Welcome to messy but essential. I'm Rod Stilwell. And this is the weekly podcast about the people side of project leadership. It's where we help you improve your soft skills to reduce hard costs. In today's episode, we're going to be skimming the surface of the topic of managing relationships. Joining me in studio today is my brother Dale, who's both my business partner and comes with an extensive project experience around the world.
Hello.
That was pretty minimal. We'll talk about that. And we'll get a chance to say a little bit more once we get going on this. Before we jump into the topic, though, as is customary in these podcasts, I want to talk a little bit about safety. Now, typically, we think of safety in terms of physical things, making sure that there aren't wires that we trip over, or making sure that there's nothing overhead that can fall on us from a scaffolding or whatever.
But when it comes to relationships, we need to talk about emotional safety. So emotional safety is really creating an environment for the relationship that allows the two people in that relationship to be authentic, to be real with each other, not to be judged. That's truly a safe relationship. It doesn't mean you don't disagree, it doesn't mean you don't have conflict, it doesn't mean that you don't
challenge each other. But you do so in a way that is respectful of the boundaries and who each other is. So even though this isn't a podcast about safety, everything we talk about when it comes to relationships, needs to be framed with the understanding that those are happening in a safe, emotionally safe environment. Just a quick thought I read a quote the other day, which I found was particularly useful. And that is that a relationship without trust is like a phone
without service. All you do is play games. And when you think of it, relationships that any one of us have had that haven't really been founded on trust, we'll talk about that in a moment. Probably there's a certain amount of game playing that happens there. So I'm going to get Dale to jump in in a few minutes and talk to me talk to us about his experience with relationships and projects and
so on. But before we do, I want to talk about a formula that I read a number of years ago and show notes will give you a reference to the book it comes from. But the formula was quite simply r equals t plus v plus d. relationships, equal trust, plus value plus dialogue. In other words, in order to have a good relationship, there needs to be trust between the two people, there needs to be shared values in the sense of we value each other. But we also have values that we share in common.
And there needs to be some form of dialogue, we have to stay in touch. In fact, studies have shown that if you do not have a minimum of five touches a year now that doesn't seem like an awful lot, but still five touches a year that's getting to see somebody a phone call, visiting them, not just a quick email, but something meaningful. If you don't have five year, you don't really have a relationship, you have an acquaintance. So Dale when we talk about trust, especially as the first
part of the formula. Share with me a little bit your perspective and where Trust has been important in terms of relationships and projects for you over the years.
Yeah, thanks. I I would definitely say trust is critical to those relationships and critical to relationships on a project. And I think that, you know, when we're talking about trust, I think what we're talking about is an appropriate level of trust or the, the relationship in question. So, you know, you're not necessarily going to have the same level of trust for a co worker that you have for a family member or a, you know, close personal friend
or whatever. And that trust may not be founded on exactly the same things, but you still need to trust that that person that you're working with, towards a common goal has the expertise to do to fulfill the role that they've got, that has the willingness to, to work on it, that will honor their commitments, that is going to be you know, accessible and part of
the team. And so you know, you you're, you need to be able to trust them in order for that to be able to work and trust can be a difficult Thing within project relationships, because often, the people that we're working with, you know, are not necessarily people we've worked with for a long period of time. So we're having to try and build relationships quickly, in some
cases. And so you know, where that trust comes from, and how we build that trust can be different than it would be in other relationships in our lives. So for example, you know, sometimes on a project, if I don't know the person very well, that person may be sort of borrowing trust, you know, so they're, they're coming to me with a recommendation from somebody else that I trust. And so I'm willing to extend that to
that person. You know, because I trust the person who's recommending them, I trust the person who's told me that they have the expertise and that they're great to work with, etc. So it's not always trust that I've developed specifically with that individual, because I may not have known them long enough. But I do need to have that sense that I trust this person, in order for us to work together and be able to relate to each other as we work on the project.
I think that's a really important point, because clearly, we trust takes time, we have to build a period of time, but we don't want to go into even a brand new relationship with zero trust, we want to have a premise that that trust is going to be there often until such time as it's broken, or something happens that that causes us to question that trust. So I think that that's a really important consideration.
