Cultivate

Morag Barrett: You know, that's an interesting question. It was a combination of several events, but I think the biggest one was because my audience were asking me to. The content of the book is based on a workshop that I developed when I started Sky Team back in 2007, and every time I delivered that workshop, or the keynote version of the content, I would have a line of people coming to see me saying: "Where can I read more? When's the book coming out?" And so, hence, the book came out this year to meet that gap.

Rachel Salaman: And in the book you talk about the importance of identifying critical relationships. Could you explain that? Because it was interesting that one of your critical relationships that you mention in the book is with your barista, the guy who makes your coffee. So what is a critical relationship?

Morag Barrett: Well, I think for most of us, when we're at work, we can very quickly find ourselves running on the proverbial hamster wheel, working hard, trying to achieve our goals, and we don't take the time to stop and ask ourselves, "Are we running in the right direction, and who are we running with?"

We know when relationships at work aren't working because you're sitting in a meeting gnashing your teeth, or drumming your fingers on the table, or maybe going home and saying, "You won't believe what so and so did at work today."

But my goal is that we get ahead of that game. So one of the premises of the book and the workshop is that the world of work is the biggest team sport that any of us get to play. So think about that: you can have the best sales team in the world, but if operations can't build the product or service that you are providing then you don't have a successful organization, and you can have the best sales and operations team but if you don't have a strong HR group to recruit talent and support your growth strategy, you don't have a successful business, and that brings you back to the team sport and the nature of critical relationships.

Most people pay attention to the usual suspects – their boss that they report to, and maybe their team if they happen to be a people manager – but what we tend to overlook are the horizontal relationships that can also help or hinder our success. And you're right: in the book I talk about the barista or coffee shop person who can put your double frappuccino whatsit thingy on the counter without you even having to ask for it.

But think about it: when you're having a bad day, when somebody senses it and gives you just what you need that then brings you back into the real world and gets you out of your bad mood – doesn't that just help you and all your work interactions? So that's the importance of critical relationships – those people who can directly help but, as importantly, those people who can directly hinder you in achieving your goals.

Rachel Salaman: And in the book you identify four relationship dynamics, and those are ally, supporter, rival, and adversary. So could you tell us a little bit about each of those?

Morag Barrett: Yes, these four relationship dynamics form part of what I now call the relationship ecosystem, and in fact I suppose it goes back to your first question: why did I decide to write the book?

I grew up in finance back in the U.K.: my first 15 years was in looking at the numbers side of business, and I remember being told, "It's not personal, it's a business." And as I happen now to work in my consulting firm with a lot of technology and engineering and IT and finance organizations where it's process and systems first, what I wanted to do with these dynamics is create a language and framework that makes the intangible tangible. So these are about diagnosing the health of working relationships, those critical stakeholders, or relationships that we just talked about.

So the ally I think is the most critical, and my hope is that everybody has at least one ally, and they are the unconditional, we-focused relationship, and what I mean by that is an ally is somebody who has your back on the good days, but especially on the bad days. It's unconditional, because they are there for you no matter what: they're going to give you the tough love and feedback that you need to hear; they're also going to celebrate your successes, and they're going to help coach you through your career and navigating day-to-day challenges that you might be experiencing.

The supporter is interesting. I describe them as "insidious" in the book, because they look very much like allies – they're very nice to work with but they don't rock the boat and they tend to give you the feedback you want to hear versus the feedback you need to hear. And the key difference is, when the going gets tough, unlike an ally who steps forward with you, the supporter takes a step back and you can find yourself isolated at the very time when you need others around you.

The rival is a little bit more competitive. There might be a little bit of elbow jockeying for position – maybe the five minutes of time with your boss, the next promotion, money for your project, whatever. It's a conditional relationship and I describe it more like Jekyll and Hyde, and when I'm working with leaders around the world, they'll talk about, as they walk towards a meeting with a rival, they are thinking about their last interaction: they are either planning their offensive strategy – "I'm going to say this first and show them and put them in their place" – or they're planning their defensive strategy – "Well, if my rival does X, then I'm going to do Y." What they're not focused on is the business decision at hand: the very reason they're getting together in the first place.

And then finally, adversary. Even without describing it, most people can tell me the horror stories of working with or near adversaries, and adversaries are overt or covert. Overt – you know who the person is; covert, you just know something is wrong, which is again why you need to have an ally – somebody who has your back. But the thing about adversaries I've learned through my career is that there are very few people on this planet who get up in the morning with the intent of being perceived as an adversary, and invariably when we sit down and look at it, it's misaligned goals and expectations. It's a difference in style and approach. And, for the sake of having a conversation around how we're going to work together, this relationship is allowed to fester and unfortunately become toxic.

