Repairing relationships is the career superpower nobody talks about

Sometimes the stakes around workplace culture are actual life and death. Other times, they’re more nuanced.

The safety lapses at Boeing that led to two deadly crashes in late 2018 and early 2019 are the extreme examples of what happens when people don’t have hard conversations in the office.

A group of engineers spotted a major safety risk in their 737 MAX’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, software, and raised concerns in emails, during meetings, and in hallway conversations. Investigators later revealed that these engineers were repeatedly mocked, hushed, and told to move on.

The concerned engineers who persisted? Transferred, sidelined, and forced into early retirement.

For Boeing, avoiding conflict and uncomfortable truths resulted in accidents that killed 346 people. It also cost the company and its shareholders tens of billions in lost value, a production halt, a negative credit outlook, and immeasurable reputation damage. 

The stakes aren’t always this high and the outcomes aren’t always so public. Sometimes, the ignored or silenced employees simply move on to other jobs, or maybe are forced to adjust a presentation in a way that results in the client pitch falling short and the client choosing to work with another company.

The ability to navigate hard conversations successfully is a critical relational skill both at home and at work.

I’ve been coaching individuals and couples for several years on relationship skills, with an emphasis on long-term romantic partnership, and have written a book about how to eliminate blind spots in our relationships that are leading to negative marriage and relational outcomes (strained, painful relationships and divorce).

And over and over again, the conversation always veers back to the idea of trust. This isn’t about lying and infidelity, though without question, those are major influences on relationship trust. Betrayal disappears trust in a hurry. But what usually affects our relationships for the worse are little, often accidental betrayals happening in our blind spots. Think of them as paper cuts. Any one of them isn’t a big deal or relationship-threatening. But the slow, steady buildup of them over several months and years pretty consistently erodes trust and threatens the viability of a relationship.

This is also a useful way to think about workplace conflict and the quality of our internal and external business relationships. Most of the time, when we’re all trying hard, we do a fair job of maintaining okay relationships with everything. The emotional stakes are typically lower at work than they are at home.

But just like at home, what threatens workplace safety and trust over time are often behaviors or conditions we’re not paying attention to. Behaviors or conditions that might be causing stress, anxiety, pain, anger, sadness, and fear for our work teams.

They happen in our blind spots not because we’re idiots, but because the very conditions causing those negative emotional experiences for others are simply not impacting us in the same way.

Rank-and-file employees might experience a policy change differently than a manager.

The members of an engineering and R&D teams might approach various facets of product development differently than sales and marketing teams would.

And it’s our ability as teammates and leaders at work, and as relationship partners and parents at home, to see, understand and — in an ideal world — anticipate the needs of the people who surround us.

When we do that successfully, we achieve trust and psychological safety, which in many workplaces is an underrated skill and cultural condition. 

Psychological safety and trust are the foundation on which healthy, lasting, high-functioning interpersonal relationships are built, and the same rules apply at work.

The Boeing case is extreme but illustrative of why optimizing for psychological safety and trust in the office is necessary for teams to thrive.

“Team psychological safety is defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking … a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up,” said Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management chair at Harvard Business School in her much-cited 1999 study Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.

The conclusion of that study, which tracked 51 teams in manufacturing and healthcare, demonstrated a correlation between “safety and trust” in the workplace and positive business outcomes.

Here’s how: When there was high psychological safety among teams, members of those teams would engage in active learning behaviors like asking for help, admitting errors, and experimenting with new ideas — and it’s the team-learning behaviors that consistently result in higher performance outcomes. Edmondson’s work demonstrated that people won’t engage in this critical learning behavior when they don’t feel safe to do so. If people who ask questions are treated as incompetent, and people who take risks that fail to produce desired outcomes or make mistakes are punished by being passed over for advancement opportunities and pay raises, then team safety plummets, and so will its performance.

When managers model curiosity and humility by asking for help, they inject psychological safety into the work environment and signal a non-punitive culture, says the business adviser and research professor Brené Brown.

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage,” writes Brown in her book “Daring Greatly.” “Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.” 

Many of the same behaviors linked with successful romantic partnerships and parent-child relationships are what we’re looking for at work to achieve desired outcomes, so take note if you’re just as interested in crushing marriage and/or parenting as you are in building trust and successful relationships at work through simple, effective habits.

William Ury is a co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project and the co-author of “Getting to Yes,” a manual on successful negotiation first published more than 40 years ago. Ury’s work suggests that practical steps for cultivating psychological safety and trust in the office — or negotiating conflict or desired outcomes successfully — include: