Stressed interpersonal dynamics at work are really common. It forms a large chunk of my design leadership coaching conversations. How might we tackle these better by borrowing from couples therapy?
Transcript
Intro
[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Stressed interpersonal dynamics at work are really common. It forms a large chunk of my design leadership coaching conversations. How might we tackle these better?
One of the things I notice is how often the idea of being professional means people don’t have the conversations on the emotional level that is actually where the conflict is. They’ll instead dress it up in terms of process or what’s the right thing to be doing on the project when it’s more often to do with feelings of not being seen, being treated unfairly or unjustly.
Borrowing from therapy
[00:00:29] Andy Polaine: Given how much the conflicts are actually relational, one of the ways you can tackle this is to borrow from relationship therapy techniques. Whether that’s for couples or family dynamics. A fundamental concept of EFT emotionally focused therapy is the dynamic of the pursuer withdrawal cycle.
So typically in couples, there’s one person who’s the pursuer who wants more closeness, more intimacy and so forth, and for the other one that feels too much and they withdraw. And the dynamic is the, the more the person withdraws, the more the pursuer pursues and it just makes it worse and worse and worse.
Part of the process in couple therapy is either with the therapist or then eventually to learn without the therapist to recognize that they’re in their cycle and see it as this thing that we want to try and step out of and break the cycle.
An approach you might take at work is asking something like, “how can we do this better next time we have this situation?” And the important part of this is we. Rather than blaming any one person for being wrong, and you always do this or you should stop doing that, you externalize the dynamic you collectively have and you turn it into a problem for you to collectively tackle.
So now you’re in it together rather than in opposition to each other.
Outro
I encourage you to try this out. If you’ve used this approach in work or in personal life, how has it worked for you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
If you’d like to check out my design leadership coaching practice, it is at https://polaine.com/coaching, and I’ll put the link below.
I hope that’s useful for you, and I’ll see you next time.
