Employing Differences, Episode 127: Didn't we agree?

Karen: 0:08

Welcome to Employing 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, "Didn't we agree?"

Karen: 0:26

So we are following up on last week's episode, which was about working agreements. And this idea that we get asked to help groups create working agreements where the group has said, "Okay, we agree we're going to..." whatever the things are. Meet this often, have minutes, share work in this way, do our communication via this method, or whatever the things are that are in working agreements. And then fast forward a month or two or three, and as an individual, I find myself saying, "Well, we said we were going to start our meetings on time, and we haven't started our meetings on time." Or "We said we were going to meet weekly, and we haven't met in three weeks. What's going on here?" Or, "I thought everybody was going to take a turn making the coffee, and there hasn't been coffee when I got here in a month?" What are my options now? The question really today is,"Didn't we agree about this stuff?" But it's not what's happening. How is my understanding of our agreement not matching my experience of the shared space? Now what?

Paul: 1:40

And I think that's a really useful place to start: The idea that my understanding of what we agreed to is not my experience of what is happening. And I think that's perhaps the least blame-y way that we can approach this. Because that's not saying, "Well, you're not holding up our agreement." That's the blame-y version. But but the genuine space of, "This isn't what I thought I agreed to. I thought that we agreed about this thing. My experience of it is at odds with my understanding of it." And I think that's a really useful place to come from. And what I want to point to is actually what you said at the end of the last episode, Karen, that I thought was really great, is this idea that the conversation we had about creating the working agreements gives us a basis for the conversations we want to have when we notice that those agreements aren't being held in whatever way – when we notice we are in this situation– so that we can repair the working relationship. And so where I want to come to in this discussion today is really from that place of "How do we get back to having a good working relationship?" Because if we come to it from the place of judgment, of righteousness, of now I'm going to use this working agreement to demonstrate you are wrong, that doesn't actually help us do the work together. That doesn't repair the relationship. That damages it even further. And so I think one of the really useful places to start is that place of, "This is my experience of what's happening." And then – using one of our favorite tools ever – get curious. "This is the experience I'm having. Is anybody else having that experience?"

Karen: 3:29

Yeah, and I think that really going through the starting point of this conversation is important, because what we're proposing is so at odds with what we're used to. We talked in the last episode about working agreements feel a bit like classroom rules from elementary school. And if that's the approach, if that's the mindset, then we think,"Okay, so the problem here is that somebody else isn't following the rules. How do we make them follow the rules?" And I think it's the wrong question. And so very much as you were saying, the real question is,"Why is there a disconnect? And what does that mean we should do with it?" And I want to just name right at the very front that it's very possible that the thing we should do with it is change the working agreement. We may change the behavior – and probably if I'm noticing it, it's because I would like the behavior to change. That's probably the case. But that may not actually be the answer. It may be that the behavior that's present is the behavior that works. And so we said we were going to communicate these things on email, but somebody's texting me instead. It may be that that's because text is what works for them. And saying,"Well, you didn't do email. We said we do email," isn't going to solve that problem. There's a reason they're doing it differently. So getting curious about are the working agreements even what we need them to be. And then if they are – if that is actually the behavior that we want – then I want to get curious about what's not in place to support that? What's the reason that we're getting a different behavior than the one we agreed? Because there is a reason, always.

Paul: 5:21

Always. And I think there can be a couple of things. As we talked about, working agreements are intended to be things that will help the group be most effective, which means they're probably different than what everyone would do by default. So sometimes the reason is this is just a new behavior for me. This is a new thing. Karen has asked me to make sure that we communicate all these things out by email. And I'm just so used to texting. But I can see that it would be useful if I sent this as an email. And then a thing happens, and I go, "Oh, let me just communicate." So I send the thing out, and I text it. And Karen goes, "What the heck?" It's a new thing for me, and I may not even realize that I've done it. And so if Karen is able to come to me from that place of curiosity and collaboration, and be able to say, "Hey, I just want to understand what's going on here." I want to point this out, but I want to get curious about it. I'm not saying you're a bad person. Just what's going on. It may be that I just go, "Oh, did I do that? Oh, you're right. I absolutely did do that. I didn't even think about it. I'm sorry." So sometimes it is just it's a new thing. I need some practice, I need some reps. Sometimes I've done it six times in a row now and Karen finally gets to the point where she realizes she needs to bring it up and comes to me. And I'm just like, "Yeah. Here are the challenges that I'm having. I know I made this agreement. I know I said we'd do this via email, but X, Y, and Z." And now we get to decide together are there things that we can do together to deal with X, Y and Z, to remove those barriers? Because I might still think this would totally be better if we did it via email, I just have these problems, these obstacles to it. Can we work together to remove those obstacles, or we make go, "Those obstacles are not worth removing." Maybe that would be more work than then actually following the agreement, so maybe we do change it. But it gives us options for how to proceed with it.

