Turn toxic situations into relationships that work

How to maximise your performance through people

How much of your time is spent dealing with people? The bulk of it if you’re normal. And if you’re not dealing with them directly, you are probably spending time on some area of regulation that arises from a people situation.

The fact is that people and their concerns occupy the majority of your time and when these go wrong, issues can spiral into a far trickier employment law quagmire. How much time and emotional stamina do you have?

Consider this: everything that comes to you in life comes to you through other people. Your house, your job, your food, even your income. This applies in your business life too. Every project you work on will depend on other people. If you can manage your business relationships successfully, it is almost a given that you will be perform better in your career and your company will perform better too.

There are always difficult team members around a company who cause unhappiness and who defeat hopes of out-performance. If only you could catch these people situations before they devolve into a minefield of accusation and counter-accusation. With or without legal involvement, dysfunctional business relationships can cost you and your company, time, money, and well-being. Besides pouring oil on troubled waters, can you do something that will offer practical benefit?

Learning how humans relate to each other will give you material advantage

In this critical area of your performance in business, consider how much training you have had. Our educational and training priorities are more about the relationships between numbers, processes and regulations than they are about our relationships with other human beings. Yet in business, it is your relationships with your colleagues and clients that will determine your success or failure. We are left to learn about these relationships by experience, which is another name for ‘learning how not to do it”.

There have been tremendous advances in our understanding of how human beings relate to each other, however, and you can now tap into this knowledge to make your business relationships work for you. But first, let’s take a closer look at why your relationships may go sour.

Beware! We are each unique

You are unique but, being unique can be a problem! We regularly hear of the unique gifts we each have to offer. We hear less though, about the unique perspective each of us has, that arises from our particular combination of life’s experiences. This gives you the individual perception you bring to events that involve other people.
But those people have their own equally valid perceptions and it unlikely that your and their perceptions will match. Witness the divorce rate between people who thought they had similar perceptions on life! Can you really say that your perception is the ‘right one’? Can they? It is almost inevitable that your perceptions will clash so let’s look at whether choosing to change your perception can yield anything.

Since your perception is only a function of the perspective it arises from and is no more ‘right’ than any other, why not choose a perception that gives you power. A powerful perception can give access in a situation that was otherwise mired. Eg ‘Her work is the best but she’s always complaining’ might be replaced with ‘We don’t listen to her and her work can be even better’. Neither is right but one gives you possibility.

Can you apply this to a relationship breakdown?

Take responsibility

In any relationship breakdown we encounter, we look for a cause or who’s to blame or who is at fault. And if we’re experiencing the breakdown with someone else, invariably, the blame lies with them and they are the cause!

But have you noticed how difficult it is to get somebody to change? Were you ever successful in getting your partner to change? Even if you were able to pull rank with an employee their resentment would surface somewhere – often when you least needed it.

One of the most powerful steps you can take in any relationship is to take responsibility for it. By recognising that a relationship is not working and that you have something to do with it you gain power, because you access possibilities in a situation that were unavailable by seeking to apportion blame. It may be impossible to get someone to change but you can determine how you yourself behave in the relationship.

You can, for example, listen rather than assert your perception of the situation. When someone experiences being listened to, their frustration and resentment with you often evaporates and you experience relatedness.

Although seemingly similar, taking responsibility has nothing to do with taking blame. As a manager, you may be working with someone who has failed to meet their commitments. Clearly, blame may appear appropriate. By choosing to take responsibility, however, you can still hold them to account, but then ask yourself, “Who was I ‘being’, that he or she failed to do their job?”

This may throw up that you were unaware of what was happening in your department. Perhaps your management style created a climate of fear in which employees felt unable to confide their difficulties. By not meeting your expectations, perhaps your colleague was really telegraphing his or her view of you and/or the company’s management style. The answers to these questions, if you are straight with yourself, can throw up new openings for management that would remain hidden from you otherwise. How you behave in a relationship will determine how the other person behaves and how the relationship goes.

Get clear on their concerns and your accountabilities – and fulfil them

Any relationship will carry concerns and accountabilities and the extent to which you fulfil on these determines how the relationship goes. A state of a relationship is often an indication of how concerns and accountabilities are being met. This can this help you in a managerial situation

Whenever you employ someone you will have concerns that you expect to be fulfilled but which may not be spelled out in your employment contract. You expect for example, that the bulk of working hours will be worked and not spent by the coffee machine gossiping. You will have a concern that any conversation by the employee with a client or potential client will promote the company in the client’s eyes and seek to meet their needs. Another concern could be that, if the employee experiences some deficiency in your management style or that of the company, they will inform you directly rather than bad-mouthing you to third parties.

Whenever you meet the unsaid concerns of any relationship you are laying the foundation for a relationship that works. Conversely, when you experience the heat of management dissatisfaction on your neck, it is likely you are not sensitive to concerns about your work that higher management has.

Employees generally have a concern that managers should listen to them. Do you?

Relationships also carry accountabilities that are far more explicit. You may be accountable for training, for example. In your relationship with your company to what extent are you delivering on your accountability on time, below budget and with excellence?

When colleagues avoid eye contact with you it is a sure-fire sign that either they are not fulfilling on their concerns and accountabilities or that they have a judgement that you are not. Here is an opportunity for the objective straight talk – hard ball without getting personal – that can clear the way for a fruitful working relationship.

Where you are experiencing a relationship that is not working, take time out to consider their concerns and your accountabilities, and the extent to which you are meeting them. Fifteen per cent is not unusual in a poor relationship. Watch what happens when, quietly, you start fulfilling on these! Try this at home!

Please feel free to leave your cave and contribute

Our bodies, and the thoughts and emotions they carry, were designed in an age of scarcity. Survival took the form of who had the biggest cave, who trapped the most food and who had the most attractive mate. Our bodies have not had the time to respond and to adapt to living in the corporate age. We were not designed to work in Human Resources and certainly not designed for IT!

What drives your business relationships is still your need to survive and succeed. Your main concern and motivation is yourself and what you need. This relationship model is ubiquitous and can be the modus operandi in the business world. Success in operating it, however, fails to lead to a life of fulfilment and the cost in human happiness and resource is profound.

There is another model of relationship that offers far more possibility and that can enable you to have your relationships work powerfully for you.

The mainspring of this model is contribution rather than survival and when introduced into a team, productivity and team effectiveness can increase exponentially.

Real contribution is something that can be unpleasant in the shorter term. It may mean, for example, saying what needs to be said by being straight with someone when it would be far easier to be nice. You may have to tell your boss how poorly his or her actions are coming across when it could have consequences for you at your next appraisal. It may mean firing someone when you know that the path that they are on will lead to nowhere.

Contribution is a cause and effect action. When you contribute, the relationship works. When you don’t, it doesn’t. You choose, however.

Your ability to choose enables you to create how your life goes

Being programmed to survive, 99% of your thoughts will be about how you can best survive a situation or what experience you can take from it for next time.

But actually, you don’t need to be bound by your thoughts and can ignore them, choosing to be guided by something ultimately more fulfilling.

By ignoring “Don’t take that lying down” and choosing to contribute, you can turn a potentially toxic situation into a relationship that really works. When you do that, you won’t have to worry about your survival. The people in your life will do that for you. You will be too rare and far too valuable.

Playing Hamlet specialises in taking executive teams through a process that creates for them a compelling vision for themselves and their company, and enables the individuals concerned to put aside personal differences and reach for their future.

“90% of all US businesses have experienced employee theft ”

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