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The second “Challenge of We” are situations where the feedback itself is actually being produced by the relationship. In other words, because we’re not getting along or there’s friction in the relationship, you think I need to change. I, of course, know that you’re actually the problem. And so part of understanding the feedback in the context of the relationship is really stepping back to take a look at the relationship system that’s creating that feedback. Now the easiest way to understand this is just with an example, and one that always comes to mind for me comes from a management team. I got a call from a CEO and he said, “You know, I got these eight senior vice presidents, they can’t stand each other. They don’t talk to each other. They can’t make decisions together and they all come and complain to me about each other.
So what I found on this team, which is common when a team is struggling to work together, is that you’ve got a couple of primary conflicts between individuals that everybody else is reacting to or trying to work around. And on this team, one of the primary conflicts is between a guy I’ll call Sam, and a guy I’ll call Pete. Sam is one of these no-filter guys. Like whatever he’s thinking comes right out his mouth. And Pete tells me right upfront, “I hate conflict.” Now, to make this even more fun, Sam runs operations, which used to be Pete’s job. Pete left operations to take over international, partly because it’s the growth engine of the company, but also he admits so he can be out of the country most of the time and not have to deal with Sam.
Now, these two quickly get into a relationship system. There’s a problem every week or two between operations and international. You know who starts the conversation, Sam. Sam calls Pete. You know what Pete does, right? From Pete’s perspective, caller ID is the best invention ever. Pete doesn’t answer; he lets it go to voicemail. Sam leaves a message and immediately emails. Pete sees the email show up in his inbox. Just the sight of Sam’s name makes him anxious, so he lets it sit because he’s in the middle of a lot of other things and can’t deal right now. And when he doesn’t get a response, Sam, of course, texts, and then Sam goes to his right-hand guy, the right-hand guy says, “Sam’s looking for you.” Pete texts back, “I know.” And then eventually Sam goes to the CEO.
These two guys are in a very intense relationship system, and they have a lot of feedback for each other. When Sam goes to complain about Pete, it’s “Pete’s unresponsive, he’s irresponsible, you know, he’s being unprofessional.” Pete goes to complain about Sam, who is a bull in a China shop and doesn’t know when to back off. Now we would call this actually a self-reinforcing relationship system because each of them has an emotional coping strategy for dealing with the stress of the situation, but their strategies actually make the problem worse. So the more Sam pursues, the more Pete avoids. And the more Pete avoids, the more aggressively Sam pursues, which means the more Pete flees. So they’re actually producing exactly the behavior they don’t like.
Step 1: Look at “you + me” intersections
Now, to get a handle on this what we recommend to understand a relationship system and the feedback going on inside it is to take three steps back. The first step back looks at “you plus me” intersections, meaning, what are the ways in which we’re different and those differences are actually creating a problem between us? One guy’s really direct, aggressive, argue it out. The other guy finds that very stressful. That difference between them doesn’t cause problems in some of their other relationships that are more evenly matched, but it’s causing a problem in this relationship.
Step 2: Look at roles
The second step back then looks at roles. So, you know, my role in the organization is to nag you, your role means that what I’m nagging you about isn’t that important. That’s going to add to the friction between us.
Step 3: Look at the big picture
The third step back then looks at other people, processes, physical set up, environment that can add to the challenge. In Sam and Pete’s case, because Pete is often in a different time zone while Sam is thinking why isn’t he getting back to me? He’s not getting back to him because he’s sleeping or he’s in transit. So that’s also exacerbating the situation. Now, we finally actually got some traction on this problem about the middle of the first day. When all the eight senior vice presidents were together. It was a moment where Sam looks at Pete and he says, “Pete, I just don’t understand why when I tell you you’re full of shit, you think I’m attacking you.” And this is of course exactly what Pete hates, excuse my language. So he was kind of speechless and it took someone else on the team to step in to say, “Well Sam, I know that wouldn’t feel like an attack to you, to you that’s like an invitation to a healthy conversation, but to Pete, and by the way to a couple of others of us it’s not so easy, and it does feel like an attack.”
And once we started mapping the relationship system so they could see it, the way in which their coping strategies were making it worse and eliciting exactly the behavior they hated, they were able to step back from the pretty intense feedback turned into character accusations that they had for each other to see, okay I can see where this is now coming from. And then we reversed the arrows.
So we actually had Pete coach Sam. If Sam wants a response from you, what should he do? Coach him. Give him some feedback or coaching on this front. And Pete said, “That’s easy. First of all, don’t call me. Because when you call me you already know what the issue is and you have your preferred solution, and I have to answer the phone cold and be hit with the barrage of your advocacy, and I find that really stressful. So instead, send me an email, tell me what the problem is. If you have a preferred solution, just tell me what it is and especially tell me by when do we have to figure this out because everything’s a crisis with you and that adds to my dismissiveness.” And Sam said, “I could do that.” And so we said, “Okay Sam, what coaching would you give Pete if he wants you to back off a little bit, what should he do?” And Sam said, “Well, just tell me you got it. Tell me you got it and tell me by when are we going to figure this out, like when can you call me or when can you get back to me? Because part of the problem is I can’t tell if I’m getting through to you. But if you tell me I got it and I’ll call you Thursday morning, I can relax. I can move on and solve the next problem.”
Now, relationship systems often are very entrenched patterns in relationships. And so did this get better? Sure, for a while, but they also had to commit to each other that changing those patterns for each of them was going to be pretty challenging. You can accept feedback, but actually changing something is the next step that’s hard and they needed to agree that they would handle the slip-ups where you fell off the horse with a little bit of humor and say, “Hey Sam, you forgot to tell me about when we do we need to decide.” Or, “Hey Pete, you forgot to tell me whether you got it or not,” rather than to see it as an opportunity to say, “Ha, I knew that you were impossible.” So the challenge of we actually means understanding what in the relationship is producing this frustration that we each feel the other person is the one who needs to change. And it can really change not only your view of the feedback that you’re getting, but also it can transform that relationship with some hard work.