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What's Love Got To Do With It?

This article is more than 9 years old.

In a New Yorker cartoon, a bored-looking couple are sitting apart on a couch, facing a smiling therapist who says, “Any healthy relationship requires fundamental acting skills.”

Clearly that therapist doesn’t believe in the Michelangelo Effect.

That effect is where couples who affirm and support each other’s better sides are able to “sculpt” each other in mutually beneficial ways.  Thus they are more likely to become ever more deeply committed to each other and to enjoy fresh experiences and learning – through and with their partner, according to researchers, Arthur Aron and Gary W. Lewandowski, Jr. In psychology, this is called self-expansion – growing through experiences with others.

Imagine what a powerfully positive impact those effects enable them to have in  their interactions with others, as well. In effect, that's a scalable way to strengthen one's capacity to connect better with others.

Reading this research, it dawned on me that the behaviors that build sustainable marriages could also help inclusive-style leaders to model such relationship-building behaviors and thus inspire colleagues to optimize their talents for each other and their organization.  They can become what I dub Opportunity Makers, with and or others, in all parts of their lives. Such Opportunity Makers naturally encourage others, in work and in life,  to support each other’s strongest talents and to introduce each other to new topics that can spur them to self-organize around vital projects where they can use their disparate, best talents together. In so doing colleagues sculpt each other’s strengths as they succeed at projects they could not have accomplished alone. Such experiences whet the appetite for further deeply engaged work together.

The icing on the cake of love and life:  many of the enduringly happy couples turn their differences into sources of interest rather than conflict, thus enabling them to learn from each other more often.

You might be more likely to evoke a similar effect by enabling yourself and others to better hone your awareness of your capacity to understand each other better by reading two compelling, research-based books: Heidi Grant Halvorson’s No One Understands You And What To Do About It (out in April) and Nicholas Epley’s Mindwise.

To understand the power of diverse people working together around sweet spots of shared interest, they might then read Morton Hanson’s Collaboration, Scott Page’s The Difference and Keith Sawyer’s Group Genius. After that the leader could champion discussions on how colleagues can dovetail their strengths on specific work projects.

As in a sustainable, growth-oriented marriage, what’s key for relationship-building Opportunity Makers to model are three traits:

  1. Strongly felt, shared mission
  2. Mutual understanding and expressed support of each other’s strengths and expressing support for them
  3. Desire to learn, grow and create with others

You can measure how well you are consider my adaptation of two questions from the marriage researchers, Aron and Lewandowski:

• How much has working with this colleague resulted in your learning and doing new things?

• How much has knowing this colleague made you a better person?

From other marriage researchers, we can glean further insights into how leaders can grow their organization by enabling colleagues to do greater work together through passionately engaged and sustained relationships at work.

The renowned Gottmans believe that those in happy marriages exhibit certain behaviors with each other. While some researchers criticize the Gottmans’ for scant proof that marital happiness can be connected to these behaviors, they seem worth considering for building closer, productive engagement at work. I have adapted some of them, slightly for modeling relationship-strengthening leadership at work:

• Know each other. Discover and be mindful of their strongest likes and dislikes, greatest talents and passionate interests.

• Focus on each other’s best qualities and opinions of each other, and the rewarding times you have shared.

• Interact as frequently as needed to stay engaged in the shared work. Speak forthrightly about differences so you experience working disagreement and can trust that you know where you stand with each other.

• Allow your partner to influence you so you both can feel heard and can learn from each other.

• Solve your solvable problems. Don’t try for complete agreement on everything. Consider, does this difference between us affect our top goal or can we work around it?

• Understand your partner’s underlying conflict that is preventing resolution. Either find a way to address it directly or offer an alternative that can overcome it. If you two are disagreeing for more than ten minutes, by the way, you are probably not discussing the underlying problem. Not resolving it means it will probably grow.

• Create shared meaning. Find strong sweet spots of shared interests, values, past experiences, needs or traditions.

Since many of us spend the majority of our waking hours working, the leaders that show us how to accomplish greater things through stronger relationships will probably become increasingly sought-after.  Perhaps it is not too odd to look to the secrets of lovingly engaged couples for insights about how we can make our work more meaningful and satisfying together.