CHAPTER 5
Whom Do I Travel With? (Relationships and Teams [Th]at Work)

LEADERSHIP RELATIONSHIP CHALLENGE

Despite increasingly competitive and isolating work settings and declining interpersonal skills, much work has to be accomplished with others and within teams. Great leaders help employees build skills for professional friendships between people and among teams.

Ask 10 people what brings them joy, and chances are good at least half will refer to people they love. One of the saddest experiences of Wendy’s career was talking to a client who was extremely distraught by the 9/11 phone calls that a man on one of the hijacked planes made to say good-bye to his wife. She too was upset by this image, wondering what it would feel like to receive such a call. But that wasn’t what had upset him. “You don’t get it,” he said. “What is so hard for me is that if I had been on that plane, I would have no one to call.” It is hard to imagine abundance or meaning in life without people to share it with. Friendship helps not only our leisure time teem with abundance but our work teams as well.

While much of the joy in daily life comes from sharing it with others, the challenges of getting along have not diminished with all of our technology for connecting. In fact, the anonymity of e-mails, Tweets, Web-based bulletin boards, and blogs often intensifies the challenge as it removes the personal touch so central to meaningful relationships. Globalization and equal hiring initiatives mean more and more of us work with people of different cultures, backgrounds, orientations, races, and life stages. Increasingly complex work necessitates coordinating efforts among people of diverse professional training to bring products to fruition or provide the range of services expected. Getting along with people who differ from us in either overt or subtle ways requires skill, patience, self-awareness, curiosity, and empathy. And getting along with others is catching. When one person is happy, others share the joy, and vice versa. Students with more depressed roommates become more depressed, and students with more optimistic teachers become more positive.¹

And yet we seem to have less and less opportunity to develop the very relational skills we need. Spending our days in front of screens and hooked into earphones reduces face-to-face contact and visual cues for reading one another, so we get less practice in real-time talking and listening. What we see on those screens increasingly involves gamesmanship, overt hostility, partisanship, backstabbing, and cutthroat competition, with few role models for healthy relating.

Fortunately, as we come to value the human element at work, some of the old rules about not fraternizing are starting to soften a bit. When research suggests that people with at least one really good friend at work are more apt to like their job and stick with it, friendship at work becomes an asset rather than a liability. Research by the Gallup Organization reveals that employees who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be highly engaged at work than those who do not. Those with a close friend at work are almost twice as likely to be satisfied with their pay, and that number stretches to three times as likely for those in the lowest-paying jobs. People with close friends at work are 27 percent more likely to see their strengths as aligned with the company’s goals. These friendship claimers are also statistically more likely to satisfy customers, get more done in less time, have more fun on the job, have fewer accidents at work, innovate and share ideas more, and simply show up more consistently. Those with three or more close friends at work report even more increases in work and life satisfaction.² While work friendships can create problems as well, the advantages of having strong friendships and good relationships at work seem to far outweigh the disadvantages.

Effective leaders play an important role in helping subordinates make friends, build strong teams, resolve conflicts, get along with customers, and build relationships of trust, support, and abundance throughout the organization. Effective leaders also reap the benefits of personal engagement and satisfaction when they have close friends at work.

One plant manager who was worried about abysmal scores on employee engagement measures (along with high customer complaints, high absenteeism, a poor safety record, and low overall plant performance) decided she had little to lose by trying to foster friendship among her employees (who were all men, almost all over 40, and described as hard-nosed manufacturing line workers). She began talking about the importance of caring for each other, set up a social fund to give employees money for outings with coworkers and their families, kept communication open, and openly encouraged friendship among her employees. The attitude and feeling at work changed, people started having more fun at work, and the plant became simply a more pleasant place to be. These “soft” changes also translated into hard improvement in productivity and customer perceptions. A year later the employee engagement scores were up dramatically, as were productivity and plant safety. Customer complaints decreased 50 percent, and absenteeism dropped. These trends continued the following year.³

Just as good parents let their kids work out their friendship squabbles on their own if they can, effective leaders get out of the way of other people’s relationships. But effective leaders also provide opportunities for people to get together, and they model good listening and sincere apologies, demonstrate caring, and when necessary help mediate problems. Relationships are too important to our sense of abundance and meaningful life to ignore. When people come together to make ideas grow, ideas improve and the people find more meaning. What’s more, research like that just cited suggests that good work relationships mean good business.

