People watching at work: how understanding relationship psychology improves team dynamics
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.
Summary
- Understanding how you react to colleagues starts with self-awareness. Our brains can process social slights or exclusion at work in the same way they process physical threats, which triggers our fight-or-flight mode.
- Building connection requires intentional effort, such as keeping mental or written “colleague maps” of the small details of people’s lives and offering specific positive feedback rather than generic praise.
- Workplace friction should be approached as conflict management rather than conflict resolution. Many differences of opinion cannot be fully resolved, but managing them effectively yields better team decisions.
Transcript
Introduction to workplace psychology
Karen Bridbord: 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 behaviour, organisational psychology, and clinical psychology. I’ve had a career where I’ve spent time in both arenas, treating people clinically as well as working directly in the workplace on a day-to-day basis.
Bruce Daisley: I was really intrigued with the idea that you’re a workplace psychologist. It immediately struck me and I thought, wow, how common is that? How common is the idea that a workplace actually has a psychologist? Whether they tap into one or they actually have one on the payroll, how common is that, Karen?
Karen Bridbord: Yeah, I don’t actually think it’s that common. 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 individuals one-on-one. But not so long ago, for about 20 years, that’s what I did.
Organisations would reach out to me, and mostly I was in a consulting capacity helping companies deal with human-type challenges in the workplace. Those challenges could range from having teams that need some support in working more effectively together, to individuals challenged by personal circumstances that could impact how they show up at work.
I found my own academic background is in both arenas. I studied organisational psychology as well as clinical psychology, and I think that mesh of backgrounds has really allowed me to have a toolkit 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. I’ve taken quite a bit of my training with him with couples and have applied it to the workplace.
Relationships are relationships. Granted, there are different boundaries when you’re working with a colleague than when you’re working with your life partner. And when I say working, I just mean 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, or whether you’re working with your parent, right?
There are some fundamentals that occur when people learn how to, for example, repair conflict. Conflict usually happens in the closest of relationships. 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, stonewalling, contempt, or defensiveness, which shuts down conversations, right? But in fact, when people learn how to have productive conversations, it frees them up and actually, I would say, brings them closer.
The importance of self-reflection
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 second. Before that, I saw the book as it was. If you are one of the fortunate people who 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 I 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. It extensively reminded me of attachment theory and how we form attachments to people around us, inviting the reader to appraise their own sense of that.
I 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, where you’ve realised that this is not just a relationship problem between two people, but you need to help someone understand what’s going on in their own head. I wonder if you could just explain why you went into such depth regarding personal analysis.
Karen Bridbord: Yeah, thank you for picking up on that. That was really the first step, right? The first relationship is with the self. We are continuously having a relationship with ourselves, and we are complex creatures who have been impacted by the past, by the present, and even the perception of the future. So understanding what our triggers are and what our strengths are is incredibly important when interacting with others.
The hallmark of emotional intelligence starts with self-awareness. The idea is that when you have that insight about yourself, you have a greater likelihood of being able to manage your own reactions. 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 also becomes about really being able to regulate your reactions and your reactivity at times.
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 enough insight to be able to know, maybe I’m getting triggered right now; I’m in a fight-or-flight mode.
By the way, our bodies and our minds perceive social threats the same way as we perceive a saber-toothed tiger. If we feel excluded, disrespected, or unfairly treated, for example, our brains will go into that fight-or-flight mode. That’s when we can get into trouble regarding how we respond. Understanding the self is so key to being able to ultimately regulate how you respond to others, which could result in greater success. It may mean saying, listen, I need to take a little bit of a break right now, let me think about what you said and come back to you. You don’t have to tell the person, “I’m triggered, I’m having a hard time with what you’re saying.” It allows your nervous system that break to actually calm 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.
Unpacking deeper personal dynamics
Bruce Daisley: Yeah, it just struck me that the self-awareness that probably a lot of us think that we’ve got access to is quite superficial, in truth. And so going into depth and analysing 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 behaviour, yes, but to have more structure to it helped me understand the relationship situation holistically. So I was just really interested in how you did that.
Karen Bridbord: Yeah, absolutely. And just to that point, I would say that we learn so much about ourselves by bumping up against other people, right? Self-awareness seems like a very solitary process, like an isolated process. In fact, the reflective piece can feel like it, however, it happens by having reactions towards other people. It’s only through those interactions and 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, journaling, or even talking to a trusted friend or advisor—can really help us make sense of our reactions. Sometimes we react to people based on unexplored territory and triggers we have from earlier relationships earlier in time.
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 interpreting situations as being dismissed. Maybe we are being dismissed, but are we withdrawing ourselves and not activating ourselves to help remedy the situation? Instead, we might just say, “The world is going to dismiss me, so I’m just going to remain dismissed,” as opposed to activating ourselves to foster healthier, more productive relationships.
That’s a small example. 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 and our initial work experiences—can impact how we interpret things and then how we respond accordingly.
Generational connections and technology
Bruce Daisley: On that topic there, I’m always cautious of generational suspicion or generational change. However, if our first ever group was broadly, for most of us, our family, then family systems are so formative for what follows subsequently about how we engage with others and how we understand the dynamic of power. Have families changed over time?
