What Does It Take? (Part 2)

There’s no real secret formula to life but here are qualities I’ve observed in others I consider successful, as professionals and as human beings.

Practicing trust and humor is a good way to boost personal courage, especially during stressful episodes. Trust means readily showing others proof of your intent, your motives. Even saying “I’m still not sure what I want from the situation” is better than nothing.

Humor loosens up tense muscles, enables rapid learning, and makes it fun to collaborate over the most difficult tasks and situations.

Most of us practice the wrong sort of humor, however; rather than being situational, humor is used to poke fun at someone else. But charming people know the most engaging humor is self-deprecating. For example, have you ever noticed that very arrogant people have a weak sense of humor?

Be kind. This can be hard, especially if you work in a place where a good day is one long defensive play. But if you think a colleague really has it out for you, wait for a pattern to develop before you stage a pre-emptive strike against them. If you receive credit but know it was wholly a team effort, don’t be a credit hog: share it.

If you listen more than you speak, you’re probably doing a lot of things right.

Kindness is too often confused with permissiveness. To be kind is not to be soft and yielding, but — in tough situations — to be disciplined in communicating difficult concepts so that we don’t take down the other person’s dignity at the same time.

I knew a guy once who was brilliant—articulate, ambitious, driven. He aspired to be, and was, “first in everything,” winning industry award after award—until I heard his assistant mutter behind me, scoffing, “First in everything? Last in people’s hearts.”

What Does It Take?

I’m always telling myself to have courage, to be stronger today than I was yesterday, not because anything bad is happening, but because the present can be so beguiling, so quiet and flat and innocent. And yet tomorrow begins today. I don’t want to cope with life by becoming an unconscious person who destroys things and moves on heedlessly.

I wrote that as my status post on Facebook a couple weeks ago, then was surprised by the reaction it got: friends “stole” it for their own status posts and later their friends reposted it as well.

But why?

Life requires courage—not always the adrenaline-pumping sort where you rush into a burning building to save a client’s project, but the extra nudges it takes to face the phone yet again (cold calling), to sort through complex questions (client may be unhappy), and to build solutions at work (too many deadlines looming), often with people you may not even like working with, who may whine and bellyache every step of the way.

Tomorrow does start today. A history buff, I like considering the influences of the past on our lives today, but to get things done—to be productive—we have to appreciate how actions today set up results tomorrow. If you don’t cold call today, it’ll be even harder to start tomorrow—and tomorrow may be when you need the new revenue. Got a problem with a colleague? Talk bad about them behind their back? Tomorrow you may have to account for yourself. Be ready.

The point to life is to become a more conscious person, to outgrow narcissism, to realize we may rationalize well, but in the end a hurtful action here and now will have a painful reaction there and later, even if the one you hurt is too proud or savvy to show how they’ve been damaged. There’s no getting around it: if you live and work heedless of anyone’s interests but your own, sooner or later you’ll have to understand what you did, and it could be a very difficult reckoning.

Next week: OK, so what?

When Trust Has Been Broken

Every human relationship involves an emotional contract. It may be formal, a trigger for work, such as signing a non-disclosure agreement with an employer. Or it may be a deeply complex pledge that’s formal, legal, moral, and spiritual — vows of marriage are, perhaps, the most common of these, and, very likely, the ones most frequently broken. But for this blog, we’re talking only about workplace betrayals.

A breach or betrayal of trust has an immediate effect: it confuses and disorients the one who’s been betrayed. It’s a negative game-changer. Suddenly every aspect of the relationship has to be reviewed: what has the past really meant? What were the more recent signs, and did they all point to trouble? Was there any deception and has it been of long standing? Does this relationship have any future? Can the betrayer ever be trusted again?

Immediately after this distress, there’s the need for justice. Scales must be rebalanced. Equilibrium must be regained. In the process, don’t be surprised to find the entire relationship being re-evaluated for its overall value.

So what do you do if you’re the one who’s been betrayed?

• Take your mind off revenge, because that’s not justice or equilibrium. Fortunately, work involves tangible deliverables, so focus on keeping yourself professionally intact and above reproach. No matter how badly you’ve been burned, deliver on your commitments. “Being the adult” will only inspire more respect and trust for you. You’ll recover equilibrium faster this way than focusing on how to get even.