A Relationship Playbook

What makes for good relationships at work? It is one thing to get along while we veg out in front of the TV with someone. It is quite another to get along while designing a new Web page, coordinating efforts to clean up an oil spill, or hammering out the details of a merger. What are the keys to getting along while getting things done?

Historically, folk wisdom, family role models, and religious teachings have been humanity’s primary sources of information about what makes relationships survive and thrive. In recent years, researchers have made relationships a scientific agenda, complete with video cameras, statistical analyses, and brain imaging techniques to help us understand the nitty-gritty of how people interact. We’ve sampled that literature with a simple question in mind: What are the most important skills that grease the skids of human connection? We looked for fundamentals, but fundamentals with a punch—with proven results, solid research, and sensible theory to back them up. We wanted the essential skills that will allow someone to play the relationship game with a reasonable chance of success, both so relationships can thrive and so work can get accomplished.

We’ve grouped our findings into five learnable skill sets that seem to capture much of what it takes to promote genuine connection. As individuals develop these skills, leaders emulate them, teams adopt them, and organizations foster them, the magic fairy dust of human connection can increasingly sprinkle down on the practical world of work. These five skill sets are:

1. Make and respond to bids

2. Listen and self-disclose

3. Navigate proximity

4. Resolve conflict

5. Make amends

Make and Respond to Bids

Irene felt lucky to land a job right out of college, even if it meant a move to a new area. While Irene anticipated an adjustment period, she was unprepared for the cool reception she received at her new job. She enjoyed her clients, but the other employees seemed preoccupied and distant. The secretary smiled vacantly and showed her the copy machine but had little to say. Staff meetings consisted of the office manager reading off policy changes or calendar events while everyone listened in polite boredom. Irene resented being expected to spend many uncompensated hours each week completing paperwork as part of a new initiative, but when she raised the issue in the staff meeting, the supervisor gave everyone a lecture about budget cuts and how lucky they were to have jobs. Irene needed the money, but she began to wonder about the “lucky” part.

Whether we are new to a company or have worked there for 20 years, the process of finding supportive relationships, building good teams, or making “best friends” at work begins with making and receiving “bids.” Relationship expert John Gottman defines a bid as a request for attention.⁴ A bid might be a smile or a touch, simply looking someone in the eye, saying hello, offering a compliment, sharing something personal, requesting help, or asking a question. In the world of relationships, nothing happens until someone makes a bid. At Irene’s company the art of bidding had apparently been absorbed into the holes in the soundproofing tile: no one had much interest in anyone else at work.

Equally important in the bidding process is the response we get to our bids. If the other party does not respond by paying attention to our bid in a positive way, the game stops, like a ball that dies when a tennis serve is not returned. Unlike the tennis serve, the goal of a bid is not to defeat the opponent but to encourage a volley. In fact, even in established relationships people are not very apt to keep bidding if we don’t hit the ball back. Gottman’s research found that an overt bid that is not responded to is almost never repeated. This suggests that it is just as important that we respond to other people’s bids as that we make bids.

Both making and responding to other people’s bids are crucial when we are new or when others are new to our organization. But even when people are established, relationships founder when no one is bidding or when bids are ignored. Even with old friends or family, unrequited bids are unlikely to be repeated. This doesn’t mean we have to accept every lunch invitation or agree to help everyone who asks, but our response to these bids needs to acknowledge the bidder and give positive attention even if we can’t go along. “I’m swamped” does little to grease the skids of emotional connection but will leave the bidder feeling exposed and ignored, where “Darn, wish I could. Could we reconnect in three weeks when this project is further along?” might save the volley. Even “I’m almost always committed for lunch, but have you thought of asking Tom?” might successfully redirect the ball to a more suitable player while keeping the bidder in the game.