So those are the four dynamics that I outline in the book: ally, supporter, rival, and adversary.

Rachel Salaman: So how can understanding those dynamics help us build better relationships?

Morag Barrett: What I've found is by having a language and framework it allows you to do something: you're not a victim. So when I'm working with clients or I'm doing the keynote, I'll ask you to think about the goals you need to achieve in the next three months and who are those three to five critical relationships that could help or hinder you. Now that you've had that brief introduction to the four relationship dynamics, are any of them an ally? How would you know? And people may put their hand up; some people admit they don't have an ally just on that brief introduction, but they do have that portfolio of supporters, rivals and maybe an adversary.

So having a language allows you to start thinking about how have you contributed to this? What have you done or not done that's allowed you to have this portfolio of relationship health? And more importantly, what are you going to do to strengthen it so that you have at least one ally working alongside you.

Rachel Salaman: So thinking about allies, should we focus more on being someone's ally or on recruiting allies to our side, or doesn't it matter? Is it more or less the same thing?

Morag Barrett: I think it does matter, but it's a great question, Rachel, and I often get asked, "How do I know if somebody else is an ally to me?" And my approach is you have to start with you. So it doesn't really matter whether or not somebody else is your ally today, the question you have to answer is, "Are you an ally to them?" And this is a choice: it's not rocket science but it's a choice, and it's not something you can just do Tuesdays at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, it's a 24/7 commitment. And my experience is if you can operate as an ally with an ally mindset to others, then, over time, that will be reciprocated, but it will be reciprocated so much more quickly if you sit down and talk about the rules of engagement at some point and often throughout your working relationship.

Rachel Salaman: Now what do you mean by that exactly – the rules of engagement?

Morag Barrett: We focus very much on the what needs to be delivered in business. I saw it all the time in my banking career and in my corporate career and now as a consultant. What we don't tend to do is to sit down and talk about the how we're going to deliver those results. So how do our roles intersect? How are we going to make decisions and who is going to make what decisions? When we have got bad news – because invariably mistakes happen and things don't go to plan – how can we best bring that to each other's attention, and if I disagree, how do I disagree with you in a way that increases learning and strengthens the relationship, but doesn't damage it?

And, often, that's misperceived as being the soft fluffy side of work, and, "Oh well, Rachel, you and I, we've known each other for 10 years, we don't need to do this." Well, yes we do, because every new team, every new project, it is a different set of rules, and if we don't articulate those rules is it any wonder that we're sitting there in meetings gnashing our teeth, drumming our fingers or going home to our significant other and going, "You won't believe what happened at work today." All of those are signs that the rules of engagement haven't been articulated or aren't being held accountable to working to.

Rachel Salaman: I was interested in your book that you explore the idea of having a best friend at work, and you cite some research that shows how that can boost performance in a number of different ways. Can you tell us about that research?

Morag Barrett: One of the most famous companies that has been working on employee engagement is the Gallup organization. They talk about employee engagement and they've identified 12 questions that many organizations are using to assess the health of their company culture, but also employee engagement levels, and one of those questions is, "Do I have a best friend at work?" That correlates nicely with my concept of the ally relationship. But what Gallup have done in terms of their research is that those companies that have a higher percentage of engaged employees tend to demonstrate much higher results in customer satisfaction, higher results in terms of profitability, and higher results in terms of productivity, and their estimate in the U.S. economy alone is that disengagement – employees who are unhappy in their role – cost the U.S. economy in excess of $450 billion a year in lost productivity, lost profitability and lost customer satisfaction. It's huge. So that's one piece of data that correlates with why should you care.

The second piece: I was reading some research done by the Association of Accounting Technicians, actually back in the U.K., and they were asking what are the top 10 reasons for staying with a company and, of those top 10 reasons, relationships appeared three times. Relationship with my colleagues was number one, relationship with my boss was number three, and then the relationship I have with our customers was number seven. So forget location, location, location; it's relationship, relationship, relationship. It's not the "how" that makes us excited on Monday to go into the office or even to some extent the "what" we're being asked to do. It's all about the "who": the fact that we love – not love in a romantic way, but we enjoy working with, we're challenged by, we're learning and growing with the colleagues around us. So best friends matter and allies matter.

Rachel Salaman: Now, supporters are different from allies, as you outlined a little earlier, and you mentioned that you consider supporters to be the most insidious relationship dynamic. So what kinds of things prevent supporters from becoming allies?

