Having Effective Conversations to Build or Restore Trust in Any Relationship

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There are some people with whom we easily build trusting, productive relationships — people with whom we connect and take our relationships to the next level without much trouble or controversy. But there are other relationships — personal and professional — that require more work, either because past dealings or misunderstandings have created mistrust or animosity, or because different personalities make it harder sometimes to find common ground. Sometimes there is a problem in the relationship that we need to address or react to. But at other times, even if the relationship is functioning sufficiently, we want to take it to a higher, better level.

Communication: The Key to Transforming Relationships

Trust, relationships, partnerships: These are just different ways of talking about the same thing — a level of intimacy and trust necessary in order to connect, interact and collaborate well with others. This intimacy lives in communication and is shaped by communication. It gets built through communication, and it can be destroyed by communication, or a lack thereof.

Over the next few weeks, I will share my thoughts about how to take any challenging relationship and transform it into a genuine partnership based on trust, respect and understanding. I will also cover how to take relationships that are functional to the next level. The principles for both scenarios are the same. The application has to be personalized to each person, relationship and circumstance.

The Four Steps for Transforming Any Relationship

There are four steps that if you follow will enable you to significantly transform or improve any dysfunctional or functional relationship no matter what the starting point. The more you understand these steps as principles or spaces to navigate the conversation through, the more confident and effective you will be at applying them to any circumstance:

  1. Step One: Align both parties on the need for improvement in the relationship and the level of trust, the desire to achieve these improvements, and the commitment to invest the time to achieve them.
  2. Step Two: Complete the history of the relationship by fully getting each other’s reality and experiences.
  3. Step Three: Create rich and exciting new possibilities for the future of the relationship.
  4. Step Four: Turn the new possibilities into clear actions, practices and results that take the relationship to the next level.

Get on the Same Page

The first step for generating a new level of trust in the relationship is that both parties genuinely want to transform the relationship and are willing to commit the time, energy and emotion to the conversations that can make this happen. You can’t force people to do this. It’s got to be authentic. This doesn’t mean that people know how to achieve the desired outcome. It means they want it.

Create a Common Interest

It’s always easier if both sides want this and there is no need for anyone to convince anyone else. But, as we all know very well, that is often not the case. So, in order to get people on the same page, there sometime needs to be an explicit dialogue about “Why do it?” “What for?” “Why now?” and/or “What’s in it for me?”

Consider a contrarian view: There is a benefit and cost associated with having a prolonged dysfunctional or dissatisfying relationship. The benefit is typically status quo, avoidance of conflict and uncomfortable conversations. When operating in the benefit mode, people tend to blame others rather than take responsibility for the situation. This is often accompanied with some self-righteousness, which could sound like, “Why should I take the first step?” “It’s all because of them;” “I’ve tried to address this before but they didn’t cooperate;” etc.

On the other side, the cost typically includes stress and loss of joy and satisfaction. And overall it drains energy to stay upset, incomplete and/or dissatisfied in a relationship for a long time. Sometimes people become cynical or numb in the relationship or about relationships in general. I had a single woman friend who every time I asked her how her love life was going, she would tell me the same story about how “all men are selfish and only care about one thing…” Self-righteousness is costly in itself.

So, when discussing the need or opportunity for change in the relationship, you can look for the areas of cost. These will give you opportunities for areas of common interest.

We all know the saying: “It takes two to tango.” However, I believe that when it comes to relationships and trust, “It takes one to take two to tango.” So, if you are the one initiating the transformation in the relationship, don’t get distracted, discouraged or fall into blame — take responsibility for enrolling the other person in the breakthrough. Listen to their concerns. Swallow your pride. Acknowledge them as valid, even if they are not factually true. And respond to them from your commitment, not reaction.