• Confront the betrayer and ask for a candid assessment of what happened, and what needs to happen, going forward. I don’t mean a knock-down-drag-out confrontation. I mean a rational, dignified inquiry into their motives which, if they’re legit, should not be difficult to discuss openly. It could, after all, have been a misunderstanding or misstep. If you tend to be indirect, this would now be a time to not mince words. Don’t pussyfoot around. “As I see it, this is what was done to me and here are some of the consequences I’ve had to deal with as a result. I need to know why you did this and what I can expect from you in future.”

•  Let it go. You may not get what you want from that discussion. Chronic betrayers act from cowardly impulses—they act badly, then can’t own up to it, so they often pretend it was a honest mistake, or that you simply got it wrong. Let it go. The strain of carrying the grudge or memory will only deter you, not your betrayer.

Relationships can come out stronger for having navigated crises of trust. The air gets cleared, the exact measures of loyalty and respect are renewed, and life moves on.

If you imagine your life as a series of concentric circles, you’ll see that the individuals you trust and respect most occupy the innermost circle closest to you. The upside to betrayal is that you get instant, crystal-clear insights on that other person—details you may not have had cause to perceive. But with the betrayal, they’ve proven themselves to be unworthy of your trust, so it’s entirely fair to remove them from that inner circle. If they want to regain it, leave it up to them to choose when and how they’ll do so.

You keep moving forward.

Trust: Building Relationships Versus Claiming Rights to Them

Last week I mentioned “karmic panhandlers,” those people who hope to benefit from large concepts of trust and respect without proving themselves worthy of such investment.

A few years ago I was approached by a mother from my kid's school. She said she'd worked for years in marketing and, as they were newly relocated, asked if she could have lunch with me about freelance work prospects here in town. Long story short, what began as a professionally extended invitation boiled down to this:

Me:             “So have you tried cold-calling prospects here?”

She:             “No.”

Me:             “Have you tried interviewing with the big companies in town?”

She:             (shifting uncomfortably) “No.”

Me:             “What is it you'd like me to help you with?”

She:             “I just thought, maybe, if you had some accounts you needed help with...or, um, clients you

wanted to offload....”

I can't recall the last time—before or since—that someone had the gall or naivete to ask me to just hand over some clients. A more professional response from her would’ve been along the lines of, “I was wondering if we could consider partnering up to go after opportunities we might not otherwise get on our own.” It would imply a willingness to work, to share risks and skills-building, and to take the time to build a collaboration.

Instead, when I demurred, she got into some remarks about how, as professional working moms, we automatically belonged to a network of mutual respect and support (ie, you owe me your help). She struck me as wrongheaded—far more aware of the standards to which she held other people than herself. And I didn’t understand the resistance to cold calling. As awful as cold calling seems, it is actually the initiation of new relationships. It seems less horrible when you regard it that way.

Trust is no different than loyalty or credibility—it has to be built and earned. It may have a stated value (“Seriously, you can trust me”) but the real proof is in how each individual takes action. They have to demonstrate they know how to help themselves. They have to know how to initiate, versus relying on others to do that for them. (And it helps to know how to follow up, because how do you learn to trust someone who never follows up with you, or does so in a spotty way?)

Women Who Don’t Help Other Women

 I’m going to start this series with the ticklish issue of trust between women, because it’s the one area where, when we’re good, we’re very, very good; but when we’re bad, we really let ourselves down in big, symbolic ways. My daughter’s generation nailed it when they coined words and phrases like “frenemies,”  “mean girls,” or “Queen Bees and wannabes.” This proliferates the workplace where adult women often find themselves confounded by rivalries and conflicts, and feeling ill-equipped to deal with them.

Madeline Albright said, famously, ”There's a special place in Hell reserved for women who don't help other women.” And trust is the foundation of any helping process.

  

I've given—and received—enough help to know the transformative power it has over us. On the downside, over the years I've been approached by working women who’d “talked bad” about my work or services behind my back but, upon going freelance themselves, felt no qualms about inviting themselves into my network. This I’ve found intriguing because when it comes to trust, it helps if the individual realizes any networking relationship is part of a longer-term, two-way street.

So here are my (post-feminist) concerns:

• Why wouldn't you help anyone who asked for it, male or female? Are we to suspend all critical thinking on the basis of gender only? Is a woman more entitled to my help than a man?

• Would you withhold help from a qualified male in preference for a less qualified female? And by doing that, are we then not perpetuating the very behavior we deplore in “the old boys' network”?

• Finally, the karmic panhandlers. These are the folks who have no problems reaping the benefits of trust, but they haven't earned the right to our unquestioning support. Next week I’ll talk some more about this, especially in light of concepts that suggest some of us are entitled to automatic dollops of trust from others.