When we raise concerns or work issues, we are also bidding for a kind of attention. The staff meetings in the preceding example were littered with the rejected bids of staff members whose concerns or questions had been virtually ignored. These dropped bids cluttered the emotional court of the staff meetings, resulting in employees who felt little commitment to the workplace, little involvement with one another, and little confidence in management.

Arina, a supervisor in a large social service agency, noticed that even though many of the employees were friendly and connected, others seemed to operate on the sidelines. Many of the latter were talented individuals whose work benefited the agency, but Arina felt like they were not having a great experience at work and wondered how long they would stay once other opportunities opened up. She took time during a training meeting to discuss the concept of bids, gave a playful demonstration of making and receiving bids, and invited discussion about what happens when bids are ignored. She encouraged everyone to pay more attention to both making and responding to bids and made sure she modeled the changes she was hoping for. She continued to bring up the concept of bids often, asked the less connected employees about their experience with bidding and responding to others’ bids, and deliberately set up time for people to connect informally. The atmosphere at the agency began to warm up, and at least some of the folks she had worried about losing started to make better connections at work.

Think about a bid for attention you have made today. What did you do? How did the other person receive your bid? Did he or she keep the volley going? Who made a bid for your attention today? Did you return the serve or let the ball bounce off the court while you looked something up on the Internet or rushed to meet a deadline? We have encouraged people to set a goal of having at least one meaningful encounter with a person each day. While this sounds easy, it often requires consciously making and receiving bids rather than falling back into personal isolation.

How would you rate the confidence people in your organization feel to make and respond to bids? Do you make a point as a leader to greet and engage people in conversation, respond attentively to their bids, and encourage others to do the same? Or are too many balls dropping out of play, making the workplace feel cool and flat? Do people at all levels understand the importance of simply making and responding to bids?

Listen and Self-Disclose

Once a relationship has been opened by a bid, two simple skills help deepen the connection: good listening and appropriate self-disclosure. These are the skills that allow close friendships to develop out of mere acquaintances. And close friendships not only lead to more engagement and satisfaction at work; they lead to a sense of meaning or abundance.

While we often think our best friends are people we have a lot in common with, research suggests that proximity is really the more important variable in who will become a close friend. Our friends are more likely to be the people who live next door than the people who live just a block away, more likely to be people in our office than one building over, more likely to be people we sit next to in a class than those across the room. Sure, among the 150 or so people we interact with regularly we will often choose to get closer to those who like the things we like or who see the world as we see it, but in almost any group of 150 we can find such people with a little effort.

In addition to good eye contact and an open posture, many good listeners take the time to restate what they are hearing to make sure they understand both the content and the feelings involved. “Wait a minute; let me make sure I understand. So you think . . . Am I understanding that right? What am I missing?” This simple three-part formula communicates real listening:

1. I’m hearing . . .

2. Is that right?

3. Is there anything else?

This formula comes in especially handy when feelings are strained or emotions run high, but it is also valuable in any kind of negotiation, including the negotiation of a new relationship.

Of course, even the best of listeners won’t get anywhere unless someone else talks. Work doesn’t always feel like a safe place to disclose the things that keep us awake at night or that are at the core of our innermost feelings. Nor do we especially care to hear the details of everyone else’s colonos-copy, marital discord, or high school basketball career. But people don’t get the benefit of having close friends at work unless they are willing to take some risk in letting people know a little more about them than what is on their résumé. And that means work has to be a reasonably safe place for people to be honest.

Leaders can help create that sense of safety by listening carefully to others and restating others’ opinions and feelings, especially when conflict or tension exists. They can also model appropriate self-disclosure by sharing their values and experiences from time to time, either one on one or in public. But self-disclosure without self-awareness or without being interested in others as well can backfire. If one person reveals too much too fast or too often while the other only listens, the “friendship” will feel more like therapy or parenting than genuine two-way connection.