I’ll give you a specific example. It might have been that during a certain period of time, a lot of us might have spent adolescence watching TV side-by-side with our parents, or we might have had evening meals with our parents. For different cultures, like Spanish and French cultures, that still remains. Sometimes when I talk to Spanish and French people saying, “Oh, actually, 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 that changed?
Karen Bridbord: By the way, there is a lot of research that shows that families that eat together are more connected. And so there is a lot of validity to that. It turns out it’s not just eating; it’s just the spending time together. So yeah, go ahead to your point.
Bruce Daisley: So in the old days, we might have watched television together, sitting side-by-side. Now, in our first group, people might be on their phones 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 Gen Z or Gen Alpha workers to be a little bit more estranged from a group dynamic in favour of being individualistic?
Karen Bridbord: It is such a great question. To answer that, I do think about going 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 habit. It’s not only what’s going on at home, it’s also people going to restaurants and not connecting. I do think that the phone has become something that we’ve grown accustomed to very quickly. Some would even argue that there’s an addictive element to the phone, that the dopamine receptors give us a reward system in our circuitry, and so we are drawn to the phone continuously.
Do I think that the younger generations are using and will continue to use them more than we did? For example, I didn’t grow up with a cellular phone the way I have now. Yeah, they may find that their sense of connectivity is met more so through online mediums.
It was once the case that we didn’t really have restaurants to go to and have someone else cook for us, meaning we had to cook at home in order to eat. Similarly, whereas we previously had to meet up with people to feel connected because we didn’t have phones, the phones will continue to serve a way where people are getting their connection met in that manner.
I will argue that I do think it is extremely important, though, to have that in-person opportunity to be with others. People ask me this all the time. I was just giving another talk and they said, “Do you think that it’s okay to just be a remote employee?” And I say, “Yeah, of course, I think it’s okay.” But I think that for organisations where you have remote employees, any opportunity to bring people together, even if it’s on a quarterly basis, will make a difference for connection.
There’s something specific that happens when we’re live with individuals. I’m not minimising the fact that, thank goodness, we have Zoom and thank goodness we have phones that allow us 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.
Building colleague maps and safety
Bruce Daisley: I want to draw on that one. One of the things that I said we would come back to was your mentor, Dr Gottman, whom you studied under… You talk about being kind to yourself regarding 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 mention it. At the base level, there’s nothing more enchanting than someone whose name you don’t remember coming over and greeting you by your name. You’re consumed with, “Wow, what a wonderful thing,” and you might be riddled with your own embarrassment that you can’t reciprocate.
But people remembering small details about us can be so important for building connection. You talk a lot about building connection. I just wonder if you could reflect on all that for a second. Some people might say it’s cynical to keep a map like that, whereas I saw it as something that was quite achievable. Do you believe that is just a natural order of being a better human?
Karen Bridbord: Look, we’ve got so much information coming at us every day and we have to filter things 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. Nobody needs to know that you’re writing down, “Sandy has a dog named Will.” It’s actually a kind thing to make note of because people want to know that they matter.
People want to know that you remember, especially if somebody has shared a piece of personal information with you, such as, “My dog had to have surgery last week.” How wonderful to follow up and say, “Hey, how does your dog feel?” If people end up sharing a personal piece of information—something that’s bothering them or worrying them—to be able to follow up and make a note of it is a nice thing. 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.
Granted, all human beings have different comfort levels with how much information they’re willing to share, but there are definitely green lights that make us all feel more comfortable when we know something about people. Those colleague maps that we build tend to get stronger over time, and they are important. They can be anything: What do you enjoy doing over the weekend? What’s your favourite food? What makes you laugh? What’s your dog’s name? Things like that build colleague maps.
Certainly, there are colleagues that you may have a deeper relationship with. As I’m sure you know, Bruce, one of the better indicators of satisfaction at work is having a best friend, right? We have that research from Gallup showing that, in fact, people won’t leave a workplace when they have a best friend because they’re connected to the place. So with colleague maps, you don’t have to be best friends with everyone at work, but the idea is that you have enough of a connection and know enough about the person that you feel comfortable with them.
Another aspect of building a sound relationship workplace is positive feedback. It is about catching people doing things well and calling them out on it, being supportive, and appreciating them. I’m not just saying telling people, “You did a great job.” Of course, people like to hear that, but what people like to hear even more is specificity. For example: “When you gave that presentation to the client, you were so specific, and I think that really helped the client understand.” Getting specific with feedback, whether it’s positive or constructive, is super important. But people tend to forget how important specific feedback is in the positive as well.
The third level of a sound relationship workplace is, in essence, having that five-to-one ratio—that turning towards. You are turning towards more than turning away or turning against. Just being mindful, of course, in remote workplaces, this can end up looking like returning people’s emails within a certain timeframe, not waiting three days, because somebody might think, “I don’t matter.” Correctly or not, 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.” At least acknowledging that the email has come to you makes a difference. Otherwise, people may make assumptions erroneously. 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. People end up going in a certain direction, and you could say that sort of resolved the conflict because a 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 rather 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.
