appreciation for and positive feedback about Ellen’s work .

Through adjusting expectations, accepting her manager for who she was, and getting her need for feedback met in other ways, Ellen was able to respond differently to her manager.

This helped reduce her stress and increase her productivity because instead of working for praise that would never come, she was working for her own satisfaction.

When we accept others as they are, we significantly reduce our own stress and we probably reduce their stress as well. When people don’t feel accepted or included at work, it can be very painful. In fact, research has found that “exclusion or rejection is physiologically painful. A feeling of being less than other people activates the same brain regions as physical pain.” 6

What a gift we can give to our coworkers if we can accept them as they are, if we can let them be themselves and feel a true sense of belonging. Accepting others for who they are helps us build better working relationships and significantly decreases our stress because, whether we accept them or not, people are unlikely to change. Who do you need to start accepting just as they are? Try it for a few days and see how it changes your relationship with them.

Who do you hang out with at work? It’s often the same people all the time. Having vast and varied social connections at work improves our performance and reduces our stress, but many of us don’t venture past the comfortable cliques we’ve fallen into.

According to neuroscientist David Rock: “That’s because collaborating with people you don’t know well is a threat for the brain. The brain determines, subconsciously, whether each person you meet is a friend or a foe. People you don’t know tend to be classified as foe until proven otherwise.” 7

This explains why we stick to our cliques, but what can we do about it? If we want to grow, we need to find ways to break out of our safe, comfortable social circles and engage with potential foes. Stranger danger is a biological phenomenon. Viewing people that we don’t know as threats is how we’ve survived as a species for so long. But it’s not usually that helpful, especially at work. If we decide every stranger is a foe, not only do we miss out on important social connections, we may misinterpret their intentions.

Have you ever done that? I sure have. I’ve also seen plenty of people get into really messy situations because they misread intent and discarded other people’s ideas just because they perceived those people as the enemy. Just because we’re hardwired to see strangers as threats doesn’t mean it’s good for us. When we can catch ourselves making judgments or feeling negative towards someone, it’s a great opportunity to replace our judgment with curiosity.

Get out of the stranger danger mindset! Push yourself to get to know new people at work and make connections with them. Remember that someone who doesn’t know you also thinks of you as a potential foe, so if you can take the initiative, everyone’s going to relax. A really easy way to build connections is to spend a few minutes at the beginning of each meeting connecting on a personal level. Take some time to chat about the weekend, the weather, or local sports.

Remember that research on how our social circles influence us? That’s another really good reason to break out of your cliques and build relationships with different people at work. If you can choose the right people, they’ll have a good influence on you.

Want to win friends and influence people? Tell them what you appreciate about them. I know we’ve already talked about the value of positive feedback, but I’m bringing it up again because it can have powerful impacts on our working relationships. You’ve probably lived this—don’t you have just a little more love in your heart for those people who share genuine and meaningful positive feedback with you?

revealed that the engagement level of employees who receive recognition is almost three times higher than the engagement level of those who do not. Recognition has been shown to increase happiness at work in general and is tied to cultural and business results, such as job satisfaction and retention.

High performers offer more positive feedback to peers; in fact, high-performing teams share nearly six times more positive feedback than average teams. Meanwhile, low-performing teams share nearly twice as much negative feedback than average teams. 8

Many of my clients think that only managers should give feedback, but anyone can offer specific and deliberate positive feedback. Feedback from our peers often feels more meaningful, because they’ve been working alongside us and they see our daily challenges and successes. Taking a few minutes to share what you appreciate about someone, the positive impact they’ve had on some aspect of your work or life is a great way to build relationships, create a positive workplace culture, and improve productivity. If you haven’t already done so, why not try using the AIID model we talked about in Chapter Three and share some positive feedback with your coworkers? Remember to share not just the action, but also the impact.

When I was teaching a class on feedback, one of my students said, “I go around and give out ‘attaboys’ at the end of every day.” When I suggested he try to change his “attaboys” to very specific feedback that was unique to each individual, he tried it and got tremendous results. He was amazed at how much harder his staff were working. One tweak in how he delivered feedback made a big difference in how it impacted people.

Remember the research that showed that our brains perceive every possibility as either a potential threat or a potential reward? It turns out that our sense of status strongly triggers the threat or reward response. Although we aren’t always conscious of it, we’re more concerned with our status than we realize. Black and Blake’s research, shared in David Rock’s book Your Brain at Work found that “maintaining high status is something that the brain seems to work on all the time subconsciously.” 9

What are the ways you unconsciously try to improve your status? Do you mention the high-level project you’re working on or the fact that you had lunch with the boss last week? Do you drive a fancy car or wear brand name clothes or display other status symbols? Is your job a way you define your status, so you talk about it nonstop? Do you tell everyone about how much your fancy vacations cost? Do you name-drop? There’s nothing wrong with any of these things but it’s fascinating to notice all the ways we subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) try to improve our status. The problem with our desire to improve our status is that we are often focused on being better than other people, which activates their threat response.

In workplaces, our status can be determined by hierarchy, but it can also be determined by the subtle politics of each workplace. Who is close friends with the boss? Who has worked here the longest? Who is the informal leader or most popular person? Who gets the window office or the first choice of the baked goods in the break room? All kinds of factors influence our status and the perceived status of others .

Most of us don’t consider how much our threat-and-reward response to status influences our interactions with others at work, yet it can have far-reaching and long-lasting impacts. I’ve worked with some teams where people haven’t spoken to each other for years because of some seemingly small disagreement. I’ve always been confused by that, but now I see how being perceived as “wrong,” “less than,” or “losing” activates our status threat response. We generally avoid people or situations that may activate our threat response. Status is the root cause of so many of the workplace conflicts that I’m asked to facilitate. It’s way more important than I realized.

