The key to building effective and strategic relationships at work is to make them safe, vital and repairable, says coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier. To get there, you can have a keystone conversation with your team.

When relationships in our personal lives start to come apart at the seams, we often go above and beyond in a bid to save them. We attend marriage counselling; we muster the bravery to have the difficult conversation with our friend; we sit our children down and clearly explain right and wrong to them. 

We put so much energy and effort into these relationships because we tell ourselves they’re the ones that really matter. But when it comes to fractured relationships in the workplace, we’re quick to brand them as ‘unfixable’.

We’d rather just gossip about Susan’s propensity to micromanage or complain about Simon’s chaotic approach to project management. But these are people we’re spending 40+ hours with each week – far more time than we spend with our loved ones. So why should we accept subpar relationships at work?

Having keystone conversations

Michael Bungay Stainer, coaching expert, author and founder of learning and developing company Box of Crayons, believes that setting up strong and robust relationships at work should be a strategic imperative for HR and business leaders.

A bad relationship with a colleague can make you feel anything from deflated, frustrated and confused to anxious, distressed or psychologically unsafe.

“On the flipside, think of the best relationships you’ve had,” says Bungay Stanier. “You’re braver; you’re better able to negotiate ambiguity; you’re more courageous; there’s an expansive quality; and you can feel the best version of you showing up.”

That’s why you shouldn’t just “cross your fingers” and leave these relationships to chance, he says. You need to put in the work from the get-go. That’s where the ‘keystone conversation’ comes in, which is a concept he unpacks in this latest book, How To Work With (Almost) Anyone.

“This is a conversation about how you’ll work together that occurs before you plunge into the work.”

He says there are five essential questions that should inform a keystone conversation:

• The Amplify Question: What’s your best?
• The Steady Question: What are your practices and preferences?
• The Good Date Question: What can you learn from successful past relationships?
• The Bad Date Question: What can you learn from frustrating past relationships?
• The Repair Question: How will you fix it when things go wrong?

By asking these questions, you can get a good sense of the following information:

• What that person considers to be their best qualities/abilities. For example, do they consider themselves a big-picture thinker or a detail person? This information can be invaluable when mapping out a team structure.
• How they like to work. For example, are they good on the fly or does the lack of a clearly communicated plan cause them anxiety? This can help pre-empt any issue that could arise in terms of a collaborative project.
• What they value in a manager/colleague. From an HR perspective, this is a great question to ask during the onboarding stages, as it’s useful feedback to share with that person’s manager to ensure a new hire’s first impressions of your organisation are positive.
• What don’t they value in a manager/colleague? This information is worth its weight in gold. Say they disclose their frustrations with a former manager micromanaging them, you can then ensure you’re pairing them with a manager who is known for promoting autonomy.

“The magic [in these questions] is that they create a conversation that is atypical in most working relationships,” he writes in the book. “The questions are straightforward and powerful. They’re easy enough to answer quickly… [but] they take some work to answer well.”

Creating repairable relationships

Bungay Stanier says there are three essential elements needed for an effective relationship at work. They need to be safe, vital and repairable.

“Let’s start with ‘safe’. There’s not one HR person [reading this] who isn’t already nodding along and saying, ‘Yep, I know all about psychological safety. I’ve heard about Amy Edmondson.’ It’s what allows people to show up as they are and say the things that need to be said without fear of retribution.”

‘Vital’ relationships are about going beyond psychological safety, he says. 

“Think of it as psychological bravery. This is a willingness to push, provoke and challenge to get out to the edge and take risks.”

The third element, ‘repairable’, is often where we stop in a work context.

“Most of us are pretty [bad] at repairing relationships. We just absorb the pain or feel sad about it in private. But we need a willingness to say, ‘It’s inevitable that this working relationship will get dinged up and bent and cracked and damaged. Sometimes in big ways, but mostly in small ways. 

“So the ability to repair gives that chance for the relationship to be as good as it can for as long as it can.”

“Most of us are pretty [bad] at repairing relationships. We just absorb the pain or just feel sad about it in private.” – Michael Bungay Stainer, coaching expert, author and founder of learning and developing company Box of Crayons.

The pre-work of a strong relationships

The ‘repairability’ of a relationship depends on both the pre-work that goes into it and how you bounce back from difficult moments. He draws parallels with the retail industry.

