The Hindu Business Line : Relationships along organisational fault lines

Flatter hierarchies, tighter interdependencies, and decentralised decision-making – all these depend on the quality of people’s relationships, says Diana McLain Smith in Divide or Conquer ( www.penguin.com). Yet, despite their obvious importance, relationships remain largely a mystery, she adds.

Researching for an answer to what makes teams stay together, the author finds that relationships have an informal structure that can be mapped and changed; also, that relationships may be the most underutilised lever for transforming performance. “This is especially true for relationships that operate along organisational fault lines – interfaces where coordination is as essential as it is difficult… where interests collide and conflicts erupt.”

Part one of the book, devoted to ‘understanding relationships,’ declares that while relationship troubles are a fact of life, the manner of handling these troubles is about perspective. “The best way to avoid waiting games – where each person waits for the other to see things his way – is for people to help each other shift perspective to regain their collective cool,” Smith advises. “While shifting perspectives won’t make feelings go away, it will make it easier for people to use their emotions to think things through together.”

Transforming relationships, discussed in part two, begins by calling for a disruption of interaction patterns that get in the way. This step is tough, cautions Smith, because people who seem to know each other may see the other only as caricatures in their heads; for example, ‘he’s so sensitive, she’s so competitive,’ and so on.

“The very efficiency these caricatures give, they also take away, because they make a person’s understanding complexity – sure to emerge under stress – harder to understand or to handle,” Smith bemoans. As antidote, therefore, she suggests that the single most important thing people can do is to slow down and take a closer look at each other and at how their relationship works.
Those who are working at changing a relationship require a key emotion: hope. For, it is hope that makes people far more resilient in the face of setbacks, Smith reasons. “But how do you go about cultivating hope where none exists? You don’t. You have to manufacture it.”
The trouble, she rues, is that most people do just the opposite. “They manufacture despair. They guard against disappointment by expecting little and hoping for less, and they end up with just that: little and less.”
You are much more likely to create a positive self-fulfilling prophecy by acting hopeful, the author urges. “Acting as if good things might follow increases the odds of creating circumstances that justify that hope. And remember, you can always stop hoping, but it’s awfully hard to jump-start hope once pessimism sets in.”
A book that can let you see the hitherto invisible bridges across failed and flailing relationships.

D. Murali

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