People watching at work
Dr Karen Bridbord is the author of a new book, The Relationship-Driven Leader that invites us to bring a psychologist’s lens to our job and the relationships with those around us.
Her perspective is to use psychology to understand the person in front of you to interpret the world through their eyes. If you’ve got a controlling boss or someone who behaves in a way that impacts your life she helps you unpick what’s going in their head.
Transcript
Karen Bridport: My name is Karen Bridbord. I am a licensed psychologist who currently serves as a chief talent officer for a construction company called Al Bari. But my background is really in change management human behavior. Organizational psychology. Clinical psychology, and I’ve had a career where I’ve spent time in both arenas treating people clinically as well as working actually in the workplace on a day to day.
Bruce Daisley: I was really intrigued with the idea that you’re a workplace psychologist. It really immediately struck me, I thought, wow, how common is that? How common is the idea that a workplace actually has a psychologist? Or whether they tap into one or they actually have one on the payroll. How common is that, Karen?
Karen Bridport: Yeah. I don’t actually think it’s that common, and I call myself a workplace psychologist. Because that’s what I do in essence, or I have done now, I’m actually spending more time leading a company and bringing in other people who help people one-on-one. But not so long ago, for about 20 years, that’s what I did.
Organizations would reach out to me. And mostly I was in a consulting capacity helping companies deal with human type challenges in the workplace. And those challenges could range from having teams that need some support in working more effectively to together or individuals challenged by some personal.
Circumstances that could impact how they show up at work. I found my own academic background is in both arenas. So I studied organizational psychology as well as clinical psychology. And I think that mesh of background has really allowed for me to have a toolkit to, to borrow from as needed. From a clinical standpoint, I was trained by a guy named Dr.
John Gottman, who is a well-known couples therapist. And I’ve taken quite a bit of my. Training with him, with couples and have applied it to the workplace. So relationships are relationships. Granted, there are different boundaries when you’re working with a colleague than you’re working with your life partner.
And I, when I say working, just living together. You don’t have to, be in the same quote unquote job but there are, basically principles that carry over no matter what the actual relationship is, whether you’re working with your child around something, whether you’re working with your colleague, whether you’re working with your spouse, whether you’re working with your parent, right?
And there are some fundamentals that when people learn how to, for example, repair conflict. ’cause conflict is usually happens in the closest of relationships. People are very, the reason that conflict has gotten such a bad rap is because of what can happen in conflict when there’s a lot of criticism or stonewalling or contempt or defensiveness, which shuts down conversations, right?
But in fact, when people learn how to have predict. Productive conversations. It frees them up and actually, I would say brings them closer.
Bruce Daisley: I’d love to come back to something that Dr. Gottman taught us later on, but I wanted to set it up in a sec. Before that I saw the book as it was. If you are one of the fortunate people that you don’t carry any baggage yourself, then it was a wonderful exercise in informing your people watching at work, trying to decode what you were receiving.
But I think in the first instance, the thing that was most taken by was the fact that you start with self-reflection that goes a good deal deeper than most self-reflection that I’ve seen in books before. Extensively reminded me of attachment theory and how we form attachments to people around us and invite the reader to appraise their own sense of that.
And I would just wonder if you could give us a beginner’s guide for that. I wonder if you could just talk about how you I was intrigued. I got the sense when I was reading that I thought, okay, this must be informed by some of the problems that. You’ve had to decode before that you’ve realized that this is not just a relationship problem between two people, but you need to help someone understand what’s going on in their head.
I wonder if you could just explain why you went in such depth to personal analysis.
Karen Bridport: Yeah, no, I, you’re, thank you for picking up on that person. That was the first really the first, right? The first relationship is with a self, right? So we are continuously having a relationship with ourselves and we are complex creatures who’ve been.
Impacted by the past, by the present, and even the perception of the future. So understanding what our triggers are, what our strengths are, is incredibly important when interacting with others. The hallmark of emotional intelligence starts with self-awareness. So the idea is that when you have that.