Morag Barrett: That's a good question, and, in fact, I was asked that last week. I was talking at a national conference and somebody asked, "How do you move a supporter to ally?" And this is probably one of the easier transitions to make, and it comes down to, if you are somebody's ally, the most powerful thing you can do is to go and tell them. You may choose not to use the language of "I am your ally." They may not have read the book, or buy them the book and say: "Hey, I read about allies and supporters and so on, and I thought of you and I want you to know I'm your ally and here is a copy. Let's talk about it when you've had a chance to read it." So, sitting down and letting people know you have their back, that your goal is to make them as successful as you can because, in doing so, it impacts your success positively is a great start in moving supporters to becoming allies.

Rachel Salaman: So what else prevents those supporters? What holds them back in your experience?

Morag Barrett: Apathy. So, what's in it for me? The fact that nobody even asked, so they didn't have a language to even understand it. Maybe they didn't even perceive that how they were working with you as being supporter-like versus ally-like. It goes back to talking about the rules of engagement, that to be an ally means X, Y and Z. For instance, I'll give you the tough feedback when you need it. If you're having a bad day or you need advice, come and see me and it won't get on the gossip vine at work. If you need me to stay an extra hour and do the discretionary effort and help you through a sticky patch, that's what I'll do. But when we don't articulate that, then we tend to see the status quo continue, and the supporter relationship is the one that tends to emerge because it's nice, it's easy, it doesn't require effort or forethought.

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Rachel Salaman: So moving on to rivals now. How damaging are rival relationships?

Morag Barrett: Rivals, I think, are the most interesting, in that in the short term they can actually be pretty helpful, because they make sure you turn up with your A-game every day. But that's where it becomes exhausting, because if you're having to prepare and over-prepare because you're worried about how a rival is going to react, is it Jekyll or Hyde that's going to turn up in the meeting today, then over time we tend to see stress and burnout, and the relationship tends to fracture in an unhealthy way versus one where even when we disagree the relationship is strengthened.

So rivals tend to be more competitive, and they can help in the short term but absolutely my experience and the stories I hear from people within the corporate world is, over the long term, rivals and especially adversaries cause stress, cause burnout and, more importantly, will cause people to choose to leave your company or your team and find somewhere where they can thrive and where they do feel valued for their contribution.

Rachel Salaman: So if you're a manager and you spot rivalry or indeed adversaries in your team, what can you do about it?

Morag Barrett: In theory, it should be the easiest way to deal with it if they're reporting to you, and I actually had a manager come up to me and say, "Well, what do you do when you have an adversary on your team reporting to you?"

Well, that's where you're setting performance goals. You're giving them the feedback that says, "Here are the rules of engagement for my high-performing team, and this includes the values and behaviors about how we work together, and these are non-negotiable. We're either working and you're working along these lines, or you're telling me you don't want to be part of my team."

It's a tough conversation that I've obviously very much paraphrased for the purpose of our conversation, but if you don't let people know that, "Hey, that doesn't play on my team," then it will continue and, worse is, it will infect others. Those toxic behaviors infect others, information slows down, and then decision quality is impacted, and ultimately the results of the team and the performance of the whole team suffers. So if you're a manager, you can have a conversation with your team collectively and individually around your expectations for how we're going to work together.

Rachel Salaman: So you've talked a little bit about how to turn supporters into allies. How can you turn rivals and adversaries into allies?

Morag Barrett: So I'm working with people, and even in the book I certainly suggest starting with supporters, maybe then moving to rivals and leaving your adversaries until last because one of the things, if you can strengthen your rival and supporter relationships, then you have an element of peer pressure that may help influence and change an adversary's approach, versus going head to head with the most challenging relationship straight off.

But again, I've had people who have contacted me after reading the book, who said: "I had a rival. I didn't know what to call it at the time, but I read the book." And what they did was to go and have what's referred to as a baggage conversation in the book where they might go and say: "Hey, I came across this model. It got me thinking about how you and I work together and how it feels like we're butting heads. Do you feel the same?" And so in the book I give strategies for how you clear the air. How do you let go of what might have been happening in the past so that you can hopefully choose together to move forward more productively. When it comes down to relationships, whether it's adversaries, rivals, supporters or allies, relationships are built or destroyed one conversation at a time. So the way you move them, Rachel, is to have the conversation and go from there.

Rachel Salaman: So you said that adversaries should be left until last. What particular strategies help turn those relationships around?

