Rehumanizing Relationships at Work

“We don’t have to be best friends, we just have to work together.” How often have you heard or thought this in relationship to yourself or others at work? I hear this response often.

In the Old World, we were told that we didn’t need relationships. We could leave our emotions at home. Work was a place for getting things done. Just enough “getting along” was required. Whenever I hear the above phrase (and I hear it often), I immediately want to challenge that thinking. If we think that holding our nose and tolerating each other is all we need at work, I think we need to think again.

In the Old World, working on simpler tasks, it mattered less how well we connected. The managerial culture that we inherited from Frederick Taylor and others may have worked well to help us get more efficient in assembling fairly simple automobiles, but it is mismatched for most of the modern challenges we face in a VUCA environment. In a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, a higher level of interdependence is required to navigate our challenges. 

In recent years, we have begun to understand the need for better relationships in our teams at work. I really like Ed and Peter Schein’s model of relationships. It helps us to have a way to talk about the level of our current connection and how we might need to move the relationship to a deeper level for the sake of our ability to work together toward a shared goal. The Scheins describe four levels of relationship as depicted below (Schein, & Schein, 2018).

Schein & Schein’s Levels of Relationship

Level -1 relationships are characterized by domination, coercion and treated others as less than human. These relationships have never been helpful in the workplace and will no longer be tolerated in the new world where employees have many options for places to work.  Level 1 relationships are the kind of impersonal relationships that many of us were taught to cultivate at work. These are arms-length relationship where we see each other through the lens of our roles and transactions with each other. These relationships may have “worked” in the old world’s simplicity but are mismatched for the complexity of the new world.

The new world is looking for people who can build relationships with team members at level 2 or above. Level 2 relationships are built on trust and seeing the whole person. They are most often found in good friendships and healthy teams. Level 3 relationships are found and often needed by teams engaged in high-stress missions. Whether a team of navy seals or a team in the operating room, level 3 relationships have even a higher level of connection where team members know each other so well that they can anticipate each other’s’ movements. These relationships embody the best kind of human “loving” connections. Love, as Barbara Frederickson describes, in all of life including the workplace is “the essential nutrient that your cells crave: true positivity-charged connection with other living beings (Frederickson, 2013).

Rehumanization begins with understanding the need to reject the old paradigm of arms-length professionally-distant relationship in order to embrace the other human beings that we have the privilege to know and work with. Our relationships at work need to be rehumanized. Rehumanizing involves knowing the whole person, their unique qualities, thoughts, strengths, and opinions. It involves a deeper trusting connection between two human beings that can see each other.

Rehumanizing goes far beyond tolerating one another and toward the much higher end of learning to “love not only what we do but who we do it with” (Tjan, 2017). When we cultivate and nurture these kinds of relationships, there is no end to what we can accomplish is this brave new world. This new world at work is crying for rehumanized relationships.

References

Frederickson, B. (2013). Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Think, Do, Feel, and Become. New York, NY: Hudson Street Press.

Schein, E., & Schein, P. (2018). Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Tjan, A. (2017). Good People: The Only Leadership Decision That Really Matters. New York, NY: Portfolio / Penguin.