Self-disclosure requires real self-awareness so one person does not dominate conversations or throw work meetings off track with too many personal stories. Everyone wants to know what the leader thinks, but only to a point. A leader who hijacks meetings with personal opinions, stories, or dramas will soon be resented by those who have no choice but to listen. Friendship is based on reciprocity, with roughly equal amounts of talking and listening on both sides and with roughly equal levels of self-disclosure. One relationship expert recommends setting a goal of three genuine connections each day. What would happen to our experience of personal abundance if we made a point to really connect in an honest and meaningful way at least three times every day?

To what extent do people who work together in teams or in your organization respectfully listen to each other at both a factual and a feeling level? Do people feel heard? Are leaders especially careful to listen, not just pontificate? Is it safe to say what is really on one’s mind? Such an atmosphere helps foster the good listening and appropriate self-disclosure that fosters deeper friendships as well as healthy work environments.

Navigate Proximity

So what happens to work while all this love is being passed around? Fortunately for our pocketbooks, human beings need more than symbiotic clinging to one another to be happy. We not only want connection—sometimes we also want to be left alone. Linguist Deborah Tannen reminds us, “There is comfort in being understood and pain in the impossibility of being understood completely. But there is also comfort in being different—special and unique—and pain in being the same as everyone else, just another cog in the wheel.”⁵

Relationships are always working at cross-purposes to some extent because people have conflicting needs for both involvement and individuality, time together and time apart. As our need for closeness is met, we begin to feel more keenly our need for solitude, for achievement, or for respite from the anxiety of relating. When we get too far into our own heads or work, we start to long for contact with others. But when we get too much of that good thing, we start to long for time apart. Tannen goes on to say, “It’s a double bind because whatever we do to serve one need necessarily violates the other. . . . Because of this double bind, communication will never be perfect; we cannot reach stasis. We have no choice but to keep trying to balance independence and involvement, freedom and safety, the familiar and the strange—continually making adjustments as we list to one side or the other.”⁶

In navigating these competing needs, Tannen finds that women in conversation often emphasize how people are alike, while men more readily point out differences.⁷ When we don’t play our expected gender role when talking with our own gender, we may create mistrust or confusion without anyone really knowing why. Likewise, when men and women talk together, they may wonder why they end up feeling at cross-purposes. Regardless of gender, our competing needs for solidarity and solitude, sameness and uniqueness are probably easier to balance if they are explicit to us and others.

Another aspect of closeness and distance is also important to consider in work relationships. To illustrate, ask yourself whom you would be most likely to turn to if you needed a creative solution to a problem—a close friend or a relative stranger. While we would probably feel more comfortable turning to a close friend, research by Mark Granovetter⁸ suggests that we will probably get a more creative solution from the stranger. People we don’t know as well are more likely to think of something we haven’t thought of, to bring fresh perspectives and unusual information to bear on our problem.

For the introverts among us who see little value in “wasting time” networking or making small talk, this is a helpful insight. I may get more feel-good support from people I’ve known long and well, but I’m more likely to get unexpected approaches to old problems from people on the fringes of my comfort zone. These are folks who are less likely to already think like I do. Doris Kearns Goodwin determined that President Abraham Lincoln’s political genius included his willingness to bring together a “team of rivals” to staff his cabinet—people who not only had not supported his presidency and his viewpoints but who were his major competitors.⁹

