A mom wrote to the Social Qs columnist in the New York Times about her adult daughter, an actress who stars in many theater productions. Apparently, the daughter gets upset when the mom doesn’t bring flowers to every opening night or doesn’t compliment every performance.
The mom’s side: She’s being dramatic. I don’t think every performance or production is worthy of flowers or compliments.
Social Qs response: You could be right… and you get to choose. You can be right or you can be in relationship with your daughter.
Brilliant!
“Being right” typically stems from our upset when someone has not met our engagement expectations.
As an example, we expect a colleague to get back to us. When he doesn’t, we get frustrated or upset. And we justify our upset by being right and making him wrong.
But focusing on being right about the situation makes it difficult to improve the process and move forward in our relationship with our colleague.
Why? Because “being right” involves criticizing, blaming, and judging. And no one likes being in a relationship feeling criticized, blamed, and judged. It threatens the relationship’s foundation of trust.
Kenneth Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks, gets it. He works with, in his words, incredibly intelligent, whimsical personalities who often engage like a dysfunctional family. But Ziegler says his job is to make people successful. So he exercises patience for the varying degrees of dysfunction, as long as people follow the rules and don’t act like they’re more important than the company or their team.
Ziegler understands that to help people be successful, he needs to be in relationship with them. Making people wrong about how they function and engage would threaten those relationships and sabotage his commitment.
Joy at work and in life depends on our relationships.
Suddenly, being right seems so sophomoric. |
