Employing Differences, Episode 124: What's our contract?

Karen: 0:08

Welcome to Employee Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: 0:15

I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:16

And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:18

Each episode, we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "What's our contract?"

Karen: 0:27

So, contract is one of those words that can mean lots of things. Most of us are familiar with the idea of a

legal contract: 0:35

a document, whether it's in email or on paper, that has laid out in certain terms exactly what we're doing. And hopefully, we don't spend very much time in those. So that's not really where we're going today. It's perhaps its own topic for another day. But what we're really talking about here is a less formal contract. Recognizing that when we're in collaborative spaces, when we're in relationship spaces, when we're with other people trying to coexist peacefully, we have some agreements about how we're doing things and what we expect of each other and what I expect of myself. And if we don't name those – not necessarily formally in writing, but in some way that we make sure that we're both aligned, or all aligned in the case of a group – if we don't know what our contract is, we stand a very high likelihood of having different contracts. Functioning under two not agreeing contracts. Or four, or five, or 10, depending on the size of the group. And so really what we want to talk about is this moment, when we realize – or I can realize, I don't know, for sure that the person that I'm with in this is having the same expectation, wanting the same thing, moving in the same direction that I am. And I'm going to pause and ask myself,"What's our contract?" And also, perhaps the corollary of, "What would I like our contract to be?"

Paul: 2:14

Yes, those are something I often refer to as"re-contracting moments." There's two words that you used in there that I think are really important around this. One of them is expectations and the other one is agreement. When we think about this idea of contracting, and what is the set of expectations that we're operating under... And that's usually what it is. I expect this is what I'm going to be doing. I expect that this is what we're going to be doing together. I expect that this is what you're counting on me to do. There's a set of expectations around there. And I think what happens is we get into those moments where we realize some of those expectations aren't lining up with what's actually happening. And that's where I think we can notice that we may not have agreement about those expectations. The idea of making it explicit and naming it is about making sure that there is agreement around expectations. And I think this shows up in more and more places than we might realize. For me, it often shows up, for example, when I'm collaborating with my business partner on something. We'll be working on a thing, and he'll get very excited or very energetic about some particular thing that was not what I thought I came to the meeting to work on. That's very often what shows up. I think we're getting together to work on X. Now, as it turns out, he's really talking about Y. AndI actually am not sure that Y is what we should be focused on right now. This is a great moment to say,"Hmm, what's happening here? I expected that we would focus on X. And I'm actually probably okay to focus on Y. But I want to have an agreement. I want us to align around the fact that we're gonna go focus on this other thing instead." That's one possible thing that can happen. Another possible thing is to say, "We need to talk about this because I don't think we should be focusing on Y. I think we should be focusing on X, and we need to get clear on what it is that we actually want to be doing." And so I think it's really about noticing when what's happening isn't what we expected to have happen, where we thought we had an agreement, or maybe we did have an agreement and we're noticing that we're not following that or it's going in a different way. Even if we're okay with shifting there, I think it's super useful to get used to – and to build the muscle for – talking about the fact that our agreement seems to have shifted, we seem to be doing something else. and taking that moment to re-contract.