Insight about yourself, you have a greater likelihood of being able to manage your own reactions, I should say. It doesn’t always happen that way because certainly we all know people who appear very self-aware, and yet they’re getting themselves into trouble all the time in relationships. So it’s not just about being self-aware, although that is.
Absolutely the first step in understanding the self, but it’s also becomes about really being able to regulate at times your reactions, your reactivity. And when I say that I don’t want listeners to think that I’m saying to silence your voice. I think that it’s really about having options.
And the EE enough insight to be able to know maybe this, I’m getting triggered right now. I’m in a fight flight mode. By the way. Our bodies, our minds perceive social threat. The same way as we perceive the saber-tooth tiger, right? So if we feel excluded or we feel disrespected, or we feel that we’ve been unfairly treated, for example, our brains will go into that fight flight mode.
And that’s when we can get into trouble around how we respond, right? Understanding the self is so key to being able to ultimately regulate how you respond to others that could result in greater success. It, it may mean saying, listen I need to take a little bit of a break right now. Let me think about what you said.
Come back to you. You don’t have to tell the person I’m triggered. I’m having a hard time. By what you’re saying. It allows your nervous system that break to actually come itself so that you can come back to the table. Obviously, people who are self-aware have a greater likelihood of being able to leverage that option that is available to you.
Bruce Daisley: Yeah. It just, it struck me that the self-awareness that probably a lot of us think that we’ve got access to is. Quite superficial, in, in truth. And so just going into depth and analyzing with a bit more structure. Certainly informed some interesting conversations in my head and reminded me of things that look, I’ve been casually aware of in science or in my own behavior, yes, but to have more structure to it.
It helped me in understand holistically. Relationship situation. So I was just really interested in how you did that.
Karen Bridport: Yeah, absolutely. And I just, to that point, I would say that, we learn so much about ourselves by bumping up against other people, right? We don’t learn. So self-awareness seems like a very self process, like an isolated process.
In fact, the reflective key piece can feel like it, however. By having reactions towards other people, right? It’s only through those interactions that bumping up that we really get to know who we are. That’s why being able to reflect after such circumstances by either talking to a therapist, a coach, or even journaling.
Or even a friend, right? A, a trusted advisor can really help us make sense of our reactions because sometimes we react to people based on just unexplored territory triggers we have from earlier relationships earlier in time, right? If we felt like, I don’t know, I’m gonna be very stereotypical and simplistic with my example right now, so excuse me.
If we grew up in a home. Where we felt like our parents dismissed us continuously. And we never really did our work to understand that we might find ourselves in a workplace situation where we are looking at situations where we’re being, we’re interpreting situations where be, where we’re being dismissed.
And and maybe we are being dismissed, but are we withdrawing ourselves? Just, not activating ourselves to help remedy the situation. Instead just saying, the world is gonna dismiss me, so I’m just gonna remain dismissed, as opposed to activating ourselves to foster healthier, more productive relationships.
That’s a small example, right? There are thousands and gazillions of examples that I can bring to the table around how. Early events in our lives, not just with our parents, but with our teachers, with our, initial work experiences can impact how we interpret things and then how we respond a accordingly.
Bruce Daisley: On that topic there, I’m always cautious of generational suspicion. Sure. Or generational change. However, if our first ever group was broadly for most of us, our family, and so family systems are so formative for what follows subsequently about how we engage with others, how we understand the dynamic of power.
Group that people exist in as their family changed over time. And I’ll give you a specific example. It might have been that it was a period of time that a lot of us might have spent adolescents watching TV side by side with our parents. Oh, we might have had evening meals with our parents and actually, for different cultures, international cultures, that still remains sometimes when I talk to Spanish and French people saying, oh, actually they, they’ve got in the habit of having dinner together more, they look at me like, who stopped having dinner together?
But has the basis of, there’s, by the
Karen Bridport: way, a lot of research, a lot of research that shows that families that eat together are more connected. Yeah. Yeah. And and so there is a lot of validity to that. And it turns out it’s not just eating, it’s just the spending time together because a lot of, so yeah, go ahead to
Bruce Daisley: my point.
