Relationships; the foundation of success

I was listening to an interview recently with Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury and lifetime advocate for peace. He was asked what the key ingredient was for making progress in areas of conflict. Without hesitation or equivocation he replied (something like) “It’s all about relationships, without that there’s nothing”. And so it is in every aspect of the work I do, which is why the relationship pyramid is a tool I reach for more than most.

This pyramid was one of the challenger tools introduced to me by the good people of Relume. On first inspection it might seem rather obvious and lacking in potential, but I find it to be something of a tardis in terms of the value to be unlocked when you step inside its logic. I’ll try and explain:

Relationship
This is a foundation layer that, as the diagram suggests, needs the most attention. It’s not simply about people getting on. It’s about trust, common purpose, collaboration, confronting and challenging (https://www.stillwaters.world/resources-still-waters-overview/the-confront-model) and yes it’s also about respect, care, compassion and possibly even love.

There are two common mistakes to be made about relationships. The first one is that they are somehow a soft factor or something of a luxury. In the tough world of business they can be seen as weak and unnecessary. I’m often thought of as something of a tree-hugger when I advocate for relationships (which I don’t mind actually as I do love trees and often hug them).

The second mistake we often make is to assume that a good relationship needs no attention. As every good farmer will tell you, soil quality is the foundation of yield success. But soil is a living thing, that requires regular nurturing, refreshment and rest, without which it would lose nutrients and reduce its capability. Relationship are similar. Without regular attention, relationships can become stale, habitual and can end up dwindling in potency.

Possibilities
Possibilities is about creativity and imagination. Big, strong, healthy relationships allow possibilities to flourish. Possibilities allow us to dream big, to imagine the impossible. We are invested enough, and feel safe enough, in relational terms, to imagine and unlock the impossible so that what emerges as a possibility is abundant in range and quality. To keep my farming metaphor going, this is about planting, feeding and watering, nourishing ideas whatever they are so that they might flourish.

Opportunities
Opportunities is about the ability to discern (one of the six keys to success). In business language we think of it as prioritisation, the hardest part of which is being able to say no. A strong relational foundation, coupled with a plentiful range of possibilities, then requires challenging conversations to discern the real and valuable form the fanciful and fruitless. Here the farmer is weeding and pruning, making space for valuable crops by removing those less desirable.

Action and Results
I’m hoping these need no explanation, save to say that the quality of the action, and hence the results, is always determined by what sits underneath it and the quality of the relationships at the foundation. Too often when I’m working with individuals, teams and organisations they realise that they spend 80-90% of their time and effort in these top two boxes, without nurturing what sits below. This can lead to a pyramid that is narrow and tall, meaning action is constrained and results meagre. Hoping my metaphor can make it to the end of this description, if a farmer is just obsessed with reaping crops and pays little attention to the rest, it doesn’t take a genius to work out harvests will soon suffer.

I’ll try to bring to life what this might mean more specifically in my work with individuals, teams and organisations:

Individuals
I do a lot of 1:1 coaching and know from bitter experience that without a really strong relationship foundation, based on mutual trust, rapport, respect and care we are going nowhere fast. I see my first job as a coach as being to bring unconditional positive regard for my client into the room. This isn’t just because I’m a kind, optimistic person, it’s because I know the working alliance needed, often with a client in some level of distress, needs careful attention if we are to make progress. The client needs to know I can be trusted and have only their best interests at heart.

Teams
As I said earlier, many of the leadership teams I have worked with spend almost all of their collective time on the very near and the extremely tangible, i.e. results (and the action that causes them). It’s understandable really, in a pressurised environment where results are not as they would like, the temptation is to double down on action. I worked with a team recently whose experience of the relationship pyramid helped them reveal the futility of their action/results focused agenda. They needed to find ways to improve the service they offered. It needed risky, courageous, radical thinking, which in turn needed an environment of trust and psychological safety. These conditions weren’t automatically present and so they spent time working on their relationships; not so they would feel better about their work mates but so that they could generate the solutions they needed to make a breakthrough.

Organisations
I’ve been working with an organisation recently who are dependent on other parts of their corporate entity for work. They patiently and politely wait for the work to arrive, focusing their time and effort on the quality of their execution when it does come. There’s a belief that the quality of what they do will be enough to attract more work, which is a reasonable line of logic until the relationship pyramid is introduced. It suggests that incoming work, the lifeblood of this organisation, is as much about the quality of the relationships as it is the quality of the work. For them, relationships is about proactively getting out to the wider company, developing common purpose and proactively generating possibility. Dreaming big, and then having gritty conversations to hone some opportunities.