7

Otherness: Emotionally Connecting and Relating to Others

By now, we hope that you understand how important it is to seek the help of others to thrive in the SMA. We need others because we can’t think, innovate, or relate at our best alone. To relate to other people you first have to make a connection with them. It is by building a relationship over time that you build trust, and when you have caring trust, you have set the stage for the highest level of human engagement. Barbara Fredrickson explains that “good social relationships are a necessary condition for human flourishing. It is scientifically correct to say that nobody reaches his or her full potential in isolation.”¹ In other words, we are all just “people who need people” in order to do our best thinking and learning—and doing that is critical for human excellence in the SMA.

So how do you get better at connecting and relating? It’s quite obvious that connecting and relating to people is inhibited by arrogance, self-absorption, self-centeredness, not listening, closed-mindedness, lack of empathy, emotional defensiveness, and the ego protection and fear that flow from the Old Smart mental model. Accepting NewSmart and Humility as well as practicing Quieting Ego, Managing Self, and Reflective Listening lays the groundwork for relationship building with others. What else can you do to help yourself better focus on and connect with another person? Jane Dutton’s landmark work on “high quality connections” is instructive here. For Dutton, there are five keys to connecting with others.² You have to

1. be present;

2. be genuine;

3. communicate affirmation;

4. listen effectively; and

5. communicate support.

We’ve already discussed being “present” and mindful in connection with Quieting Ego, but how do we indicate to another person that we’re “present”? We do it with our words but also with our body language and emotions. So we face the person, make eye contact, genuinely smile, and open our hands and arms in a warmly inviting way. It’s also the small external behaviors such as putting your phone or tablet down when people walk into your room or office, and turning toward them or getting up to invite them in while you’re acknowledging them. This all seems so simple, right? But it’s only the start of connecting, and it requires daily effort and choice.

Dutton’s use of the term genuine is important. Being genuine means being authentic, honest, open, and vulnerable with other people. Sidney Jourard, who was a leading professor of the Humanistic psychology movement, explained another benefit of being genuine through his theory of self-disclosure in The Transparent Self: “It seems to be another fact that no man can come to know himself except as the outcome of disclosing himself to another.”³

Being genuine is hard for many people in the workplace because they work in an environment that is not an emotionally positive, trusting one. In such cases, we’re advocating being vulnerable not with people who may “harm” you but with people whom you deem trustworthy. The difficulty is that to build trust takes being genuine and vulnerable, so how do you know whether you can trust someone? Good question. Take small steps and see whether the other person reciprocates being genuine. All people need genuine human connections, so you hopefully already have them, but please understand that when you’re building a trusting relationship, someone has to have the courage to take that first small step.

To “communicate affirmation,” “listen effectively,” and “communicate support” are all about showing positive regard for people as human beings by indicating your interest in them. In the workplace, these things are especially important if you hold a higher position. I (Ed) realized this in my last leadership role. I really liked getting to work early, because it’s quiet and that’s my most productive time of day. One morning I was walking toward the coffee area, engrossed in my seemingly very important thoughts and looking at the floor. In my periphery I noticed a young analyst who worked in one of my groups. I gave him a perfunctory nod and kept going, still deep in my thoughts. About two hours later, I got a call from that young man’s boss who told me that he was about to lose the young man—his best analyst. When I asked why, the boss told me, “He doesn’t believe he has a future here, because you don’t like him.”

Turns out that the young analyst interpreted brief encounters with me such as the one that morning as brush-offs. Oh my goodness. I explained that I was simply absorbed in my thinking, but I realized how important it was to this young man that I affirm his existence and at least be courteous. I immediately went to his cubicle, to the surprise of his workmates, and apologized. I asked how could I make this right for him, and I worked hard to do so. Over the years he became a superstar high performer and worked with me on many projects. What did I learn? I learned the importance of being sensitive to those around me, and that even small interactions can have a big impact. That is why being mindful and emotionally sensitive are so important.

That was an early indication of my need to build better relationships at work, and endeavoring to do so has greatly improved my performance as well as the performance of those with whom I work. Relationship building is now becoming mission critical in the SMA, because innovative and critical thinking requires high-performing teams that collaborate well, and that simply doesn’t happen unless the teammates have trusting relationships with each other. Trust doesn’t just happen “poof.” It takes hard work, and it requires slowing down and taking time to be genuine with and care about other people.

Trust and Caring

How else to build trust and convey caring? False modesty and going through motions won’t work. Research supports the fact that we’re all pretty perceptive in determining insincerity and recognizing when people are only out for themselves, which just further undermines trust. Would you trust someone who always has to win or be right? Would you trust someone who views you as a competitor or a means to an end? Would you trust someone who is arrogant, self-promoting, a glory hog, and refuses to take ownership of his mistakes? Would you trust someone who, when challenged, becomes defensive and refuses to really engage?

