Read the full transcript of Michael Bungay Stanier’s talk titled “How To Improve Your Workplace Relationships” at TEDxHartford 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER: Okay, so here’s an awkward question to start. Can you remember the worst person you ever worked with? Exactly, of course you can. When I think of the person that was my worst person, it was a boss.
I mean, for you it might have been somebody on your team or a customer or a client, but for me it was a boss. You know that moment in the movies when the assassin trains the rifle on someone and the little red dot appears? Well, that’s what her team meetings were like. Somebody would have a little dot appear, the rest of us would be trying to move out of the way and something horrible would happen.
Now, you may not remember exactly what you were working on with your person, but I bet you remember how they made you feel. Angry, sad, ashamed. I mean, some of you quit your job because of it, and for all of us it tainted the experience. We all felt diminished.
Many of us spend as much time, sometimes more time, with the people we work with than we do with our family, so these working relationships have such a big impact on the quality of our happiness and of our success. So let me remind you that you’ve also had some really great working relationships as well, and when you remember them and you think back to them, well, the vibe is completely different, right? You feel braver and bolder and better. You felt not diminished, but expanded.
You felt like this was the best version of you who could show up and do that work. Now my guess, and of course it’s only a guess, is that for most of you, you’d like more of that type of relationship than the first type of relationship. But what do we do about it? Well, most of us, not much.
We cross our fingers, we roll the dice, we hope for the best, we pray to the gods, and we just hope that we get lucky. But I think we can do more than that. I think we can actively shape the best possible working relationships. I think you can work with anyone, well, almost anyone, and I’ll get to that in just a minute.
The Secret to Success
Now when you are thinking back on that really terrific working relationship and that feeling, what do you think the secret was to its success? My bet is that it had three characteristics that showed up in the right combination for you. The first was safe, and it was vital, and it was repairable. Safe, vital, and repairable.
So let me go through those one by one and just tell you what I mean by that. Safe is the perfect place to start because for many years, actually close to 30 years, Professor Amy Edmondson from Harvard has been talking about the power and the importance of psychological safety. And we just know that when teens can talk about what’s going wrong and when people can show up with their full selves at work, things are just better. But the truth is, safe is important, but it’s not enough.
I mean, I’ve been in some working relationships that felt really safe, and if I’m honest, they felt a little boring, a little smothering. So that’s why we need this. So vital, of course, means essential, but here what I’m using it as is full of life, full of life. I mean, if this is psychological safety, then what we’re talking about here is psychological bravery.
So it’s the willingness to step out into the unknown, to say the hard thing, to push, to challenge. And the best working relationships find their right combination of safe and vital, safe and vital. The third pillar is repairable, because newsflash, every working relationship goes wrong at some stage. It gets dinged.
It gets cracked. It gets bent. It gets broken. The fabric always rips.
And of course, there’s all sorts of reasons why. Somebody forgets to have breakfast, show up hangry, right? The communication gets misunderstood. The commitment gets kind of accidentally dropped.
Maybe you just don’t like that person. They get on your nerves for some reason. But the truth is, for most of us, of these three, repairable is the hardest one to do. Because when that moment of stress comes, when you have that little moment of conflict, your lizard brain, your little amygdala takes over, and you tend to get one of four different responses.
Fight and flight. You’ve probably heard of those two. Then there’s fawn. That’s when you’re kind of like, ooh, let me be nice to you.
And then there’s faint. That’s when you just lie down on the carpet and pretend to be dead for a bit. Okay. But the research is really clear.
The relationships that last and the relationships that thrive are the relationships that get repaired. And when you get safe and vital and repairable, things aren’t just getting better. Things are moving towards being a BPR, a best possible relationship. Now notice I’m not saying best relationship.
Look, I’m not that naive. I know that not every working relationship is going to be a unicorn cap dancing its way through a meadow burping up a rainbow. But every working relationship has potential, and every working relationship can be the best version of itself. And when that happens, not only are the great ones, do they stay great longer, but the good ones, the ones in the middle, they get a little bit more magic, a little bit more sparkle.
And the bad ones, and this is important, the bad ones change as well. They move from unbearable to bearable, from unworkable to workable. So that’s all good in theory, but how do you do this in practice?
Most of us, when we work, we just get on with the work, right?
That’s why the meeting is being held. That’s what the metrics are about. That’s what you’ve been doing for five or ten or a hundred years. You’ve been kind of like getting into the work.
But that’s the what, and the what of the work doesn’t generate safe and vital and repairable. It just generates work. To do that, to create a BPR, you have to get into the how. How are we going to work together?
69% of Issues Are Perpetual
And that’s not easy, particularly when you consider this number. This is one of my favorite numbers. Some of you are going to find this a bit depressing. I think it’s really liberating.
69%, it’s a number from the Gottman Institute, and the Gottman Institute are well-renowned for their research into relationships. And it says this, 69% of all issues in a relationship are perpetual. They don’t change, they can’t be fixed. And if any of you are in any type of long-term relationship, you know exactly what I’m talking about right now.