Obviously, as we develop and deepen relationships, our trust grows, if we look at the other parts of the formula, the value in dialogue, one of the things that comes to mind is that relationships that we value, in other words, those relationships that we want to stay in touch with. It's often because we
share in common values. In other words, if you believe in integrity, if you believe in getting arriving on time, if you believe in doing things, well, you're likely to have deeper relationships with people who
share those values. And people who don't share those values, people who never arrive on time, if that's one of your values, or people who don't share your same, you know, convictions about family or pets and those what we're likely to have less trust in some cases in them, or less of a relationship, because there's a disconnect at a very
fundamental level. So when we talk about relationships, equaling trust plus value, it's not only is this a valuable relationship, in other words, the things that we talk about are useful. But also we share a common understanding a common platform, we've certainly seen, you know, people who can disagree with each other, but still have a very good relationship, because they're not disagreeing on fundamental values. They're disagreeing on points of order. They're
disagreeing on opinions. They're disagreeing on taste, but not necessarily on fundamental values.
Yeah, and I think that's a that's a really good point. And it's, I think that your values. Sometimes the, when we think about values, in that context, we're thinking of things that are very big and very important and very overwhelming. You know, I believe that, you know, I have I value fairness, or I value, you know, these these types of big philosophical concepts. But I think that sometimes it's more
subtle than that. And I do like the fact that the, you know, the way in which the formula lays it out, it's, it's like, it's this plus this, right. And so I think sometimes, in my experience in projects, especially international projects, working with people who you don't you haven't necessarily had any relationship with in the past, is that sometimes those shared values can make up for not a lack of trust, but a gap in
trust. So I don't know how much I trust you because I, you know, I've been, I know your credentials are good people have recommended you, you know, I've talked to people who've worked with you. So I have this basic idea that, that you're going to be trustworthy in terms of doing the things that need to be done on this project. But I don't
really know. And I always used to joke that the the most important part of a project kickoff where the drinks and dinner at the end of the day, because that's where you sort of got to know a little bit about the people individually as people. And so even something as simple as you know, I know that you like to ski or I know that
you'd like this thing. And recently, we've got a shared interest and I know that you have a you know, a good relationship with your parent or whatever you've talked about something like that, that has made you accessible human being to me, that can can make up for some of the lack of trust when
something happens. So, you know, a month later, when we're on a project, things are getting tense, we're in two different cities for communicating over email, I can easily miss read what you've written to me, and the frustration of that. But having that little bit of something that I know we share, allows me to kind of look at that and second guess my first, you know, my first reaction and not necessarily get all upset about it and go, Oh, well, you know, I would have taken it this
way. But I know that this person, you know, I've had time to chat with this person, outside of the project context. And so I, I kind of give more to that. Even though we didn't necessarily have greater trust, that would have been another relationship would have allowed me to let that go. Does that make sense?
It does. Absolutely. And in fact, it kind of brings to mind a situation I had a number of years ago where the, the project that I was working on, which was a $8 billion project, to senior members of the team did not trust each other. And I would even go so far as to say at some level, they were sabotaging each other. And we had spent literally, a couple of years back and forth with these two people at each other's throats, they did not value each other, they really didn't get along at
all. And, you know, the owner of the project was needed both of them, they both brought certain expertise to the project. And, and were critical, they had a history with it, and so on. But this was clearly getting in the way, I mean, really to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars that we could kind of point two is being overspend or whatever, because these two people didn't get along. Now you might find yourself saying, Well, why were they still there, but that's a different topic. I
was working with them. And one of the challenges as well as to find that common point Gail, to your point, whether it's Maki, whether it's it's a sports, whether it's family, or whatever. And I use the technique I use that actually has images on cards, and we randomly select cards, and etc, etc, called points of view. And again, there's something I
mentioned in the show notes. And just randomly, the code that came up was a picture of two seasoned, clearly an elderly gentleman's hands that looked seasoned and worn, and they were clasped together, you could see this big ring on one of the fingers. And they both stopped what they were saying, looked at the picture. And almost simultaneously, they both said those hands remind me of my grandfather's hand, though,
that's kind of interesting. What was really more interesting was that what happened next, they both said, I was really raised by my grandfather, my father was seldom around or not even in the picture. And it was my grandfather who raised me. And the other fellow said, really mine too. And all of a sudden, we're talking about grandfathers and the challenges of grandfathers raising you and how much they love them, and blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, that was a connection, that created the value, they both now saw that they shared a common value, which was being raised by a grandfather. And, you know, that was the tipping point now Could I have prescribed that could I think it was no, you know, to purely randomly came across the right card. And that's the beauty of using the right brain to have
visual images and so on. But it was really the fact that they connected on something that they shared as a fundamental value and experience in that sense. So again, we come back to you may not know them enough to trust them. But at some level, you have to have something in common that both of you value.