Karen: 4:51

I think a lot of the time it's an easy shift. A lot of the time we're fine to shift. But for me, at least, expectations have two uses in our common language. There's the person in authority saying, "I expect you to..." meaning, "I want you to, you said you would. This is my expectation of you. What I think is the right thing for you to do." But there's also what I expect just means, "What I predict." Like what I thought was gonna happen, without any judgment associated to whether it was the right thing or not. It's just what I thought. And even if that's what I mean by expectation, if things start going differently than what I expected, than what I predicted was going to happen, I start getting anxious and uncomfortable. I don't have the sort of secure parameters. It's sort of like all the guardrails came off, and I'm just on the edge of the cliff. I may be fine headed down that road, but I want to know where the edges are again. I want to know what I can expect to have happen, and what I can expect my role to be in that. So I think one of the things that doing this often does is it allows us to shift. It gives us a safe way to say,"Okay, so our agenda for this meeting was this thing. And it doesn't seem like that's actually the most important thing right now." So if you can name that and be comfortable naming, "This is what we thought, this is where it seems like now we want to go? Am I reading you?" Or even or even whether I agree or not, "I was thinking we were headed this way, and now I'm getting the sense that you think we were headed a different way or that you are headed a different way. I'm wanting to check in with you about that." And it's the curiosity that we talk about more or less every episode. But it's also just that willingness to track. This is the thing that's going on in the room that we're in. This thing going on in this space between us. And I think in this case you're talking about with your partner, you may be aware that that shift is happening in this space between you and he's just not because he's passionate and excited. And and it probably goes the other way aometimes, too, I would imagine. But whoever it is that seeing we're out of alignment with our previous contract – or we're just missing a contract; we don't have a contract, we don't have those guardrails, within which we can what to expect – it's so useful to name it.

Paul: 7:35

Yeah, the thing you said about being off-balance and not having the guardrails connects with things that we know from neuroscience research, which is basically that our brains are giant predicting engines. And when we mis-predict something that creates a sense of instability, and our brains really don't like that. And while we're caught in that space, it can actually be hard to make that shift that you talked about. So yeah, even just naming it like, "Oh, I'm noticing that there's a difference here. I think you're right, let's make this right turn. And let's go there, even though we said we were gonna go straight." That allows our brains to relax around it, and actually focus on the work. Because that's really the problem. When we have this misalignment, a lot of our cognitive energy gets redirected into that mess, rather than being able to focus on whatever it is. Going back to the idea of we're working on X or we're working on Y. When I'm thinking about the fact that we said we're gonna do X, and we're dealing with Y, that means I have way less energy to deal with either X or Y. It's just going off into ether. It's steam spurting out of my ears at that point. And I want to say that I think that contracting and re-contracting doesn't actually have to be super difficult. One of the very simple things that I do, for example, in almost every call that I'm in, in every meeting that I'm part of – particularly when I'm the one running it, and it's a small number of people – is I always start with the question, "What are people hoping happens here today, in this call? What are you hoping you get out of it?" Because people are coming in the room with either predictions or hopes. They have expectations. But it may be that no one else is aware of those. And if we can get those all out on the table, we can either say, "Yes, we are going to deal with those," or"No, we're not." That takes two or three minutes at the beginning of a call, particularly one on one. And then we have a contract for the rest of our call. This is actually what we're gonna dig into. And so it doesn't have to be this legal, very precise language, many clauses sort of spelled out sort of thing. Just asking people about what they're hoping will happen, what they expect will happen, what they're predicting will occur, what they think they're there to do, can start to make that contract explicit.

Karen: 10:14

Yeah. I love what you're saying about how it doesn't have to be hard. Because I do think that's one of the reasons we don't do it is that we expect it to be a space of disagreement, or we expect it to be making waves or whatever. And most of the time, it's not, actually. An awful lot of the time, particularly if we're catching things early, everybody's still flexible. Particularly if nobody's figured out there's a problem yet, so nobody's anxiety's up. "We're all good." But that's why that moment where you're seeing it is such a useful one. And I will say, this is a thing I do in facilitation all the time. Because the more people you have, the more different perceptions and expectations you have coming into the room. That's just a whole lot of complexity. And so, that's a space where I really try to think about, "Okay, what is the contract?" And I feel like there's a huge danger there that we rely on implicit contracts. You know, "The facilitator's the boss and is going to tell us all what to do." But that doesn't mean everybody's actually bought in to that model, or to that facilitator's particular approach, or that kind of thing. So there's the sort of implicit"This is what a meeting looks like," or "This is what these roles look like," or "This is what work is supposed to look like in this way." And if you aren't checking in with people, like, "This is what I think we're doing. Is this what you all came here for? Is this the meeting you wanted to have?" And it doesn't, as you say, it doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to take a long time. Fairly often as I'm facilitating meetings, I'll be saying, just in the middle, okay, "So it seems like it would be helpful if we did this other activity. Everybody good with that?" It might literally take 15 seconds to look around the room and everybody's nodding. Okay. But that moment of contracting, and the willingness to say maybe it's not. I have an idea that we're all expecting this thing, but I'm gonna create the space for "If we're not, boy, do I want to know that." And I think that's the other reason we don't ask is because somebody might say we're not expecting the same thing. And then what are we going to do? But that's exactly when we need to know.

