Why Focus on Relationships

Rarely do I meet someone who thinks it’s a bad idea to talk straight or to listen well or to learn from mistakes or to understand the other guy’s point of view. But it’s equally rare that I meet someone who isn’t either skeptical or worried about what the other guy will do in response. “What if the other guy does what he always does?” They ask me. “What if he blows up, stonewalls, or attacks me? Then where will I be?”

I found this out the hard way. Early in my career, I was so focused on individuals and on team dynamics that I failed to see that everyone in these groups hesitated to make the first move for fear of what the other guy in one or another relationship might do in response.

Confronted with this fear again and again, I finally realized that relationships within these teams were stopping people from making the changes they needed to make to improve the team’s performance.

This realization eventually led me to come up with the Relational Approach introduced in Divide or Conquer. I’m hoping that this approach will shed a much-needed light on the context that determines how everything unfolds between people: whether straight talk helps or hurts, whether you can stand to listen to what another person is saying, how well people learn from each other, even how negotiations turn out. Relationships are the platform upon which these skills are built or discarded. If that platform is strong, much can be built. If it is weak, very little will take.