So in the old days where we might have watched television together, sitting side by side, and now maybe if. Our first group we do that, people might be on their phone scrolling with headphones on. Is that going to inform a different basis of our understanding of what it means to be in a group over time?
Are we going to expect Jen Z or Jen Alpha workers to be a little bit more estranged from a group dynamic in favor of individualistic?
Karen Bridport: It is such a good, it’s a great question, and my, and to answer that question, I do think I go into restaurants these days. I’m sure people look around and half the people are sitting across from someone else and are on their phones, so we’ve gotten into this. It’s not only what’s going on at home, it’s also people going to restaurants and people not connecting. I do think that that. Online that phone has become something that we’ve grown accustomed to very quickly. And I think some would even argue that there’s an addictive element to the phone that we, that the dopa dopamine receptors give us a reward system in the circuitry.
And so we are drawn to the phone continuously. Do I think that the younger generations are using and will continue to use more than we did, for example, which I didn’t grow up with a phone a cellular phone the way I have now. Yeah. And just like they may find that their sense of connectivity is met more so through.
Through online mediums, their wheel. I do believe that it’s ju just like we’ve gotten it was once that we didn’t really have restaurants to go to and to have someone else cook for us, that we had to cook at home in order to eat right. Similarly, whereas we had to meet. Up with people to feel connected because we didn’t have the phones.
Similarly, I think that the phones will serve in a way that and continue to serve where people are getting their connection met. In that way, I will. Argue that I do think that it is extremely important though to have that in-person opportunity to be with others. That I do think that and people ask me this all the time, I was just giving another talk.
They said, do you think that it’s. Okay, to just be remote, be a remote employee, and that’s okay. And I say, yeah, of course. I think it’s okay. But I think that for organizations where you have remote employees, any opportunity to bring people together, even if it’s on a quarterly basis, we’ll make a difference for connection.
There’s something that happens when we’re live with individuals, right? And I’m not minimizing the fact that, thank goodness that we have Zoom. Thank goodness that we have. Phones and that it allows us also to to make, to create meaning and connection to some degree. But I think that we do miss out when we don’t get to be with people in person.
Bruce Daisley: I wanna draw on that one. One of the things that I said would come back to your mentor, Dr. Gottman, that you studied under before and something that you referenced of his work helped me reflect on relationships and you talked about bids and responses. This a phrase I’ve heard a little bit elsewhere, but I.
It beared reminding and I’m suspecting the first instance this is most helpful for us is in our home life, but actually there’s a direct application for all of our relationships and this idea that when someone asks for your attention, that’s a bid. And what you do with that bid.
Determines how the relationship feels. I wonder if you could just help me understand that a bit more and remind us of the science of it.
Karen Bridport: Absolutely, yes, absolutely. I’ll just break it down, basically, in any given interaction. You have one of three choices, in essence. So you and I are having an interaction, Bruce, right now.
So you can either turn towards me, which you are, you’re nodding. I feel like you’re really following what I’m saying. You’re trying to make sense of it. That’s turning towards. You could turn away from me. So maybe you start getting distracted by something else in your environment and you lose focus, you lose your attunement To our conversation that’s turning away.
Or you could turn against me. Turning against me would be to say, Karen, what are you talking about? This doesn’t make any sense. This is, you’re not, Ugh, I don’t agree with you. So really those are our three options and like a game of tennis, which we spoke about right before starting this podcast.
You can literally, tally how two people are co are communicating. You could say, oh, that person, she just turned against him. Oh, he just turned against her. Oh, he just turned away from her and within a 10 minute conversation you can actually create a numerical ratio. Within that 10 minutes, she turned towards him 10 times.
