From our newsletter Outside the Lines - The Business Edition

A Choice

Wisdom often lies in having to make a commitment, a bold judgment on the state of things.

It’s a way of cutting through the messy complexities of everyday life; complexities that keep us busy and doing - and not thinking too hard about the situation at hand.

It turns gray into black and white.  It’s not that this means it’s necessarily the truth - but it does create an interesting moment of pause before you take the next step.

You’ve already heard a few of my favourite questions to ask in that pause.

• Is this Good Work?  Or is it Great Work?

• Does this move you closer or further away?

• Is it a Yes or is it a No?

Here’s another one I’ve been chewing over recently.

• Are you doing this “to” or “with”?

The difference

This distinction gets to the heart of the way you work with people and the nature of the relationship you create with them.

You’ll get the difference straight away.

“With” takes you to an “adult to adult” relationship, where you and they both ask for what you want and both feel free to say Yes or No.

It’s not necessarily a touchy-feely or even a deep relationship.  You can have transactional relationships that are “with”, just as you can have more intimate relationships that stay stuck in “to”.

In short, it’s a place where you’re reminded of their humanness, what Martin Buber would call an I/Thou relationship. (see I And Thou)

“To” on the other hand is when the dynamic shifts.  It’s no longer “adult-to-adult” and something has happened to corrupt the way the power and responsibility is shared.

Buber would call this an I/It relationship, one where the other person’s essential humanity has been forgotten and you no longer respect and hold their freedom to make their own choices.

You’ll remember the times you’ve had things done “to” you - and just how that can subtly or otherwise diminish you.

And you’ll remember those people with whom you’ve worked “with” - and remembered the sense of trust and growth that engendered.

Drama Triangle

One of the models that helps explain this to me is the Drama Triangle, a model that has its roots in Transactional Analysis.

The Drama Triangle suggests that when a relationship is dysfunctional - when it’s in a “to” phase - three roles get played out.

> Persecutor
> Victim
> Rescuer

The Persecutor is the bully (or more subtly, the micro-manager), the person who doesn’t trust anyone and who feels surrounded by people not as good as themselves.  The “to” side of this is pretty obvious - when you’re working with fools, you can’t trust them to work “with”, you have do this “to”.

The Victim is the whiner, the “it’s all so hard, and they’ve let me down, and I can’t do anything.”  The Victim is a genius at attracting people who do things to them - either the Persecutor or the Rescuer.

The Rescuer is a role as dysfunctional as the others, although it can somehow feel a little better as you’re just “helping out.” Rescuers love Victims and are forever jumping in to save them.  That’s not “with”, that’s “to”.  It’s a role that gets played out in organizations all the time.

If you find yourself dancing around the Drama Triangle - and we all do at some stage or another - then there’s been a shift from “with” to “to”.

Something to ponder

Scan the list of people with whom you work.

• With whom are you “with”?  With whom are you “to”?

And perhaps more interestingly…

• What is it that flips you from one to the other?

• What helps you get to “with”?

• What pulls you back to “to”?

Don’t take my word for it

Smart people thinking out loud about recognizing others’ humanity.

“Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.”
-Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philosopher

“The more I see of man, the more I like dogs.”
-Marguerite De Launay, Baronne De Staal, French writer

See more quotes and add your own here.