Telling All the Truth Series 3 | Mending What’s Broken
Truth: People can change their behavior and repair relationships if they want to.
…if both people are willing and can both listen and define what a ‘positive, productive working relationship’ might look like for them.
Truth: People can change their behavior and repair relationships if they want to.
Typically, we hear the term “irreconcilable differences” in a legal document regarding the dissolution of a marriage. In other words: we cannot work this out. We cannot fix this. Repairing work relationships is possible if both people are willing and can both listen and define what a ‘positive, productive working relationship’ might look like for them.
I once had a client who had demoted a director. Once she had been her team leader, she reluctantly stepped back to be an equal team member while they searched for a replacement for her role. Many relationships were broken.
This was a tough situation, and when they reached out to me to see if this team could be “saved,” I had a long talk with the previous leader. She admitted that she had made some mistakes and some poor decisions. In truth, she hadn’t been prepared for the role, even though she was excited and enthusiastic. She didn’t reach out for help when she got into trouble, and some of her team members began complaining about her and sabotaging some of her efforts. For more than a year, things were pretty dysfunctional.
It’s hard to recover from something like this. She wanted to know if I thought she could still be on the team and work with her colleagues, even though things had gone so badly that her organization asked her to step down (but not leave). I was honest with her: it’s possible but won’t be easy.
I suggested the following path:
Plan to be vulnerable and honest. Own your mistakes.
Plan to meet with each team member individually and be willing to talk about how to repair the relationship and discuss the question, “Where do we go from here?”
Ask each person to be willing to work on the relationships with you.
Be willing to endure some challenging rough patches while people got to decide whether they can move forward.
Ask for the information you need so that you can also move forward.
Be willing to forgive (and let go).
Find a way to work positively with the new leader.
“Or,” I told her, “I can help you leave gracefully.”
Ultimately, she chose to leave a few months after our conversation.
When you examine the list above, you can see it’s a significant commitment requiring a lot of emotional integrity and heft, and there are no guarantees things will work out as you would like. It takes a lot of courage to repair broken relationships, so it’s almost always better to be proactive in creating, nurturing, and maintaining positive, productive relationships from the beginning. (This is why I talk about building that Trust Bank Account repeatedly!) But know this: there are no long-term relationships, professional or personal, that do not require work: forgiveness, amends, do-overs, mia culpa, back-tracks, soul-searching . . . work is the place that, if we are willing, we work out our human-ness and become better and better at relationships.
If I am supporting the repair or rebuilding of work relationships, here are some things I do and you can consider:
Get clear on what the intention of the relationship is. What’s the purpose of it? What do we need to accomplish together? Have a shared, important goal.
What are our roles and responsibilities? How is this supposed to go?
Check for willingness to make improvements and changes. Are both people willing? It’s not enough (or appropriate) to say, “I’m willing for the other person to change to make this better, but I’m not.”
Come up with a plan about how to check in with each other along the way. Presuming Good Intent is an excellent place to start (a foundational principle for Influencing Options Communication) because that helps you show up openly. You’ll also need a way to say, “Hey, something doesn’t feel right between us, so I want to get curious and check it out.”
Set up regularly scheduled times to check in and share balanced feedback: what’s going well? Where are we making progress? What’s not going well? How can we be better?
Watching my clients show up, willing to work on their relationships for the long haul, it’s so satisfying for everyone! It’s worth it to meet your common goal and purpose. Don’t be afraid to ask for help!
Missed the first 2 articles in this series? Catch up here…
Telling All the Truth: A Series
Telling All the Truth Series 2 | People Can Change
Learn more about the topics discussed in the Telling All the Truth Series…
Check out the following recommended Influencing Option Leadership programs:
Fearless & Fair Communication
Performance Coaching and Influencing program