She turned away from him three times. She turned against him once and he. Turned towards her five times. He turned away from her. Et cetera. And what Dr. Gottman found actually in his research, because he found that there was a ratio for that when people were having conflict conversations, when they were communicating within a conflict, that for everyone turning away or turning against you actually needed Five turning towards to buffer it. Let me repeat that because that’s an enormous ratio that as psychologists, we were shocked by that amount, so that for every one turning away, meaning ignoring someone or withdrawing from someone or turn or turning against saying something unkind, you needed five Turning towards that’s an enormous ratio. And how does that translate to the workplace? It’s really important that we recognize that how much more positive exchanges we need to have with people. And these bids are on a moment to moment basis. They can be verbal, but they can, they could be a, or they could be a nonverbal, which, your audience can’t see me, but it’s like shaking my head no. So they’re verbal and nonverbal. It shows that the. Impact really of the positive to outweigh that turning away or turning against. And by the way, turning away was found to be a little bit worse than turning against Why?
Because at least in turning against, there’s some interaction, even though it’s negative and hostile, and it is way harder to repair relationships when people are so disconnected from each other and turning away, there’s no energy. I could tell you as a clinician, it is. To work with people who are in high conflict than it is to work with people who are so disconnected, almost apathetic towards each other.
So this has and in the workplace, by the way, sure. There’s situations where people are blatantly being hostile to each other. I would argue that in a workplace setting I see more turning away where people are either freezing each other out, not responding to each other shutting down and those kinds of behaviors over time lead to a disconnect that is way harder to repair.
Okay. That is way harder to repair, and I don’t believe that people do this because they’re malicious or angry. It’s just, I really believe that many people never learned how to effectively repair, relationship conflict. It is an art and is and so that’s been the challenge. That has been the challenge.
Bruce Daisley: You talk about building maps of colleagues. Lives and I think just being kind to yourself about thinking, oh, Jesse’s got a dog. I must make a note of that, rather than just leaving it to the chaos of my memory so that, I can go back and I can mention that and we all find it.
The, at the base level, there’s nothing more. That’s right, but there’s nothing more enchanting than someone whose name you don’t remember coming over and greeting you by your name, and you’re like, and you’re consumed with, wow. What a wonderful thing. And you like you’re riddled with your own embarrassment that you can’t reciprocate.
But people remembering small details about us can be so important for us. Building connection. You talk a lot about sort of building connection. I just wonder if you could just reflect on all that for a second. Some people might say. It’s cynical to keep a map like that, and whereas I saw it as actually something that was quite achievable.
I just wonder, do believe that. Is that just a natural order of being a better human?
Karen Bridport: Yeah. Look, we’ve got so much information coming at us every day and we filter, we’ve gotta filter th things through our, through different lenses. I don’t actually think it’s superficial to make a note of people’s lives.
I actually think it’s a caring thing. I think it’s something that even and nobody needs to know that you’re writing down. Sandy has a dog, named Will, what, whatever it is it’s actually, I think a kind thing to make note and because people wanna know that they matter, right?
People wanna know that you remember, and especially if somebody has shared with you a piece of information such as, my dog had to have surgery last week. How wonderful to follow up and say, hey. How does your dog feel, right? Because if people end up sharing a personal piece of information something that’s bothering them, something that may be worrying them to be able to follow up and make note I think is a nice thing.
And it’s not a calculated thing. It’s being human and understanding that we only have so much cognitive reserve to remember all of these details. And it’s it reminds me, right? So as a couple’s therapist, when I tell people no, you should have date nights, schedule, date night.
People will be like that’s ridiculous. To have to schedule a date night. It’s if you don’t schedule it, it’s not gonna happen, right? Because there’s gonna be other things that come your way. And even intimacy when I tell people, yeah, schedule, that’s terrible to schedule in. Are you kidding me?
Schedule intimacy with my. Partner have schedule, having sex that’s egregious. No, actually it helps, it, it actually helps relationships just it’s about making time. And similarly, we’re so busy and these days with social media and with our online lives as well. We’ve got that much more information coming at us than ever before, and making note of these things can actually help us.
A lot of people write down birthdays, for example, of people that matter to them because it’s really easy to forget your best friend’s birthday when you have your children’s birthdays or, and you, some days you may not even recog realize what day of the week it is. You may not even make that connection.
At the end of the day, we connection matters and I think that it’s not just connection, I think it’s also maintaining that connection. And that’s why I keep on harping back to this idea of being able to repair when conflict occurs becomes so important. Because connection is one of those things that is dynamic.