Mm hmm. Yeah, something that humanizes the other person in your eyes, right, you know, stops you thinking of them as a as a role or whatever or a obstacle or something and puts them back in the context of another human being.
Yeah, that's I like that. That's exactly what that is. And that really brings us to the third component within that equation, which is dialogue, talking to each other, sharing with each other, understanding each other. You know, if you're not having that dialogue, if the if it's just you know, toasts emails or text messages or whatever, then you know, the relationship and you pointed out earlier, Dale has a plus sign
between each of those. In other words, in order for that equal sign to be valid, you have to have all three, you have to have trust, you have to have value, and you have to have the dialogue. So when a relationship dialog breaks down, there's an unequal sign here. You have a relationship. If that dialogue has broken down. So when people ask me, you know, I haven't talked to such and such for years, they don't really have a relationship. They know them. Yeah. And maybe you could come
back really quickly. But at the moment without the dialogue, they don't have a relationship.
Yeah, and and that you can, you know, you can, the individual components might become more important because of a deficiency in one of the other categories. Right. So as we talked about what the value is the same thing with the dialogue. You know, if if there's two people on a project who've worked with us on hundreds of projects together, we we kind of know each what each other's thinking before we even finished the sentence all the rest of that stuff, right?
We know exactly we can, we can carve this off, hand it to you forget about it, I never have to think about it. Again, I know exactly how it's going to be done. I know all those things, the dialogue may be less important. But the less trust the less shared values, the less shared experiences, the less of all that we have, the more the
dialogue becomes important. And you need to over communicate over dial on keep having the conversations, keep asking the questions, all that stuff to make up for that, that sort of lack, which we often have in these project dimensions, and, you know, updating the the Microsoft Project, so the Gantt chart does not count as dial. Right?
really? Darn.
you know, I think the project manager too, is whoever's managing the project, obviously, because that person tends to have the greatest amount of vested interest in the success of the project, and meeting the various people involved, you know, sometimes ensuring the dialogue takes place becomes your responsibility. You may not be the one having the dialogue, but you've got to make sure that it's happening.
Yeah, I think that's a really important point as well, your dialogue often needs to be intentional, we're pretty busy, everybody's busy these days. You know, if you're listening to this, in 2021, we're, you know, working our way through a worldwide pandemic, and people are communicating through zoom and teams, and WebEx and in Google Hangouts, and so on, and, and, you know, people are finding that there's frustration or fatigue coming from the virtual communications, but it's
still dialogue. And in fact, in many cases, I've had clients say, strange as it may seem, I have more connection today, even though I'm not allowed to be physically present with them, I have more connection, more dialogue, more FaceTime, with people around the world, with colleagues, family, etc, than I've ever had in the past. And of course, I wouldn't have prescribed a worldwide pandemic to get them closer together. But the reality is, you know, those,
that dialogue is happening. And, you know, to kind of close out on the relationship equals trust plus value plus dialogue part of this podcast, I want to reinforce that relationships happen because we stay in touch, because we share the things that are important to us and so on. And I'm not talking about a Facebook post that 500 people see, etc. I'm talking about truly the one on one or one to a
small group of relationship. And one of the things that I like to do is every now and then go back and look at what are the 60 most important relationships in my life. I call it my nifty 50 and I literally have a list that that changes because you know, you move in and out in my case, different clients come in and out, they become part of a very important part of my life and then they move on to other
things and so on. But within that, what I call nifty 50, I actually calibrate those relationships, looking in terms of the depth that I have in the relationship and the relevance of that relationship to where I
am in my life right now. The role or the position that they occupy, in other words, I the you know, just a gatekeeper, not just Are they a gatekeeper, somebody who, whose job is to, to filter, you know, the contacts, are they you know, actually the decision maker, or the somebody who has a strong influence in the outcomes, etc. And then the fourth, I look at his influences, it relates to a
bigger picture. I was recently speaking with a new acquaintance who was going to become a trusted relationship, I certainly hope but new acquaintance, and when they were introduced to me, the person, a common friend who introduced us, he said, this is an I'll call him James. This is James. James introduced me to Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. And I thought to myself, so it wasn't just that James knows Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, James introduced me