Sometimes people don’t want to move on because they don’t trust the other person’s sincerity. So, declare your sincerity, even if you have done it before. Sometimes they feel they’ve tried to address issues before and the other person wasn’t sincere, didn’t listen, wasn’t open to what they had to say, didn’t take ownership or responsibility for past transgressions, etc. So, stay open, own their experience of your past attempts as valid, apologize if needed and express your sincere commitment to making it work this time.

This first step is the ticket into the game. Without a shared desire to elevate the relationship, the next steps are irrelevant. While it takes courage to take a relationship to the next level, especially if the starting point is dysfunctional, isn’t it “better to fail giving it your all, rather than give up without trying at all?”

Stay tuned for more next week.

Different Behavior Means Better Meetings

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In our last blog post on this topic, we talked about the difference between a meeting that is organized around an agenda and one that is oriented around outcomes. In today’s post, we further explore this topic by looking at the impact each type of meeting has on team behavior.

The fundamental difference between an agenda-driven vs. a results-driven meeting is that they elicit two very distinct types of behaviors from team members.

When a meeting is oriented around topics and an agenda, it brings about a greater degree of opinion swapping. For example: Someone expresses his or her point of view on a new product, provoking someone else to state his or hers. That then reminds someone else of something tangential which they share, and soon these conversations begin to resemble a yo-yo.

But a meeting that is oriented around outcomes provokes conversations that focus people on saying something that has to do with achieving a result. It cuts back on the tangents and encourages team members to put forth offers, recommendations and commitments that move the action forward.

Some simple ways to make sure your meetings are ‘result vs. agenda’ oriented include:

  • Declare the meeting objectives at the beginning of the meeting, rather than by the amount of time allocated to each topic. Encourage spending as much time as needed on each item to achieve the stated objective(s) of the meeting.
  • Invite people to the meeting who will gain from or contribute to the realization of the stated objectives of the meeting. Don’t invite spectators or people for political reasons.
  • Complete the meeting by summarizing the commitments made, not the topics discussed. Too often, the minutes of a meeting reflect what was talked about, not the promises made.
  • Don’t tolerate conversations that don’t directly forward the outcomes you want to achieve.

By focusing on these guidelines, your next off-site or team meeting can go from drowning in conversation to being infused with commitment.

How do you make your meetings effective? I would love to hear your comments.

Talking About What You Are Not Talking About

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What do you consider to be the key drivers of your group’s effectiveness? Is it their ability to raise and address difficult issues? Is it their skill at being able to come to alignment on common goals or objectives? Perhaps it’s their ability to subordinate their personal agendas for the common good?

Regardless, the prerequisite for all of these is the ability to have open, honest and straight conversations. It’s not what you can talk about that makes a difference at work, it’s what you can’t. It’s always what you are not dealing with that’s controlling and shaping your team.

If you want things to be different in your organization, then you have to develop the willingness and ability to talk about what you are not talking about. Here’s one way to get started.

In functional groups, ask each member of the team to write down their background conversations (their stories, opinions, judgments, ideas and perceptions) about the company and the other departments within the organization they interact with.

For example: We had one manufacturing group whose background conversation about the engineering group went something like this:

Engineering is always building prototypes, which they design in partnership with the sales group and then take and sell to the customers. But they never consult with us (Manufacturing) about our capacity to build these or seek our input regarding the design.

This leads to customers saying, “Yes, we want that,” and engineering then handing off the design to us and our struggling to deliver what they promised. We resent engineering for not including us in the process and feel like they view us as an obstacle to success. The net result of this is poor customer satisfaction, loss of customers, poor product quality and lots of failures in output.

In order to address this issue, we brought manufacturing and engineering together to discuss their background conversations about each other, and, within 18 months, both profitability and customer satisfaction soared.

The bottom line is that you have to be honest about things that are not working company-wide. If everyone knows people are nervous about layoffs or competition, put it on the table. Discuss it. One of the myths is that you have to always be positive and pump people up. But the most refreshing thing is honesty — both about the good and the bad.