We don’t need the complexity of trying to work with people who intensely dislike us to get the benefits of peripheral contacts, however. Jeff is a volunteer employment specialist in the church group we attend. Of the 100 or so families who attend our congregation, roughly 10 have lost jobs, another 10 need upgraded employment, and at least 10 more have seen real economic losses in their family businesses. Jeff decided to see if the members could help each other, so he opened his home on a Sunday evening meeting to everyone who wanted to come to share ideas for improving his or her work situation. The dozen people who showed up included a realtor who was thriving on foreclosures and wanted to help others, a colonel ready to retire and wondering what to do next, a small retail shop owner struggling against new competition, and a talented carpenter who couldn’t get enough work after the housing market crashed. Jeff invited each person to share his or her situation and needs in just a couple of minutes and then invited brainstorming from the group for 10 to 15 minutes per person. By the end of two hours each of the six people who had come with a challenge had at least two or more solid ideas for new contacts, offers to help with a specific problem, or new directions to consider. A couple of people connected around an idea for a new business venture. Customers of the retail store gave its owner specific suggestions for improvement. The carpenter knew someone who was a great contact for the colonel, and the realtor gave the carpenter ideas for getting in on the foreclosure market. A random group of people with no obvious similarities in job interests were able to help everyone in the group in some way, and everyone came out grinning and energized.

This simple experiment reminds us of the value of investing in both close friends and broad social networks. Cross-functional teams, neighborhood groups, or random collections of those taking severance packages could well have answers for one another’s problems that their closest friends and colleagues do not. As a psychologist Wendy has learned that she gets better ideas by attending conferences on the periphery of her interests than those she thinks will be most central to her work. She knows a lot about things she’s really interested in, so it is harder to learn something new, whereas she gets tons of new ideas that she can apply in creative ways when she gets training from people who approach the world very differently.

Connecting us with others is one of the roles of “vital friends” at work, according to research by the Gallup Organization.¹⁰ We all need at least some friends who play the important role of connecting us with people we don’t necessarily claim as best friends. Malcolm Gladwell’s “tipping points” are fueled by such people, who always seem to know somebody who knows somebody who . . . As these folks share information and bring people together, trends are born, deals are made, and ideas are cross-germinated.

Are there ample opportunities for people in your organization to come together for support and ideas and also to work independently with sufficient privacy? Are you including on your teams people whose backgrounds and ideas differ? Where do people with divergent viewpoints come together to learn from one another? Who are the connectors, and are they valued and encouraged? What problems are people facing today that others from completely different backgrounds might shed light on if brought together to brainstorm?

Resolve Conflict

When one of our kids was about seven, we overheard her in conversation with a young friend who had come to play. They were squabbling about some now-forgotten offense, and the friend threatened to “tell.” Our daughter, unmoved, replied, “It won’t do any good. They’ll just tell us to work it out ourselves.” We didn’t know whether to be happy or sad about our daughter’s assessment. On the one hand, we hoped it meant she understood that people, even young people, could work out their problems and that we had confidence in her ability to do so. On the other hand, we wondered if our daughter felt a little too alone with her relational challenges—if she thought we were unwilling to get involved and that she was on her own.

We rely on our rational thinking and empathy for others to resolve conflicts creatively and compassionately, but people vary greatly in their skill at these basic tasks. Our conflicts with one another are sparked by all kinds of differences in how we think, feel, and see the world. We have come to appreciate more and more how much people need help to learn to get along. The skills of resolving conflict and remaining cool under a perceived attack are complicated, but they can be learned.

Understanding some of the physiology of the human brain as we respond to conflict can help us have more empathy for ourselves and others in times of disagreement. First, it helps to know that special cells called mirror neurons help us imagine, empathize with, and mimic the emotions of others. When we feel connected with people with good emotional and relational skills, our mirror neurons help our own skills improve. Just modeling how to be cool under fire and skilled at conflict management is an asset of good leadership.

Once a conflict surfaces and we decide we are under threat (and what we find threatening varies greatly from person to person), high-power hormones like cortisol and adrenaline (epinephrine) kick in. These hormones empower the body with quick self-defensive responses—a great boon when we need extra energy or faster response time against a genuine attacker. But the same hormones, especially if chronically elevated, have a disastrous effect on learning, problem-solving skill, and empathy for others. While a certain amount of pressure or expectation increases our learning, work performance, and problem-solving ability, once we get past this optimum level of demand our performance begins to decline. Adding more pressure will not help us do better; it will only undermine our performance more.