Paul: 12:38

Right. It's the fear of conflict. It's already there. You're revealing what's already happening. I think particularly in those re-contracting moments of, "Oh, I don't know that I want to name this," it's not gonna get better by not naming it. It's already happening. You're not causing the problem by naming it. You are pointing at it. You're drawing attention to it in such a way that one of two things will happen: You will either stop and deal with it, or you'll keep doing what you've been doing. They'll either ignore that you've brought it up and they'll just keep going, in which case you're not any worse off than you were before. Or now there's an opportunity to go,"Oh, okay, well, what's going on here." Now, there is, of course, a third option, which is that people will stop and try to deal with it and that will then explode because of all sorts of other underlying things that also were already there. And so you do have to make the choice of, "If we stop to slow down to talk about this, is that worth it to the group?" And we've talked about that on a lot of other episodes as well. I think where we can run into trouble there is if we insist on the re-contracting happening. That we have to get to agreement. Because what you may discover is this really is two different meetings. Some people need this and some people need that. And you can't necessarily find a way to do both of them in the same thing. But that's okay. At that point, you go, "Okay, we just didn't know that before." Usually, there's going to be a lot less anxiety about that, than this weird feeling of us looking at each other, like we're working at cross purposes. Because we are in that situation.

Karen: 14:28

In general, for me at least – and I think for a lot of people – I have less anxiety about doing the thing that I know what it is and I don't like it than I do about, "I don't know what we're doing." I can't tell if I'm doing the thing that I want to do or if we're going to a place I don't want. That's the anxiety-producing that shuts down the cognitive. Whereas,"Okay, we've agreed to do the thing that was not actually what I wanted to do," okay, I can still live with that. And hopefully there's some plan to do the thing I didn't want I do or there's some reason that that's gonna work out for me. But I think we underestimate the cost of uncertain expectations that. It is so much the space between. We talk about this space between a lot, but this one, that is exactly where this lives. You're over there, and I'm over here, and there's this difference hanging out in between.

Paul: 15:25

And as usual, we point out that when we notice that, conflict is a cue to curiosity, to go, "Okay, let's dig into that, to explore that." So to track where we've been here today, we talked about this idea of contracting, which is really about expectations and agreements. So expectations can both be predictions of things that we think are going to happen, or maybe things that we hope or want to have happen. But when we each have different sets of expectations about what's going on, we may not have a clear agreement about what we're here to do, we're here to work on, in which case, we don't necessarily have a clear contract. And so contracting is really about doing things that – in the simplest possible ways – help us to get on the same page about what it is that we're trying to accomplish together. Because when we lack that, we can have that uncertainty, that misprediction about what's going on, that strange anxiety that crops up in this space between, because we're not trying to do the same things. We're not actually working towards the same goals. And that drains our cognitive ability, drains our ability to actually work well together and to collaborate. And so when we start to notice that those things are happening, we – also in the simplest and lightest ways that we can – want to do some re-contracting. To point out what it appears to be that's happening, how it seems to us to be, and asking whoever it is we're working with, or with the group, "Which way do we want to proceed? What do we want to do about that?" How do we want to in this moment, reestablish our common expectations, and our common agreement about what we're going to do? Recognizing that sometimes we avoid doing that, because our fear of what might happen if we point out that we're not all aligned can be getting in the way. But I love how you put this, Karen, that as it turns out, we are way more capable of dealing with unpleasant things when we know that that's what we're dealing with than dealing with strange things where we don't understand what's going on. And so that's one of the things that we find really useful about this idea of really being clear when we're working together about what our contract is.

Karen: 17:47

I think that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 17:52

And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.