On Building More Durable Relationships

Some of my coach­ing and con­sult­ing work is in uni­ver­si­ty set­tings. Not long ago I heard a pro­fes­sor at a fac­ul­ty meet­ing voice con­cern about his stu­dents. He’s some­one who gen­uine­ly cares about his stu­dents as matur­ing human beings who face pres­sur­ized aca­d­e­m­ic and social environments.

“You don’t want to demor­al­ize them,” he said to his col­leagues. “You want to sup­port them but some of them don’t real­ize that we’re also here to eval­u­ate their work, as well. Espe­cial­ly for some of my Ph.D stu­dents, I have to be care­ful not to crit­i­cize lest they go into a doom loop and become less pro­duc­tive. I’ve seen stu­dents get feed­back from me and turn their work around. But I’ve also seen stu­dents who I’m con­vinced ulti­mate­ly suc­ceed­ed only by my say­ing noth­ing at all.”

He chalked the dif­fer­ence up to the lev­el of self-knowl­edge of the stu­dent. There were those who knew their work was­n’t what it need­ed to be and actu­al­ly wel­comed feed­back that helped them and there were those who did­n’t seem to know their work had prob­lems and either sim­ply did­n’t want the feed­back or could­n’t han­dle it and would crash.

All of which has remind­ed me of Car­ol Dweck­’s artic­u­la­tion of fixed vs. growth mind­sets: the impor­tance of being okay with mis­takes, with not know­ing what to do or how to pro­ceed yet, with hav­ing faith in our capac­i­ties to grow and learn, and with the under­stand­ing that per­fec­tion is an unre­al­is­tic, soul-killing stan­dard. These prob­lems with the fixed mind­set can be traced to a key under­min­ing belief — that intel­li­gence is a fixed thing. You have enough of it or you don’t. And if you don’t, you are in trouble.

The idea of dura­bil­i­ty in rela­tion­ships may have a sim­i­lar aspect. We may believe our con­nec­tions with oth­ers are frag­ile and fixed and we need to be very care­ful with them, or that they are evolv­ing, can take some ups and downs and raw moments because that’s how we learn about each oth­er and deep­en our relationships.

In the late 1980’s I came across an ear­ly edi­tion of The Coach by Steven Stow­ell and Matt M. Strace­vich. It was the first book I read that sug­gest­ed work­place rela­tion­ships ought to be “durable,” mean­ing we ought to be able to share tough per­for­mance or con­duct feed­back with­out that inevitably lead­ing to some­one leav­ing or get­ting fired. This was long before our cur­rent lay­ers of social dis­cord, learn­ing trends like “resilience,” or advo­ca­cy for trau­ma-informed lead­ers and teams. To me, through all these pass­ing stages, durable has remained a most pow­er­ful word — a growth mind­set applied to our capac­i­ty to build relationships.

I’m think­ing of the pro­fes­sor and his reluc­tance to offer feed­back at all to some of his stu­dents while also know­ing this is not opti­mal in terms of his charge as an advi­sor. It seems to me he did­n’t have con­fi­dence or did­n’t see his role as build­ing rela­tion­ships as much as tech­ni­cal and ana­lyt­i­cal learning. 

To be fair, that’s not easy work at times and where dif­fi­cult feed­back is con­cerned, we tend to focus how to be per­fect in our deliv­ery of tough news rather than build­ing a rela­tion­ship that’s a durable con­tain­er for that news. For exam­ple, we place pres­sure on those offer­ing feed­back to be per­fect­ly:

• calm, clear, gen­uine and honest
• tact­ful and diplomatic
• trans­par­ent regard­ing the moti­va­tion for shar­ing it
• open to receiv­ing feed­back in a rec­i­p­ro­cal way
• patient and under­stand­ing of anoth­er’s defensiveness
• car­ing for the human being who is hear­ing some­thing that is painful or hard.

These are all great attrib­ut­es, and for sure we should work on them. Sim­i­lar­ly, as receivers of feed­back we put pres­sure on those receiv­ing feed­back to per­fect­ly:

• put aside our defen­sive­ness and lis­ten thoughtfully
• ask clar­i­fy­ing ques­tions and respond open­ly and gen­er­ous­ly, cre­at­ing a dialogue
• be grate­ful for the will­ing­ness of the sender to risk speak­ing up
• reflect and learn about our poten­tial blind spots
• not take crit­i­cism per­son­al­ly and resist blow­ing it out of proportion
• Under­stand that it is also emo­tion­al­ly dif­fi­cult for the per­son offer­ing feedback

These, too, are attrib­ut­es that we can all work toward as receivers. How­ev­er, this is not what I mean by dura­bil­i­ty. All of these attrib­ut­es may make feed­back safer, but in truth few of us can act in these ways per­fect­ly when giv­ing or receiv­ing. We make mis­takes. We get tense. We get upset, mean­ing hurt or angry or dis­ap­point­ed or guilty. Peo­ple cer­tain­ly can and should try to do all of these things, but in a tru­ly durable rela­tion­ship, peo­ple can share and hear the feed­back even if it isn’t per­fect. Even if as senders or receivers we are both a lit­tle freaked out, even if our artic­u­la­tion of the feed­back or the response to it involves some false starts, dis­com­fort, awk­ward­ness — pain.

Durable means we accept each oth­er for our fail­ures to be per­fect in our con­nec­tion with one anoth­er and to our­selves, espe­cial­ly in raw moments when we are most real, accept­ing because we under­stand that as human beings inten­tions do count when things are rough. This seems to me to per­haps be an essen­tial ele­ment of dura­bil­i­ty. Inten­tion is what keeps us try­ing to do our best at this, learn­ing along the way from stum­bles so that we can work togeth­er on a part­ner­ship that serves a larg­er goal and is big­ger than our pass­ing “mis­takes.” In this regard the will­ing­ness to go back and try it again, clean up our mess­es, for­give our­selves and oth­ers for imper­fec­tion are all ele­ments of cre­at­ing gen­uine­ly durable rela­tion­ships, rather than sur­viv­ing the brit­tle ones based on iso­la­tion. It is the process of liv­ing into and through the inten­tion that makes the dif­fer­ence — the dif­fer­ence between an arti­fi­cial rose, a pic­ture of one we hope to achieve or one liv­ing for a short time in a vase ver­sus the real one, one that endures, thorns and all, alive and grow­ing in the wind and rain.

It’s pos­si­ble we want that per­fect ver­sion of our­selves as a sub­sti­tute for a rela­tion­ship ani­mat­ed by trust. We may see trust, like intel­li­gence, as not some­thing that can grow. We may live feel­ing that it’s either there or it’s not there, that we or oth­ers will only trust so much. I’ve been in many rooms where peo­ple tell me that trust has to come first before any­thing else — like feed­back — can hap­pen, but that may well be more a voice of self-pro­tec­tion than any­thing else. To me, there is no sub­sti­tute for trust any more than there is a sub­sti­tute for the scent of ros­es in a gar­den. No mat­ter who we are, as lead­ers we build trust through inten­tion — with­out guar­an­tees but with per­sis­tent hope those inten­tions merge into a com­mon vision, whether as col­leagues or friends, a vision worth talk­ing about and hold­ing to, some­thing we can be espe­cial­ly proud of in its strength and tenure, a beau­ti­ful con­nec­tion, a celebration.