Karen: 7:30

Yeah. And I think that's the big thing here. We're keeping in mind the goal is for us to work well and effectively together. For us to share the space, for us to do the collaboration, whatever it is. And if that's the goal, then we're not in the space of shame, blame, or judgment. And so if we can really keep that... and I want to point out that most of us know better than to use really blaming words. Unfortunately, when we take the blaming words out, we're often very capable of using not-blaming words, to blame and shame and judge. And so I just want to really lean into this is mental work. We really are proposing here that likely the way this plays out in real life is, "Paul sent me a text again, and I don't want to text to now I'm not going to keep track of it and he's not following our agreement, and I'm totally irritated!" Okay, stop, Karen. I have to stop from that, because that's probably how it shows up for me. And now I have to stop myself and say, "Okay, what do I want? What is my actual objective here?" And what I want, really underneath at all, is a good, solid, collaborative relationship with Paul. I want us to have a good working relationship where we can effectively get our joint work done. What do I need to do in my own head? What is my own internal work? And I may even need to go talk it through with somebody else and get some help getting my head on straight for this. But what do I need to do to get to a place of curiosity? To get to a place of benefit of the doubt? To get to a place where I really can hold the belief that as much as I may be annoyed by Paul's habit of texting – or whatever it is – that I really believe that Paul also wants an effective collaborative relationship, and that there's a reason why it's not working out the way that I expected it to. And go into it with that curiosity of, "How can we make it work better?" How can we make it work better for me? How can we make it work better for Paul? Knowing that probably it's going to be some mixture of changing behaviors and changing expectations. It's probably not going to be all one or the other. I really have to authentically carry that intention. Because even if I make my words on neatened up so that they don't sound blame-y or judgmental, we humans are really good at reading each other. Unfortunately, just changing the words probably isn't enough.

Paul: 10:11

One of the things that I work with coaching clients on, particularly when they're working around difficult conversations they need to have, is there's the message – there's the words that you want to use, there's the idea that you want to convey – but there's also your mood or your tone around it, which is at least as important. You have to think about, "How do I want to be in this conversation? How do I want the other person to experience me as I say this thing that's probably difficult for them to hear?" So yeah, not only get the words right, but also get that tone or that mood in the right way. Which also means that I always recommend that whenever you have a conversation about"Didn't we agree?" it needs to be live. Don't do this via email. Don't do this over Slack. At the very least you need to be on a video call with the person because otherwise they will fill in the worst possible tone or mood for you. They will hear your words, and you're already bringing up something that's difficult. You're saying that,"This agreement wasn't upheld," or "My expectations were not met." That's a hard thing, so it's very easy for people to get defensive, to fall into a shame spiral, to any of these things around it. You have to have your collaborative, curious mood, counteracting that tendency at every step to have any chance of avoiding that. Because if that's what happens, intentionally or unintentionally, that doesn't contribute towards the working relationship. So don't do this over instant message.