When we are paying attention and aware of how status threats influence us, we can respond differently. When we notice that a status threat is influencing our interactions, we can calm ourselves down and approach the situation differently. The next time you find yourself in a difficult interaction, take a minute to consider how status might be influencing the situation. With that perspective, you may choose to respond to the situation differently.

Neuroscience has found one strategy to enable us to calm down another person’s threat status when they are engaging with us. It may sound familiar to you: “giving people positive feedback, pointing out what they do well, gives others a sense of increasing status, especially when done publicly.” 10

When you’re dealing with someone who you sense may feel threatened by your status, try giving them some positive feedback and see if that influences your interactions .

In addition to reassuring others and reducing their threat response, we want to be able to calm down our own status-threat response as much as possible. When we are operating in a relaxed state rather than feeling threatened, we usually make different choices.

We can create a lot of stress for ourselves by trying to increase our status. Whether it’s putting way too much pressure on ourselves to impress those with higher status in the company or spending more money than we have on expensive clothing, purses, or cars, our need for high status can cause us high stress. Think of ways you strive to increase your status and how you could make different choices now that you’re aware of them.

There are a few ways we can increase our sense of status without creating a threat response in others: we can work to grow, learn, or get better in some aspect of our lives. And we can also acknowledge our accomplishments and growth to ourselves and celebrate our wins.

Being aware of how our behavior is shaped by our threat-and-reward responses to status can help us make different choices about how we engage in relationships at work. Instead of racing into a fight when we feel our status is threatened, we can identify what we’re feeling, then respond more thoughtfully. When you think about people you’ve had difficulties with at work and you consider the element of status, do you see the situation differently? Even just being aware that status might be influencing the way we interact with another person can enable us to make different choices.

Within a culture of trust, everyone is happier and more productive. If you think about different places you’ve worked, you’ll notice there’s a huge difference between working in a high-trust environment and a low-trust environment. Low-trust environments are generally fear-based; everyone’s running around trying to cover their butts. High-trust environments are safe places where people can make mistakes, be vulnerable, and learn at work.

Trust is a big concept, but researcher Brené Brown has made it pretty simple. She makes the analogy of trust being a jar, finding that acts of trust are marbles that you either fill the jar up with or empty out of the jar. Through her research, Brown found, “the feeling [of trust] is actually the sum of small gestures, kind words, secrets kept, and other everyday actions. If you want to build trusting relationships, you need to do small, good deeds every day—and avoid equally small slip-ups that lead to an empty jar of trust.” 11

I love the idea that trust is built (or destroyed) one marble at a time because it helps us become aware of the actions that we take every day and how we normally interact with others. Even something as simple as pulling out your phone to check a text or an e-mail in the middle of a conversation can reduce trust in your relationships. People are less likely to open up when they feel your attention isn’t focused on them. When we’re more conscious of the impact of our behaviour, we can choose small daily actions that help build trust and avoid the ones that destroy trust.

Stephen Covey, the author of The Speed of Trust , has identified thirteen behaviors of high-trust leaders that we could all benefit from, whether we are in an official position of leadership or not. The thirteen behaviors are:

One common workplace challenge I’ve noticed with building trust is people don’t practice accountability or deliver results. They commit to doing a task by a particular deadline, but they don’t complete it. I’m guilty of this too. Did I mention I’m two weeks behind on my deadline for this book? How about you?

One of the best ways to build great relationships is to listen well. You’ll recall we spoke about this in the tools for having difficult conversations. If we’re really listening well, we’re building stronger relationships and often dealing with issues before they turn into difficult conversations. So many of us enter into conversations to make our own point, not to listen or to understand where the other person is coming from. If you can go into a conversation with the intent to truly listen to the other person and let go of your own agenda, you will dramatically improve your listening skills and your relationships.

When we can concentrate on the person we’re listening to, give them all of our attention, and listen well, we build stronger relationships. When we add the element of replacing our judgment with curiosity, we can listen even more effectively. When the person we are interacting with feels listened to and understood, our relationship improves.

When you’re fully engaged in a conversation and genuinely interested, you won’t need to force yourself to use any listening tools like leaning in, nodding, asking questions, paraphrasing, pausing, and not interrupting. You will naturally do these things because you genuinely care about the person and the content of the conversation.

Often my children talk about things I’m totally uninterested in. My son is currently obsessed with Star Wars , and because I love him, I now know a lot more than I ever wanted to about Star Wars . I listen to him, not because I’m interested in General Grievous or Senator Palpatine or the Inquisitor, but because I’m interested in him, and I want him to feel loved, listened to, understood, and cared for.

What are the little things that you can do in every conversation you have to make sure that whoever you’re talking to feels like you care and you’re listening well?

Building positive relationships at work can be really easy or really hard, depending on the people that you work with and your own style. Whether you’re working with difficult people or wonderful people, whether you’re naturally extroverted or naturally introverted, I encourage you to draw on what’s already been discussed in previous chapters and to use the strategies from this chapter to build trusting and positive relationships at work.

When we let go of our judgements and approach people with newfound curiosity and compassion, we can be completely surprised by the results we get. We’ll often find common ground, new respect, and a deeper connection with our coworkers by getting to know people on a personal level. On those days that it feels particularly challenging, let’s remember to feed the good wolf and choose compassion and curiosity over judgement because it will make our life easier .