You need to work on it in order to sustain it. It doesn’t just exist alone. It’s it’s if you’re, if you’re working out a muscle. And if you stop working out, that muscle is gonna atrophy Similarly, connection needs attention. It needs attention. And so it is, it does take work.
It does take intentionality, but the fruits are great when it happens because it also helps with the difficult. Times, right? When people know that you have their back, when people know that you care about them, it’s basically easier to have those difficult conversations that can occur at work.
Bruce Daisley: Yeah. That idea of having your back I think is like an important part of my evolving understanding of psychological safety.
That if you know that someone’s got your back Yes. But you, they’re giving you a hard time, okay. They’ve still got my back. So they’re not just digging into me to make my life a misery. They’re doing this with best intentions. And I just wonder if you could string some of this together, what does a sound relationship workplace look like?
How do all of these things work as system thinking?
Karen Bridport: Yes. So the sound relationship workplace which I coined, has different levels to it. And these levels that I’ll share in a moment in essence have all been validated by research. And just so your listeners understand, the book is very science-based.
It’s not just, this is a nice thing to have, but I do reference. Scientific research continuously. ’cause at the end of the day at heart, I am a scientist, right? As a psychologist. And basically the sound relationship workplace entails what you mentioned earlier. Colleague apps, which is the importance of getting to know your colleagues as human beings, not as just human doings, as a right, because we tend to trust those that we know a bit more than those that we don’t know to some degree.
I mean that there’s enough safety that builds. Because you know someone’s, name what they enjoy doing over the weekend. Granted, we all human beings have different comfort levels with how much information that they’re willing to share, but there are definitely green lights I think, that make us all feel more comfortable when we know something’s about.
People. And that those colleague maps that we build, and they tend to get stronger over time are important. They can be anything. What do you enjoy doing, over the weekend, right? What’s your favorite food? What makes you laugh? What’s your dog’s name, right?
Things like that, right? Those kind of build colleague maps. Certainly there are colleagues that you may have a deeper relationship with, and as I’m sure Bruce, one of the better indicators of satisfaction at work is having a best friend, right? We have that research from Gallup and that in fact, people won’t leave a workplace when they have a best friend because they’re connected to the place.
So colleague maps certainly. You don’t have to be best friends with everyone at work, but I think the idea is that you have enough of a connection. Know enough about the person that you feel comfortable with them, right? Another aspect of building a sound relationship workplace is that positive feedback, right?
Is that you are really catching people catching people, doing things well, and you’re calling them out on it, right? That you are supportive, that you are appreciating people. And I’m not saying, telling people, you did a great job. That’s, of course people like to hear, but you know what people like to hear even more is specificity, such as when you gave that presentation to the client, you were so specific, and I think that really helped the client understand, right?
So getting specific with feedback, whether it’s positive or constructive, is super important. But people tend to, I think, forget how important specific feedback is in the positive as well. The third level of the sound relationship workplace is in essence. Having that five to one ratio, that turning towards, that you’re turning towards, more than turning away or turning against, just being mindful, of course, in remote workplaces, right?
This can end up looking we’re turning people’s emails within a certain timeframe, not waiting three days because somebody might think, I don’t matter. Correctly or not, it doesn’t, assumptions are not always correct, but sometimes it can be helpful if, you can’t get back to someone to just say, Hey please give me a couple of days.
So at least acknowledging that the email has come to you makes a difference. Other peop otherwise people may make assumptions erroneously, right? And this is what can happen. In remote settings, actually more so than in person settings, believe it or not. Then there’s the conflict piece, and I like to call it conflict management, not conflict resolution, because many conflicts aren’t resolvable, right?
People end up going a certain direction that you could say that Saul, that kind of resolved the conflict because decision was made in the workplace, but sometimes, we need to look at it more like it’s managed rather than resolved because people have differences of opinion and quite frankly, that’s a really good thing.