When people have been exposed to trauma, abuse, or neglect in their early years, their brains tend to become much more sensitive to threat, abandonment, shaming, or stress, pumping out the stress hormones more readily. Such individuals then respond more self-protectively or aggressively, and they take longer to calm down after a conflict. Under the best of conditions, however, the brain circuits that promote empathy and impulse control don’t always mature until the early twenties or beyond. All of these variables affect our ability to soothe ourselves when we get upset, feel empathy for others, and think objectively in the midst of conflict.

Mirror neurons are especially sensitive to the moods and perspectives of people with power, making the emotions of leaders particularly contagious at work. Leaders who are shaming, critical, or grumpy may evoke a lot of action, but not necessarily a lot of learning and real productivity. In an experiment with simulated work teams, the mood of the leader impacted not only the moods of the team members but their productivity and cooperation as well. The grumpy bosses’ teams also made poorer decisions and chose less effective strategies in their panic to please the grouchy boss. Fuming and moodiness from a leader may get more work done, but it will probably not be better work. What’s more, people remember negative interactions with a boss far longer and with more emotion than they remember the positive ones, so it takes a lot of positive interactions to make up for one emotional zinger. In contrast, feeling a sense of security, trust, and connection at work makes it easier to take tough feedback, solve problems creatively, take smart risks, and work through obstacles without giving up.

It is amazing how often relationships stagnate or conflicts escalate simply because people do not feel heard and understood. If you doubt this, think about an important relationship in your life. Ask yourself what the other person doesn’t really “get” about you. If this person were to really listen to your thoughts and feelings on this topic, restate both the content and the feelings until you agreed that he or she had it right and had not missed anything important, would you feel more willing to really try to listen to the other person’s point of view as well? Chances are good that if someone is just not listening to us, we can help the situation by really listening to him or her first.

Leaders who practice participative management recognize that participation does not always produce consensus. When two employees disagree, a leader can invite each to restate the other’s point of view until mutual understanding is reached. The leader may then make a decision and move forward.

Dave learned this in working with a senior executive who had laid out an agenda for his organization in correspondence to Dave. Dave thought the executive had missed a significant point and shared this with the executive. The executive expressed appreciation for the input but trusted his own instincts. At first Dave felt ignored, but then he realized that the executive had both listened to and understood Dave’s perspective. He just did not agree, and the call was his to make. Dave gave his full support to the decision. Participative management does not mean that we get our way but that we have been respected and heard. An executive once said, “I am putting you on my team because you and I do not think alike. If we both think alike, one of us is not necessary . . . and it won’t be me! But when we go public, we go with one voice.”

Marriage researchers wired each partner up to equipment for monitoring physiological signs of stress or relaxation and then asked them to discuss a recent disagreement. In one common pattern, one partner begins to distance from the other, showing outward signs of disinterest and withdrawal as things heat up. The other partner gets frustrated and ups the ante, raising the volume, moving closer, determined to make the distancer come back and face the music. Observers can see that the pursuer looks anxious and frustrated, and the monitors confirm that blood pressure is rising and adrenaline is pumping. But the monitors also pick up something quite unexpected about the cool, disinterested distancer. That partner’s physiological signs of stress (blood pressure, adrenaline response, activation of the part of the brain that responds to a threat), though unseen, are also extreme. While the two display their stress differently on the outside, both are being flooded by intense feelings of anxiety and stress. In fact, the apparent escape artist’s stress levels are so high as to interfere with clear thinking and problem-solving skill. Being chased by the outwardly upset spouse only makes the problem worse.

Some of us have seen similar patterns at work, even if the outward display of emotion is more restrained there. Only when both individuals agree to come back to the problem at a later time when their physiology has calmed down are they likely to get very far with a resolution.