Morag Barrett: Left until last but that doesn't mean ignore it, and I'll often talk about what happens if you've got two leaders who are all out at war. It's nothing to do with you maybe, thank goodness: you're sitting there going, "Oh, at least I'm not in the crosshairs." But the leaders I'm working with will talk about how that infects the organizational culture. But more often, people somewhere in the organization will be going: "Oh my goodness, why don't they do something about it? Why do they let these two leaders continue to fight?" And, of course, all of us are the "they" to somebody in the organization. So whether you're directly experiencing the adversarial relationship or you know of it happening elsewhere – one of those horizontal relationships, maybe, in your organization – it still is on your shoulders to do what you can to affect change, but that doesn't mean commit career suicide and take risks that really just are not worth doing. But again with adversaries, it takes courage, which is why there's a chapter on emotional intelligence in the book as well. But it is about preparing: use your allies to say: "Well I'm about to go and talk to my adversary. Here's what I'm planning to say. How do you think they might react? What can I do to help introduce this topic?" And then take a deep breath, take them for coffee, take them for lunch, take them off site, but again you make or break relationships one conversation at a time.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned that, in the book, you talk about emotional intelligence, and you point out that there are four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Could you just talk a little bit more about that and how it plays into this discussion?

Morag Barrett: You can Google emotional intelligence. There are a ton of books out there that will talk about this, and these four domains come specifically from the models by Daniel Goleman.

Self-awareness starts with you: do you understand what you're feeling in the moment? Do you understand what impact you're having on others and why? Because once you understand what you're feeling because emotions drive behavior – we feel before we think, it's hard-wired into us; it's part of our DNA. You cannot – and I had it said to me again early in my career – leave your emotions at the door: this is a business. Well, you can't: we all bring our emotions to work every day. So self-awareness lets us understand what we're feeling and why: why am I nervous when I'm going in to meet with a rival? Why am I excited for the debate that I'm going to have with my ally? Because self-management then allows us to respond appropriately. It doesn't mean we don't get angry or frustrated or upset, but we do it in a way that others understand our reaction but it doesn't then stifle the debate or the conversation, it helps us move forward.

Social awareness is about empathy: so what emotions are others experiencing? And then the relationship dynamic – it links very clearly to the work that I'm talking about in the book, about building those effective relationships that help us on the good days, but especially on the bad days.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you offer four relationship strategies. Could you share the main points of these, starting with the first one which you call "align?"

Morag Barrett: Yes. So again it's all very well having a label or a framework to describe the health of your relationships, but what if you realize you've got supporters, rivals, and adversaries, and maybe one or no allies, what do you do?

And so this chapter, when I talk about the four strategies, it is about now narrowing down what are the conversations that you need to have in order to move things forward. And at the very heart the very first conversation that we should be having every time we start a new project, join a new company, manage a new team, is the align conversation, which is all around "What are we trying to achieve? Who is on the team? What are their roles and responsibilities? What's my style? What can you expect from me either as your boss or as your colleague? What can I expect from you?" And setting those rules of engagement that we've touched on earlier in the conversation that allow us to move forward together effectively. So alignment is how are we going to work together.

Rachel Salaman: Then the next strategy is adjust.

Morag Barrett: Yes, because we are all human, and we forget that we promised that we would cc you on our emails or call you every Friday morning for an update, and when we forget, if we don't have an adjust conversation, the downward spiral may continue. Or if you don't show up to the weekly staff meeting and I don't call you and say: "Hey Rachel, we agreed that we were going to meet every Monday at 10 o'clock. Where are you?" Because the risk is that, by not calling you on it, the rest of the team now start to assume that the implicit rule is it's OK to miss the Monday morning at 10 o'clock, and the next thing you know you're sitting in a room on your own.

So the adjust is the feedback loop, it's the what's working: do we need to renegotiate because things have changed in the office? But they're also the course-correct conversations that get us back on track when you or I forget what we said we would do in order to be successful together.

Rachel Salaman: And you've mentioned the third strategy a little earlier: baggage. What more can you tell us about that one?

Morag Barrett: That one was definitely a contribution from one of my participants in a leadership program. He'd left having applied the relationship ecosystem to diagnose the health of his critical relationships and I'd identified two that he wanted to improve. And when he came back to the next leadership event, he reported out to us as to what had happened. The first one, he'd just kind of gone into it with a "Hey, we need to talk," and, as you know, nothing ever good comes from a conversation that starts with "Hey, we need to talk." And so, with the second, he changed his game and he started with, "Hey, we need to have a baggage conversation," and the other person was like, "What on earth is a baggage conversation?"

