Dealing With The Relational Weeds
September 10, 2018
We are relational, and we are in relationship with everything: our word, our work, our environment, with the past, the future, others, ourselves, with what we know and don’t know -everything. If you want different results, look at your relational field in which you are producing those results. Think of that field like a garden. If it is healthy, weeds will show up, and if you do not pull them out, they strangle what you want and need most to produce the results you do desire.
TRANSCRIPT
So we talked about relationships of a team being similar to a garden. So that's our analogy. And if you have a healthy garden, one of the things that happens is you're not only gonna get great plants, you're also gonna get weeds. For instance, if you're on a team and somebody interrupts you, doesn't listen to you're ideas, or maybe steals your ideas, or you think that they have, and you haven't really directly addressed that, a lot of times we will talk to other people about it, so we'll grab another team member and say, "Oh, did you know that they did this?"
or, "That happened to me too." While maybe we get a little relief from talking about that with other people, it doesn't solve anything. It really is detrimental to a team when there's issues, and they're not being talked about openly. It's probably one of the hardest things in any relationship, is dealing with uncomfortable conversations, pulling out the weeds, and looking at them and talking about them.
It's necessary to have those difficult conversations. As a matter of fact, some of the most successful people, when they've really looked at what makes a person successful it is the people that do have difficult conversations. If you don't talk about things like this, then it begins to strangle and kill the relationship. What you want to do is address whatever has happened as respectively and openly as you can with the other person, give them the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps what you think has happened, or what it means, is a misunderstanding, oftentimes it is a misunderstanding, and be committed to making the relationship better. Rather than being committed to gossiping about the person behind their back. Which is, a lot of times, what we tend to do. This makes the difference between a really high-performing team, a really effective relationship, and one that maybe was effective at one point and starts to get stifled and overgrown maybe.
This kind of relational field, this garden, is the very basis of creativity. If you are stifled you can't create. If people aren't talking to each other it not only affects creativity, it affects learning. And these are really vital things that we need to have happy healthy teams.