Karen: 12:08

That is such a smart and important thing, that to be in the space of we're working on relationship and email and instant messaging are not good for those things. That we want to have the conversation. I do want to address the piece that that comes up when I give this advice to someone live. The question I get a lot is, "But what if they're just not a person that safe for me to be in relationship with? What if I don't believe that they have a reason? What if I think they're just being a jerk? Because that's how they are and they don't care about me at all?" And my answer is, first of all, think hard about whether you want to be in a working relationship with them at all? Do you even want to be in the space of working relationships? And recognizing that you may not have a choice about that, so there's some limit there. But I do think you want to be really clear about what are you trying to accomplish? And what's realistic about that? And if, in fact, what I believe about that person is that they're going to be difficult, they're not going to take my needs into account, there's not any real collaborative relationship potential there, then I've got a lot of work to do to get clear in myself. I've got to do my own work so that the impact that that has on me is not any more negative than it needs to be. Because in fact, if Paul sends me texts all day and it's because he's just a jerk, it doesn't care about me, he's just gonna keep doing that, and me getting angry about it and frustrated, and getting all distracted – none of that helps. It doesn't help the work. It doesn't help the group. It doesn't help the team. It doesn't help me. So, you know, my first step – my first twenty steps probably – is always can we work the relationship because I basically think people are good people. And if we're clashing, there probably is a reason and there's probably some really useful work to do there. So I don't give up on it easily. But when I give up on it, that actually is the start of some serious work for me about, "How am I going to be who I want to be living my values, being effective in my space and in the work while I'm with this other person that behaves the way that they do and that I can predict is going to keep behaving the way that they do?" I don't have any reason to think they're going to change their behavior, so how am I going to coexist peacefully and productively with that behavior? Which isn't the answer we'd like to have. We'd like to have that magic switch that's going to change somebody else. But it is where we have the power to actually make a difference. So I just want to name that we're telling you what to do in the best case – and even the moderately good case where there's some willingness for collaboration on the other side – and I want to acknowledge that sometimes there's not. Or that whatever willingness there is just isn't accessible, or maybe I don't have the skill to access it. But sometimes that relationship work isn't going to work and that just means I have more work of my own to do.

Paul: 15:20

I think we've talked about this before in our episode about"How do I get them to cut it out?" of noticing what is the thing in you that that's triggering. When you have that visceral response to it, it means that it's something that's important to you. There's something there. There's some self discovery, some self-reflection you can do around that. And I think that's important to do. But the last thing I want to say on this is this last piece we've said about how do I want to peacefully coexist with this person who is a jerk – for lack of a better word – who just keeps needling me in this way, where nothing is gonna change. That's your last stop. Don't start there. I think we do that a lot. Or we start in the middle, somewhere around,"This is gonna be an uphill battle. I've got to convince them. I've got to really bring out the heavy artillery." What we're saying is you may eventually need to land in this spot. The end game may be the behavior is not going to change, the working agreements not going to be followed, kind of no matter what it is. You're going to need to come to peace with it. Start from the place of assuming that there's a misunderstanding, that there's an obstacle, that there's something there that they actually want to collaborate on, that they want to have an effective working relationship until proven otherwise. Begin in that space. It's like the simplest thing that could possibly work, which we've talked about before. It's way less work on your part, rather than just assuming I'm gonna have to armor up, I'm gonna have to do all this, I'm gonna have to just learn how to develop inner peace around this thing. Don't start there. You may need to end there. But start in that other spot.

Karen: 17:05

Yeah. So this episode has been about what do you do when you've got working agreements, you've probably even got a document, and then your experience is not matching what those working agreements led you to expect. So when expectation and experience are not matching, that first is getting away from the shame-blame-judgment space, even away from the nice words that still basically mean shame, blame and judgment. Get into the space of curiosity, of interest, of problem solving, of looking for solutions. Be open to the possibility that the working agreements themselves need to change. Be open to the possibility that your expectations may need to change. Be open to the possibility that the person that you're working with just need some feedback, or that they they're just in a bad habit, or even not even noticing. Or maybe they just understood their work in agreement differently. Any number of things. And start there start with a lot of curiosity and interest. And really keeping in mind the long view that what we're looking for here, the real goal is not the behavior, the real goal is the collaborative working relationship. And if you've done all of that, and given it all that you have, and you end up in the end coming to the conclusion that you're not going to get collaboration on the other side, the behavior isn't going to change, be prepared to approach that from the space of, "I've got work to do to figure out how I can be who I want to be and feel good about who I am and the work that I'm doing without any expectation that that person will change." That person is going to be who they are. And I've done my first 25 steps in hoping to engage with them differently. I'm now at the point where I don't expect that they're going to change. So what do I want to do about me to make that still as effective a space as it can be?

Paul: 18:57

That's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 19:01

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.