to them. So we had to know them well enough to be able to introduce this food party to them. And I thought to myself, okay, there's somebody, I want to develop more depth with. This, somebody, if they travel in those circles, I want to get to know them better. So I looked through each of those, and I use a formula again, you know, it's an acronym and the project world is so full of acronyms. D, RPI. So D for depth, RF irrelevance, p for position, and I flew for influence. And I have a point
system and so on. And I'll share that and I'm not going to go through that all right now, but I will share that in the show notes. But the point is simply that if I don't have the depth of relationship with somebody, but do incredibly relevant to my success, I'm not likely going to get much value, because I haven't deepened or haven't created that trust in a
relationship. Stephen Covey says that, you know, you need to make life as an emotional bank account, you need to make deposits, before you're allowed to make withdrawals. You need to build the trust with them before you can ask them for something. I remember, I think it was 18 or 19, when I had a position to sell me life insurance. And you know, what struck me most wasn't all of the program, etc. It was that at the end, first time I've met this guy selling me life
insurance. At the end of it, he says to me, so do you have three friends you could refer me to? And I'm thinking, why would I want to inflict you on three of my friends, you haven't earned my trust with me to them, you know, transfer you. Now I will tell you that literally 30 years later, when that same individual was still following me. And he was in well into his 80s. And he was calling me every year to find out what my status was, etc, I had no problem referring him because he had become a
trusted advisor. But the first time we met, so I think this, there's you know, when we talk about trust, trust also demands a level of vulnerability. and building relationships means disclosing things about yourself, that make you a little vulnerable, but that increases the value. So you know, if I go back to those two gentlemen, in the project, who had a grandfather in common, if they hadn't been vulnerable enough to disclose that the relationship would have stayed the mess that
it was. So trust is also about being vulnerable. So I look at how deep a relationship do I have? how relevant is that relationship to my business and personal goals? You know, I mean, you can look at your LinkedIn profile, or your Facebook profile, or whatever social media you're on and see that you have four or 500 followers or 1000 followers or
whatever. But when you start looking at them, how many of those followers would respond to your phone call at three in the morning, if you call to say that your car was broken down? And he needed help, right? Where are they in terms of relevance to where you are today. And again, doesn't mean you need to drop them off the list. But it might mean that you're not staying in touch with them as often as those who are more relevant to you achieving your goals and so
on. The other is, you know, position at the end of the day in the project world, especially understanding who the sponsor is, who the client is, who, who influences some of those decisions. You know, I remember in a volunteer role, many years ago, we had two key people, one who was kind of invisible, and I remember thinking, gee, who actually makes the decision, like, does he go home and talk
to his wife? And she really tells them what to think and what to say, in which case, I really need to be talking to her because he's kind of useless. Right? Now, that's maybe unfair, but again, influencers? Who are people behind the scenes often do we know who they are? Have we been bold enough to ask that question? You know, or you just spent 25 minutes trying to convince somebody to do something, to discover that they didn't have any power to make
that decision anyway. And then the last is overall influence. And that is, you know, from a perspective of do I know someone who knows someone who can help me build the relationship. So the example that comes to mind in a book I was reading recently, about Bob Iger, the President, and now chairman of Disney, when he was looking for Disney was looking to buy George Lucas Films. He didn't really know George Lucas very well, but he did know Steve Jobs from when
they had acquired Pixar. So and Steve knew George Lucas very well. So there was this kind of triangle where Bob could talk to Steve, who could then talk to George And connect them back to each other. But the strength of the relationship with George was built on the strength of the value of the relationship that Bob Iger had with Steve Jobs. And so again, when we come to, you know, looking at projects and so on, one of the big challenges is, we have to deal with a lot of people who
influence others. Do we track who they are? And I guess that's my point, when, you know, in terms of wrapping this up, when we think about relationships, how are we being systematic tracking, figuring out who we need to be talking to? So let's just talk for a moment about those influencers, Dale, those people who don't come to the meetings, but we need to know a little bit about them. was your experience been with that?
