Name: How to Work with (Almost) Anyone
Rating: 3.9 (39 reviews)
Author: Michael Bungay Stanier

What’s in it for me? Master workplace dynamics and improve your professional life.

There’s an art to working with people. Every day, you encounter a mosaic of personalities, attitudes, and styles. The complexity only grows in the professional realm, where the stakes are high and every interaction can directly impact your business’s success. You have to figure out the dynamics of these professional interactions, the recipes for productive conversations, and the maps for navigating workplace relationships.

Imagine if you could approach each interaction with a better understanding of the other person’s strengths, preferences, and past experiences? What if you could establish relationships built not on guesswork or good fortune, but on understanding, mutual respect, and shared purpose?

In this Blink, you’ll gain a practical approach to facilitating open dialogue and creating a foundation for effective workplace relationships. You’ll discover the importance of nurturing curiosity, embracing vulnerability, and exhibiting kindness to foster trust and collaboration. You’ll see how regular adjustments, prompt repairs, and sometimes a complete reset are necessary to maintain these relationships. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to separate facts from feelings and judgments, which will help you understand the dynamics of professional interactions.

Building stronger work relationships

You’re in a bustling kitchen – the heart of a renowned restaurant. The tantalizing aroma of spices fills the air as expert chefs deftly chop, sauté, and plate. Behind each exquisite dish lies hours of careful planning, ingredient selection, and a deep understanding of how to blend flavors to create a culinary masterpiece. Preparing a memorable meal doesn’t just involve combining ingredients at the last minute; it’s a process that begins long before the food ever reaches the stove.

Now, let’s turn that kitchen into your workplace, and that delectable dish into the potent business relationships you strive to forge with your colleagues. The recipe for successful collaboration, like our fine dining scenario, requires careful planning and selection of conversation ingredients. Your goal is to create a keystone conversation – one that keeps the relationship stable and strong.

The first ingredient in your keystone conversation is the Amplify Question: What’s your best? Just like identifying the star ingredient of a dish, pinpoint your colleagues’ talents and peak moments. Understanding their areas of expertise allows you to tap into the shared talent pool, creating a synergy where you both shine brightest.

Next, add the Steady Question: What are your practices and preferences? In cooking, it’s about knowing the consistency of each ingredient. In the workplace, it’s about understanding each other’s work habits and styles. With this understanding, you can identify the similarities and differences that could lead to powerful collaboration or meaningful balance.

The third part of our recipe is the Good Date Question: What can you learn from successful past relationships? Sharing stories about positive work experiences is like sharing secret family recipes. It helps recreate fruitful collaborations – with luck, timing, and hard work forming the secret ingredients.

Fourth, we have the Bad Date Question: What can you learn from unsuccessful past relationships? As a chef learns from burned dishes and over-seasoned soups, you too can gain wisdom from past work blunders. Analyzing these instances increases self-awareness and helps you avoid making the same mistakes again.

Finally, stir in the Repair Question: How will you fix things that go wrong? This is the seasoning that balances the dish, acknowledging that missteps are inevitable. The ability to identify problems, stay goal-focused, understand, de-escalate, and rebuild adds resilience to your work relationship.

Now it’s time to put these ingredients into action and cook up a keystone conversation – the basis of any good relationship.

Keystone conversations

Think of structuring a keystone conversation as piecing together a beautiful mosaic. Each piece may initially seem disparate, but when connected, they form a cohesive image. This reflects the essence of a keystone conversation – the foundation of your Best Possible Relationship, or BPR, with your colleagues.

Stepping into this new territory might feel awkward and challenging, but that’s totally normal. The first piece of this mosaic? Making your move. Regardless of your current rapport, you always have the opportunity to pause, extend an invitation, and pave the way for the keystone conversation.

Maintaining your Best Possible Relationship

Imagine the process of building your Best Possible Relationship as floating in a shared orbit with your colleague. Much like two celestial bodies, you move independently yet are bound by a shared gravitational pull. Maintaining this balance, preventing collisions or drifts, requires conscious care. Here’s a six-part blueprint for this intricate astral dance.

First, nurture curiosity. Picture an astronaut spotting an unknown being. You don’t have the whole picture, so it’s essential to approach the situation with an open mind and curiosity. For example, if a colleague’s decision puzzles you, instead of jumping to conclusions, ask questions to better understand their perspective.

Mapping facts, judgments, feelings, and wants

Imagine setting off on an adventure in a foreign land. Back in the day, a traveler would never venture out without a well-detailed map. But in today’s age of Google, most of us just type in our destination and obediently follow turn-by-turn directions.

Navigating your Best Possible Relationship is closer to the old-school approach. You have to learn to map out an uncharted landscape – knowing when to adjust, repair, and reset your course. To assist you on this journey, there are two crucial questions to ask.

Navigating adjustments, repairs, and new beginnings

Relationships are a balanced blend of giving and receiving. Just like a carefully composed melody, giving should be generous yet sustainable, while receiving should be thoughtful, not selfish. It’s important to recognize what’s functioning well, and identify the mutual contributions made by each party.

The first course of action when things are out of tune is adjustment – reconfiguring the melody to better suit the rhythm. But there are times when a simple tweak isn’t enough and repair becomes necessary. In these moments, consider the art of the controlled burn: confronting potentially damaging issues head-on in a preemptive manner, leaving no room for them to snowball. It’s not about having an immediate solution, but acknowledging that something could be off-key.

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