“There’s this counterintuitive research that says if you’re a brand and you screw up with a customer, but then do an amazing job at fixing the screw-up, they are 10 times more likely to recommend you than if you’d never screwed up in the first place.

“So if you’re designing a retail experience, you almost want to design a screw-up in the first interaction and then design a solution which blows people’s minds because then you’ll create raving fans.”

This is where the keystone conversations come in handy. By aligning on the five questions mentioned above, you’ll have information about what to do when things go wrong. 

“You might have asked your boss, ‘How is it best for me to bring up challenges that you might not like to hear?’ and they’ll say, ‘By going off-site to the pub and having a beer together, looking over the harbour.’ So the next time something difficult comes up, all you have to say is, ‘Let’s go to the pub and have a beer because I’ve got some things I’d like to talk about.’”

He refers to research from John Gottman, author of the book Seven Secrets of a Successful Marriage.

“He says 70 per cent of problems in a relationship are perpetual. They’re not fixable; they don’t change. Some people I’ve told that to think that’s bad and I’m like, ‘No, that’s good.’ Here’s why that’s a powerful, liberating insight: you don’t have to fix the 70 per cent. 

“You need to figure out a way to work around the 70 per cent. It means 30 per cent of the issues in a relationship are fixable. Imagine if you took your five most frustrating current working relationships – with your boss, with colleagues, with your team, with clients, with vendors – and made them 30 per cent better. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

“Sometimes removing the pain is far better than trying to amplify the good.”

Victim, persecutor and rescuer

It’s easier to get to the root of a work-related issue when you’re cognisant of the behaviours you default to in emotionally charged situations, says Bungay Stanier. He refers to Dr Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle.

“Karpman says when relationships get dysfunctional, three different roles play out. There’s the victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer.”

The persecutor’s behaviour can look like: finger-pointing, aggression, micromanaging.

“There’s power, status and a sense of moral superiority. But the price you pay is loneliness and isolation. And everybody stops working as soon as the whipping stops, so you end up doing everybody else’s work for them.”

The rescuer is always primed to jump in with advice and tries to solve everything by taking on extra work.

“Most people self-identify as a rescuer. You’ve always got to have your fingers in all these other people’s pies. And it’s probably even more endemic in HR folk.

“You often move into HR and people development because you love people. And the dark side of that is that, in the Drama Triangle, you can fall into the rescuer role:I’ll fix it, I’ll save it, I’ll solve it. And that is pretty exhausting, draining and vastly ineffective.”

And finally, the victim is prone to blame-shifting, complaining, not taking ownership.

“These people attract rescuers – people who love to save the victim.”

While you might have a default approach, people often bounce between multiple roles during a difficult conversation, he says.

“In general, I’d guess that the employee and employer are either playing the victim and persecutor role, and probably moving in between them.

“So it’s helpful just to stop and consider, ‘What’s the dynamic playing out here? What do I need to do differently to get out of the Drama Triangle?’”

How to create change

This might all sound well and good to you, but getting people to embrace the thorny parts of human relationships is much easier said than done.

It’s much easier to simply avoid someone who you feel has wronged you than to repair your issues. So how can HR help to motivate change?

“People buy medicine, they don’t buy vitamins. Meaning people will do stuff that makes the pain go away, but they’re much less likely to do stuff that just makes them a little bit better.”

HR needs to “help people feel the pain” of bad relationships, he suggests.

“Ask them, ‘Think back to a time when you’ve had a really tough working relationship and the impact it had – how it shrunk you down, how you lost your confidence, how you lost your sense of self, how you lost your trust in what you could do, how you felt diminished. And if I could show you a way of potentially making that a bit better, would you be interested?

“That’s how you’d do it on an individual level, but HR are often having to work on things at an organisational level, so then it becomes about figuring out what business problem you’re trying to solve.”

Ask yourself: What is the senior team most concerned about? “What’s the strategy they have for how this company is going to be different in five years’ time? And what problem does keeping our best people, building better relationships and allowing people to fulfil their potential solve for this organisation? Then you find language that is vitamins rather than medicine.” 

This article first appeared in the Dec-Jan 2024 edition of HRM magazine.

You can hear more from Michael Bungay Stanier in the latest episode of AHRI’s new podcast. Listen below.