Yes, I think you're gonna have, you know, people in that role in, in a variety of places, obviously, you mentioned sponsors, and sponsors are, are often a big part of your influencer group, you know, often a senior person, and often someone who multiple people on the project reports to in some way or another. So those people obviously, and their opinions have had an enormous amount of
influence. But there's also other people that are stakeholders, and those stakeholders, you know, may have may not be formally defined within the project may not be, you know, it may not be clearly articulated, that they are part of the project hierarchy in one way or another. But they feel they can exert an off an enormous amount of influence over the various people on the project and over the success of the project, if they feel that they have some kind of a stake
in this. And so sometimes, you know, we, we don't go to the trouble of identifying those, we never really know, to your point that there's someone in the background, who is, you know, maneuvering the project, or ensuring that the project never actually is successful. Because that person has a stake in the project not being successful or has a stake in something else happening, or, you know,
whatever that is. And if we don't have it kind of looked for those places, and haven't tried to think about, okay, who's going to be impacted by this project? Are there organizations that are going to be impacted that aren't at the table? You know, and who are the people that move those organizations so that people have large influences? Because if we don't do that work, to your point, when I intentional about it, oftentimes those things can be overlooked. We can have those
situations occur. And we're blindsided by them. You know, and we never really know. I mean, I remember working on a project where we were working with outsourcing partner, and we had requested something from that outsourcing partner, and it
just, it was not happening. And I had a, you know, there were people I worked with on the projects, who were I was gotten quite close to belt, build good relationships with and eventually one of the people called me up and said, Look, this is totally off the record, you know, I'm not allowed to
tell you this. But you know, we've been told by this person in senior management, we were told by this person, senior management that under no circumstances where we could give this to you, you can ask as much as many times as you want it, this was never going to happen. And so, you know, that person, there was some personality issues, there were some things and that person was, was interested in this not being a success. And that couldn't
come out formally. Because there was no mechanism for that to happen. You know, but if I wouldn't necessarily have known that that's where this was coming from. We just got to get it kept getting these delays and kept wondering what was going on. Because none of the excuses really made sense, after a while, but it certainly can't happen.
Nothing, I think that's a really good point. And it's something that we need to keep in mind is, and it takes courage to ask the question. So is there someone else behind the scenes that I need to be aware of, you know, is there a silent partner here that is coming to the
table? You know, I can remember many years ago dealing with a large aeronautics company, and it was very clear that one of the big shareholders was the president's wife, and he would be sitting in a meeting and somebody would, you know, present a $50 million project. And you know, he would say, Well, I'm, I have to think of it in terms of whether Helen is going to like $50 million less
than to push this year. You know, and, and he would be very open like that, and but we knew Helen would never like Helen was invisible, but Helen was important. And she was a you
know, a key shareholder. So I mean, I think that those are legitimate parts of any project and any relationship is understanding either other people in play here that we need to work with, that we need to develop a relationship with, even if that relationship ends up being a bit of a vicarious one, developed through a third
party, are we at least aware. So to wrap up, when we think of relationships within projects, a, it doesn't matter how quickly, the cement cures, it doesn't matter how quality the steel is, at the end of the day, projects fail or succeed on people on relationships. And the more we can develop, grow, build that trust, the greater the likelihood that the project will work out. So relationships are critical to projects. They're critical in other parts of our
life, as well. But this is a podcast about project leadership, so and so keep in mind, that how we develop grow, our vulnerable, create trust in those projects, will have a big bearing on the success of us as leaders, and of the project that we're leading. Dale, I really appreciate your insights today and joining us, I'm looking forward to more podcasts with
you on them. We've taken a bit of a departure from how I started out this podcast, which was just me, and I'm finding it much more interactive and much more exciting, quite frankly, having the dialogue. So I'm looking forward to moving that forward. You're very welcome. And again, I would encourage you as listeners have a look at the show notes. There's a table in there that gives you an idea of how I calibrate if you wish
relationships. There's a little bit more information on the relationship of course trustless value plus dialogue formula, and a few other tidbits in there that I think you would find helpful. So thanks for listening, be safe out there and develop those relationships in a emotionally responsible and safe environment. Thanks for listening