What If All Your Conversations with Colleagues Were Positive?

In August, I delivered a keynote speech and workshop for the Michigan Lean Consortium about using play as a tool for continuous improvement. 

Ever since then, I’ve been on a bit of a Lean kick.

Many people roll their eyes when they hear someone touting the benefits of Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, and other business and change management approaches. Yes, they all have their jargon, and there are certainly practitioners who get a little too dogmatic about the concepts, but they are holistic ways of thinking about the process of getting work done.

Lean is all about eliminating waste, not just for the sake of being more efficient or profitable, but because waste makes the work environment more difficult for the people doing the work and makes it more likely that there will be errors and quality issues. 

Addition by Subtraction

Think about it: when it comes to problem solving, many of us default to an additive approach: What else could we be doing? How can we add more positives to the process or environment?

Lean is the concept of addition by subtraction: eliminating waste, or sources of problems, for better outcomes. If a software program takes too long and crashes a lot, stop trying to fix it and replace it with something better – or rethink whether the software is necessary at all. If meetings tend to run long and lead nowhere on a consistent basis, cut down on the number of meetings, or rethink who needs to be there.  

Kinds of Waste

Traditionally, Lean is most widely practiced in the manufacturing, logistics, and health care industries, and focuses on the kinds of waste related to process and the physical work environment:

• Defects

• Overproduction

• Waiting

• Non-Used Talent

• Transportation

• Inventory

• Motion

• Extra-processing

There is another kind of waste that is hidden in plain sight that deserves the Lean treatment: relational waste.

What is Relational Waste?

Over my two-decade plus career, the kinds of workplace problems and complaints I hear most often are about interpersonal dynamics. Do any of these ring familiar to you?

• “My manager expects to read his mind. He doesn’t give me clear instructions and only criticizes my work without giving helpful feedback.”

• “I can’t stand the people in Department X. They never take the time to answer my questions, so they obviously don’t respect my work.”

• “My team members don’t appreciate how much work I put in. Our projects could never get done without me, but they never say thank you.”

These negative interactions, along with the resulting time spent venting and stress/emotional strain, are a major source of waste.

When people grow disheartened with work, they’re less likely to care about the quality of their work nor give their best effort. When people have multiple negative experiences with a colleague or manager, they write that person off and are no longer willing to listen to or help that person. When people don’t feel valued, they are less engaged and motivated, and thus more likely to totally tune out or leave. The time, monetary, and labor costs of relational waste are massive.

Imagine how different your job would be if you expected that the vast majority of your interactions with the people at work would be positive? 

How to Fix Relational Waste

Our first instinct is often to attribute the problem to the other person’s “difficult” personality. This is rarely the case, and that mistaken assumption only sets us up to compound the problem. The most frequent causes by far are differences in communication styles and discrepancies in how people understand each other’s roles and responsibilities. These disconnects usually start as something small, but can fester over time if they’re not addressed. 

The fact is, positive relationships accomplish so much more than negative ones.

To eliminate relational waste and reduce the likelihood of negative interactions, you need to build trust, respect, and relationships between humans.

• Create opportunities for colleagues to get to know each other as people. 

• Encourage conversations about different communication styles and problem solving styles. 

• Invest in the development of people skills as a core value, so everyone buys into the idea of treating one another with a little more respect and empathy.

This makes it possible to have the kind of open, curious, non-defensive conversations that allows people to develop a shared understanding of each other's roles and to manage their interdependencies smoothly. 

This can happen in the course of normal team meetings (with some good facilitation!) or in special dedicated team-building meetings or retreats. 

Play: The Best Kept Secret!

In either context, playing games together is a particularly effective tool for preventing or fixing relational waste. Games offer a structured way for colleagues to interact with and get to know each other outside of the normal roles, responsibilities, and high-stakes of work. They provide a way to explore different communication styles and practice new ways of understanding one another.

The positive shared experience creates empathy and social capital. Once people know and like each other a little bit more, they are much more likely to take time to answer questions or help each other out. They also feel more accountable to one another, as well as more committed to their shared success. And each positive interaction makes it more likely that the next one will be positive as well.

Do you see relational waste in your job? Let Barometer XP help you eliminate it. Email us at info@barometerxp.com to find a time to connect.