I can see some of you looking at your partners at the table and just nodding here. Like I’ve been married almost 30 years, and my wife is an amazing woman. I’m a lucky guy to have married her, and honestly, there are just a few things that drive me absolutely nuts. And my best persuasion technique, and I’m pretty good at persuasion technique, over 30 years, has made no difference whatsoever.
And apparently, unbelievably, she feels the same about me. I know, who can even understand that? So the secret to building a best possible relationship is about having a keystone conversation. A keystone conversation is about how we work together, not what we’re working on.
And a keystone conversation is what allows you to take this number, and it allows you to navigate around the 69%, because they can’t be fixed, so you’ve got to find a way of living with them. And it allows you to improve and work on the 31%. And just imagine, if you can improve every one of your key working relationships by 31%, boy, what a difference that would make in your life, and in their life, and in everybody’s life. So, keystone conversation, a conversation about how to work together, not what we’re working on.
Five Essential Questions
And at the heart of the keystone conversation are five essential questions to ask and to answer. So let me tell you what those five key questions are. Here they are. One, two, three, four, five.
Let’s start with here, the amplify. Really powerful place to start. The amplify question is, what’s your best? What’s your best?
And it brings this combination of not only what are you good at, but what are you fulfilled by? It’s really getting curious about, so what lights you up? When do I see you absolutely shine in the work you do? And can you imagine if people knew that about you, how much better your work would be?
Because they’d be trying to figure out ways to make you shine. And if you knew that about them, what you could do to improve that as well. Then the second question is the steady question. It’s like the mechanics of how you work together.
So this question is, what are your practices and what are your preferences? So it’s everything from, are you a morning person, are you an afternoon person, are you a video on person, a video off person, do you like email, do you like Slack? It can even be simply about how do you like to be called? Like my name, for instance, is Michael Bungay-Stanier.
It is not Mike Banging Spaniel, as I have been called at times, exactly. The third and the fourth question, the good date and the bad date question, the insight behind these is that patterns from your past repeat again in your future. So know what your patterns are and be able to explain them to people. So the good date question asks, what can we learn from past successful relationships?
And the bad date question asks, what can we learn from past frustrating relationships? Because the more you can explain that to people, the more they’re likely to be able to steer towards the good and steer away from the bad. And then the fifth and the final question is the repair question. The repair question is asking, how will we fix it when things go wrong?
Because as I said earlier on, things always go wrong. The fabric always rips, something goes off the rails. And the power of this question is twofold. It says, first of all, it will go wrong.
So it stops the magical thinking and says, okay, it’ll happen. How will we fix it when it does? And then secondly, it says, how will we fix it? So there’s this shared commitment to actually sorting this out and getting this right.
So there we go. Five questions. When you can ask and answer them, you start building a conversation about how we work together, not just what we’re working on, and you start trending towards a BPR, a best possible relationship. Now some of you are nodding, but some of you are sitting there thinking, this is all well and good, Michael, but honestly, have you met my boss?
Have you seen my team? Can I tell you about some of my clients? I can’t have a keystone conversation with them. That would be weird.
Weird. You know, it would certainly be unusual, because this is not a common conversation. And it would certainly be awkward the first one or two times that you do that, because you’ve got to learn your way. And these questions invite self-knowledge.
You have to know your answers to be able to share them. And a degree of vulnerability, you have to be willing to share them for people to understand who you are. But weird, I’m not sure about that, because I think weird is knowing that your success and your happiness is driven by the quality of your working relationships and not doing much about it. I think weird, or perhaps sad, is thinking to yourself, look, I’m in a suboptimal or maybe a dysfunctional working relationship, and I’m stuck.
I just can’t do much about it. But it is difficult. It’s not easy. And I think for this to happen in your life, in your organization, you may need to take the lead, because you are surrounded by people who want to have better working relationships with you.
They are hungry for it. Of course, not everybody, that’s the almost. Like everybody knows those two or those three people where you’re like, yeah, but not those two or three people. They’re a nightmare to work with.
Absolutely not. And I get that. But that leaves everybody else. Everybody else would love to actually show up as the best version of themselves and do some magical, amazing work with you.
But for that to happen, you may need to be the person who reaches out and takes the lead on this. Somebody said once, nobody likes to be the first person to say hello, but everybody loves to be greeted. This could be your moment to say hello. This could be your moment to reach out and say, hey, before we jump into the work, let’s have a conversation about how we work best together so you and I can both shine.
Conclusion
I’m not sure what the future of work holds. I mean, I know it’s AI and it’s robots, but there may be more, there may be less than that. But here’s what I know to be absolutely true. The future of work involves people like you wanting to be their best, wanting to do their best and wanting to make a difference.
And you can do that having one keystone conversation at a time, building one best possible relationship at a time. Thank you very much.