Well, that phrase stuck, and it really resonated for the group I was with, and so I said to him, "That is now going to be in the book." And so, lo and behold, the baggage conversation is the one that clears the air, and using a phrase like "Let's have a baggage conversation" usually piques the curiosity of the other person: it means they're not on the defensive, they're wanting to understand what it's all about. And that hopefully, as in his case, results in a more productive conversation that clears the air and then allows you to align and move forward.

Rachel Salaman: And finally the fourth strategy: applaud. What tips are helpful with that one?

Morag Barrett: Again, we're so busy running at work that sometimes we forget to just stop and celebrate just how much we've achieved, so the applaud is just that. It's the celebrating the successes that your colleagues have achieved, the successes that you've achieved together, and letting people know that you are their ally. So those are the three elements: saying thank you, celebrating success, and telling people, when you mean it, that you are their ally.

Rachel Salaman: You mention in the book that relationships do sometimes break down. What can people do when that happens?

Morag Barrett: Start with yourself. So yes, relationships do sometimes break down if we're not paying attention. If we don't see the warning signs usually that a relationship is starting to move off track, because if we're paying attention, if we see it, then you can have the adjust conversation and that hopefully gets things back before it becomes a major issue. But we don't because again our self-talk might be, "Well, Rachel will think I'm soft if I mention it. We've worked together for so long," or we make excuses around, "Well it was just a bad day." Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn't.

So the first thing is to pay attention when your gut is telling you something is up, and this goes back to the emotional intelligence: there is science behind why your gut is telling you something is up. And then you have to start with "What have I done or not done that's caused me to think and feel this?" It's the self-awareness and self-management that we talked about earlier – but then do something, and it's either – it starts with you. You need to change your behavior or apologize maybe for something that you've done, but you need to have a conversation with the other person and get that relationship back on track.

Rachel Salaman: You end the book with a chapter called Your Most Important Ally, `which refers to ourselves. How hard is it for people to view themselves objectively and really take that idea on board?

Morag Barrett: That's interesting, because there was a lot of debate when I was writing the book: should this come first? The first chapter in the book or the last? But what I tend to find is when we talk about relationships at work, people automatically go to everyone else: how are they reacting to me? How am I reacting to them? And we forget to think about ourselves.

In the chapter, I talk about the fact that if you've ever driven home from work and, without talking to anybody, talked yourself into a bad mood. There is an example of how our relationship with ourselves impacts how we turn up every day. And I outline what I call the "trash talk rollercoaster" in the chapter which I go through on a daily, hourly basis, and it starts and it goes something like this: "This is awesome," when you're having a great day, you think you're invincible, "Hurrah." Then it goes to "Wow, this is trickier than I expected," – so that's number two – to, "Wow, this is awful." And then that, "This is awful" very quickly switches into, "I am awful." And if we're not applying the emotional intelligence, if we're not being self-aware, if we don't catch ourselves going down into that pool of self-doubt, of "I am awful," if we don't have an ally to give us a kick in the pants if we need it, or to reassure us, then we're not going to get through that to, "Maybe this is going to be OK" and back to, "This is awesome."

So, being an ally to yourself is critical, because, if you don't believe in yourself and in your abilities, how on earth can you possibly be an ally to others? And so it's a very powerful chapter – it's an important concept – and, in the end, I left it to the end so that people would have had time to reflect on their outward relationships and the implications, and then be ready and in a position to start applying it to themselves and reflecting on the inward relationship that we all have with us individually.

Rachel Salaman: Well, we've covered a lot of ground in this discussion. What do you think are the most important takeaways for people who are looking to cultivate better relationships at work?

Morag Barrett: You're right. I hope in this short podcast we've piqued people's curiosity, and there is so much more to be read in the book. And I would ask anybody listening to the podcast please contact me on LinkedIn: let's move from first contact to starting to cultivate an ally relationship, but make sure you put in the message that you did it through Mind Tools so that I know how you came across me.

But here are the important takeaways for me. Certainly you're not a victim, you have created the portfolio of relationships you are experiencing at work through action or inaction, and so it is your responsibility to identify firstly who are you dependent on for your success: those critical relationships. So then diagnose the health of those relationships to identify what's working and what's not, and then to take action, to apply one of the conversational strategies that we talked about earlier on in our conversation, because the most important thing that you need to remember as you move through your career is that business is personal and relationships do matter: your success depends on it.

Rachel Salaman: Morag Barrett, thanks very much for joining us.

Morag Barrett: Rachel, it was my pleasure. Thank you.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Morag's book again is "Cultivate: The Power of Winning Relationships." I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.