Research shows that better decisions are made when groups are involved. Than any one person. It’s because we all see things differently. We can all look at different angles as long as we have tools for really addressing those differences. Acknowledging that there are differences and building, as you mentioned earlier, psychological safety where people feel safe enough to say, Hey, I don’t agree with that.
And here’s what I think without fear of being ridiculed or shamed for having a different opinion. Know, workplaces are not always democracies, and so people end up making decisions that you know, not all, not you know, that there may be D, but as long as you can process those differences and make it about the decision and not about the person, that’s super important.
Another place another piece of really building a sound relationship workplace is attending to your colleagues’ career aspirations to some degree. And that could mean, sometimes you’re in a position to give a person an opportunity, but sometimes you’re not because you’re not their manager.
But sometimes you can absolutely. Give a colleague credit where credit is due and help elevate them and acknowledge them. Gotta have kind of an abundance mindset where, rising tides lift all ships. Sometimes we see in organizations that people are competing within rather than without.
I always tell people. External competition is okay, but when you’re working within an organization, it’s important to come together as a team, right? Where you’re supporting each other. It doesn’t mean that, somebody gets a promotion and you may think, I wish it was me, but hopefully you can learn from why they got a promotion and maybe you can get the next promotion, right?
The idea is that you are a team and that together you rise together and then of course in the sound relationship work. Place. There’s the importance of everybody’s responsible for culture. If you have a chief culture officer of something like that, sure it may be front of mind to them, but at the end of the day, culture is something that’s really built by everybody, right?
Bruce Daisley: what does that look like to you? What does great culture look like to you?
Karen Bridport: Oh, great culture looks like collaboration. Great co. Where there’s good com there, there’s great communication, right? Again, it’s not the absence of conflict, it’s how conflict is managed. That becomes key. It’s resiliency, it’s being able to be vulnerable.
It’s psychological safety. It’s, it’s the ability of the group really to, and when I say the group, I don’t mean individual teams, the whole organization to be able to both celebrate that each person does still have their own identity as a human in the enterprise. But together, your, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
You come together to make something greater than any of you individually. A great culture also is, I think, built around a shared purpose and meaning that actually even serves as an anchor. As an anchor for bringing people together. And people understanding how their piece fits into the whole, right?
And and so that, that to me is what great culture is about. Where good, where great decision making is celebrated, right? Where where people are feel connected to something greater than themselves individually.
Bruce Daisley: Tha thank you so much for this discussion and I thought the book was an elite.
Guide to things that I think I’ve seen covered in slight detail before, but this was way more substantial. One of the things that we often talk about is we talk about as we’re entering this era of AI assisted work, that it’s the moment, if anything, for us to rehumanize work and for us to lean into the things that make humans.
Effective and stronger and make sure we do them more effectively and you seem to be a really big champion for doing that in an informed and empowered way I think. I wonder if in wrapping up, you’d give us. Your case for that, why you think this is a moment for us to rehumanize work?
Karen Bridport: Yeah, I absolutely do.
And by the way I don’t think that ai, as incredible as it is showing us to be able to do so many different things, at the end of the day, I don’t think that ai, we’ll really be able to replace a human kind of a connection that is the squon of human beings coming together. I’ll be honest with you I don’t, and and I do think that AI is gonna have a, is gonna be very helpful and helping humans connect potentially, but will not replace that.
Real human connection, that human to human contact that we all need, that we are primed for. So I would say that we need to remember that human touch doesn’t just come from a physical touch, but it comes from an emotional exchange between two human beings that I don’t believe AI will be able to replicate.
Although I think that AI. Will be able to help us, certainly help us, but it will not be able to take away that human touch, that humanness that we need from one another.
Bruce Daisley: So you are optimistic about the enduring importance of humans in the workplace.
Karen Bridport: If humans in the world and of human contact and of human energetic exchange.
The energy that happens when two people see each other, feel seen by each other and help us feel actually we need each other. As I’m circling back to what I said earlier, we need each other, we need each other to know ourselves. That’s, it’s that bumping up against the other that I talked about.
And so we need other humans to really understand who we are. Because we don’t know who we are in isolation.