Spouses, bosses, and friends can go a long way to improve the emotional climate in a given setting by avoiding what John Gottman calls the “four deadly horsemen” of criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. These characteristics so powerfully undercut marriages that if they show up steadily in the first three minutes of a marital conversation, researchers can predict with 96 percent accuracy that the conversation will end badly. The long-term prediction for divorce or deep dissatisfaction with the marriage follows the same pattern. In contrast, whether at work or in marriage, if conflict is managed with humor, empathy for the other person, willingness to listen nondefensively, a focus on solving the problem rather than blaming, and attention to creating an environment of emotional safety and trust, long-term satisfaction with the relationship is very likely.

As a leader, how well do you create a positive emotional atmosphere at work? (See more ideas in Chapter 6.) How well do you bring to the surface differences and conflicts inherent in any team? Are you willing to ask how people would rate you (anonymously) on how consistently and skillfully you demonstrate empathetic listening, emotional trustworthiness, appropriate humor, and encouragement of others and on how consistently and skillfully you avoid criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling? When conflict erupts, are you a resource for helping people calm down their physiology instead of escalating their stress? Do you encourage a focus on problems and solutions instead of blame?

Make Amends

A perfect leader or a perfect friend would always demonstrate accurate and total empathy. He or she would always understand, always connect, always help. This individual would be completely trustworthy, always responding to our needs out of a deep understanding of what drives us or hurts us. Around such a person workers would always feel known, understood, and liked. Their sense of personal safety would skyrocket, along with their learning, productivity, and creativity. This is in principle only, of course. In actuality, we learn to deal with stress, problems, and conflicts in part through experience with being misunderstood, frustrated, and left—in moderate and tolerable amounts.

Unfortunately we don’t live in this perfect world. Fortunately, there is a Plan B for all of us less-than-perfect mortals: apologize.

Apologizing gets a bad rap with many people, who feel ashamed, weak, or foolish when they apologize. As a result, many people have grown up with little or no experience with a sincere apology. They have yet to learn how powerful an apology can be in making up for lapses in empathy and trustworthiness. Fortunately, apologizing is a skill that can be learned, and it is almost never too late for a sincere apology to begin its healing work.

Legal departments have been nervous about admitting guilt when things go wrong for fear of lawsuits if people get the smell of blood. But current evidence suggests that doctors who apologize sincerely for even fatal mistakes are actually less likely to be sued, and politicians and companies are following suit. People will often see through self-serving or manipulative apologies, but many folks are deciding that apologizing is not just the economically smart thing—it is the right thing. It is still nice to know that people will not generally punish us for doing that right thing.

Of course, if apologies are not deemed sincere, they won’t go far. Genuine empathy for the hurt feelings of the other person is the basis of sincerity. Once we are willing to tune in to that hurt, the steps of an effective apology are really pretty simple: (1) Say what you did wrong (if you don’t know, or you don’t think it was wrong, just go to the next step); (2) say what you understand the other person might be feeling and that you are genuinely sorry; (3) say what you will do to try to make it up to the person or what you will do differently the next time this type of problem comes up; and (4) ask if there is anything else you can do to make it right. After the apology, take upon yourself the onus of responsibility for helping the other person regain trust in you, especially if the problem was serious. These steps are generally effective at many levels, both personal and corporate, and generally go a long way in helping individuals, companies, even nations to let go and move on.

Abundant Relationships

There you have it: five basic skill sets that grease the skids of friendship, positive relationships, and teamwork that will promote the attendant benefits of increased engagement, productivity, and meaning. As leaders model, promote, ask about, teach about, encourage, and make room for people to care about each other, not just increased productivity, increased productivity may actually follow. High-performing teams derive from high-relating individuals.

Summary: Leadership Actions to Foster Relationships and Teams [Th]at Work

Develop good friendships at work and encourage others to do so too.

Learn, teach, and model the skills of

Making and receiving bids

Listening and self-disclosing

Navigating proximity

Resolving conflicts

Making amends

Apply these skills to relationships between people and among teams.