Fredrickson describes the biochemistry and neuroscience of meaningful platonic relationships in Love 2.0. They require us, she said, to “escape our cocoon of self-absorption”⁴—a phrase that goes to the root of Humility that we’ve referred to frequently in this book. Relationship building also requires that we be willing to invest ourselves in the well-being of another solely for his or her sake and not because there’s something in it for us, according to Fredrickson. It’s something I (Ed) had to learn the hard way.

In my first leadership position in investment banking on Wall Street, I had high-producing teams. My style was very much “get it done.” I led by example, never asked my people to do anything I wouldn’t do myself, and believed that integrity, truthfulness, and treating all people with dignity were nonnegotiable. I told my team that if they produced, I would get them raises and bonuses and help them get promotions and/or further schooling. But what I didn’t do was to get to know them as individuals. I didn’t have time for chitchat. I didn’t care about their personal lives. My relationships at work were transactional. I was good at reading emotions, but only if doing so pertained to getting work done. I became self-absorbed in my work, and in me. I was not meaningfully relating with anyone other than myself. That philosophy and behavior worked for me for six years until I got hit on the head by a proverbial boulder at home that opened my eyes there and at work.

During those same work years, I failed to turn off work mode when I got home. In my wife’s words, I had become a business machine devoid of emotions and incapable of emotionally engaging and caring about her as a person. She told me that I needed to change, or she was out. It was then that I sought out a highly trained, well-respected executive coach. She helped me understand how meaningful relationships would add so much to my life and yield better outcomes at home and work. But it would require a lot of hard work by me.

She was right. I learned that if I took the time to really get to know my work teams individually over lunches and frequent personal check-ins, magical things would happen. It seemed the more they felt that I truly cared about them as human beings—not just as a means to my success—the more successful they were and in turn I was. It took time to connect and relate in the way that Dutton, Fredrickson, and Jourard talk about. It takes authentic caring because you can’t fake this stuff.

The more I slowed down and took the time to get to know my team, the more we connected and the more I legitimately did care about them. The more honest I was with them about me personally, the more they trusted me and were open and honest with me about their personal hopes, dreams, fears, and so forth. They always knew that they had to perform, but now they also knew that I was there for them personally because I cared about them as people. And I really did. That took our work conversations to a higher level of openness, and that led to better thinking and innovation.

In his new book Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster, Edgar Schein says that these types of more personal, open, and trusting work conversations overcome “professional distance” and lead to what he calls “Level 2 relationships.”⁵ Like him, we believe that we build such higher-quality relationships by investing time in really getting to know each other through humble inquiry and dialogue: asking open-ended personal questions, exhibiting an authentic caring attitude toward the other person, and disclosing personal thoughts and feelings.⁶

It’s helpful to create a short list that you can use before a meeting to remind yourself how to connect and relate. Here’s our list, which resulted from “making meaning” of the research. Your list may be different after making your own meaning.

1. Be really present.

2. Genuinely smile—a big smile.

3. Make eye contact.

4. Be positive.

5. Listen reflectively.

6. Stay fully present.

7. Do no harm.

Choose Words Wisely

In our work over the years, we’ve learned some other amazing tips on language that help us better connect and relate to others. For example, in Ed’s executive education classes, the tool that helped the most to facilitate connecting with others in conversation was to say “Yes, and …” instead of “Yes, but …” That simple difference in phrasing changes conversations by making them less judgmental and hierarchical and can help reduce the other person’s defensive reactions.

Ed learned this tool from a colleague, Jeanne Liedtka, a professor at the Darden School of Business and a highly regarded design thinking expert, who in turn had learned it from Darden ethics, strategy, and leadership professor Alec Horniman. While observing one of her classes over nine years ago, Ed recalls Liedtka making two memorable points to her executive students. First, she asked them to consider what would happen if they changed their “Yes, but ….” responses to “Yes, and …” ones. Second, she said something that’s central to excelling at the SMA Skills: “We all would be much better off at work and at home if we treated everything we believed as a hypothesis to be tested.”

The “Yes, and …” point applies as well to our penchant for thinking in dichotomies. Many of us often think that everything is either X or Y. Most dichotomies, however, are false, because most things exist along a continuum. In The Achievement Habit Bernard Roth shared some other language tips. He advises using “want to” instead of “have to” and to use “won’t” instead of “can’t,” because in each case the former emphasizes that you have the power of choice. Similarly, we learned from Ray Dalio to say “I believe” instead of “I think,” in order to recognize that our beliefs are subject to critical stress-testing by others and that we may not be thinking clearly. Lastly, going back to the discussion of gratitude, you can’t thank enough people enough of the time. Well, maybe you can, but few of us are that thoughtful.