Improving Workplace Relationships (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of a two-part series. You can read Part 1 here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/improving-workplace-relationships-part-1-paul-edwards-at4bc

The previous article in this series described Bishop Stendahl’s Three Rules, and described how they could be used in a workplace setting. In short, the rules are:

1. To understand a person, understand their motivations;
2. Compare your best with their best, and your worst with their worst;
3. Find something to admire in the other person.

And Ed Kessler added his fourth rule (bring a sense of humour).

To make this applicable to you, I’d like you to pause for a moment and think about a work situation you currently have, or have recently faced, where there is some kind of tension or conflict between you and another person.

For the first rule, discovering someone’s motivations is more easily said than done, and after the previous article I received a number of messages from people saying just that: how do I figure out someone’s motive? It’s a slow process and you will gain understanding over time. A gentle and effective method for understanding the motivation of others is, when a strong statement is made, to ask, “Why is this important to you?”. This will help to grow your knowledge of the other person, and may make Stendhal’s’ third rule easier to implement. What is your plan for understanding the other person's motivations?

The second rule is more of a thought experiment: it can help to run this as a discussion with a work colleague or mentor. Thinking about the situation you have visualized, and the other party you have issues with, are you really comparing your best with their best, and your worst with their worst? If not, and you adjust your comparisons, how does this change your outlook of both the other person and the situation you are facing?

For the last time, thinking back to the situation you’ve visualized and the other person in that situation: what is the one thing that you most admire about that person? Is this trait something you wished you had? This can even be a starting point in building rapport: “I know we’ve had our differences, but I do admire the way you are able to close out deals so quickly. I’d love to talk with you about it sometime.”

How do I rate?

When I reflected on how I’ve dealt with unhealthy tension in the past, there’s great opportunity for development and I have become better in dealing with conflict and tension over time. I self-rated myself (out of 10) against Stendahl’s three rules to see if they might be able to improve how I deal with these situations. I’ve given myself a range of ratings: how I perform on a bad day through to how I perform on a good day.

For Stendahl’s first rule, I rate myself between 6 and 9. If I “click” with someone (generally because our motivations and/or values are heavily overlapping), it’s easy and enjoyable to find out more about them, and any disagreements (which are usually slight) are quickly resolved. But if I find that I don’t easily click with the person, or there’s an obvious values misalignment, I do not put the effort into understanding them. This is robbing me of the opportunity to learn and find paths to resolution of disagreements between us.

The second rule? Wow, this was tough, and I struggled to even generate a rating for it. I’d be a 1 on a good day! However, talking with friends and colleagues it seems that I am not alone here. Comparing your best with someone else’s worst seems to be a common behaviour. Whilst that eases my conscience about doing it, I now realize this is something I need to consciously change in my interactions with others.

For Stendahl’s third rule, my range is anywhere between 2 and 10. If there’s someone I don’t understand, it is hard to find the good in them. We do not have much in common, and the effort of finding the good is perhaps too much. If there is someone I click with, finding the good is easy and satisfying. The challenge for me is to close this gap by bringing that lower number up somewhere closer to a 7 or 8.

On Kessler’s fourth rule, I rate pretty well. People might not get my sense of humour, but I bring it with me all the time.

I’ve already started to consciously use the rules. I was in a large meeting with a history of unhealthy tension. I explicitly set out to understand the motivations of the people who held an opposite view to me (Rule 1). What I learned from this is that the gap between what they were seeking and what I was seeking was not as large as I had thought! I then then leveraged what I learned from that to ask them how they would utilize one of their strengths (Rule 3), to achieve their motivations. The difference in dialogue was amazing. Instead of being prickly and defensive, we ended up having a terrific exploration of the problem space.

I’d encourage you to give these rules a try. Did they work just fine by themselves, or did application of the rules enhance other techniques? Did you end up applying them to the situation you visualized in the examples above? Please let us know in the comments, and let’s continue the discussion.

I'd like to thank Kristen Sanders and Suhasini Pashikanti for some great discussions which have fleshed out my thinking on this topic. Richard Farrelly and Brian Rock provided some great feedback on an early version of this article.