relationships built through doing things together

Bill Cunningham, famed coach to Silicon Valley founders, recommended shared projects for building relationships between people, especially people who might otherwise be at odds with one another. If it’s going to be useful for your team for two people to have a strong rapport, to know each other’s moves and operate with higher than average trust, give them a goal they have to achieve together. 

The language of psychotherapy has infiltrated our day to day diction, especially in pro-social and left-coded workplaces. Leaders often believe - in good faith - that time, vulnerability, and conversation are the essential ingredients for a strong working relationship. They assume that trust won’t take hold between teammates without these ingredients - the same ingredients, it turns out, of talk therapy.

My experience has been that this is misleading. Rather than directing teammates to stare at each other (which can be mortifying or boring or annoying, depending on the personalities involved), you’ll probably build more trust and get more done for your team’s mission if you steer your folks to look out together at a common goal.

Ben and I are advocates for laying this all out, by default. You don’t have to arrange the collaboration as a sneaky diplomatic maneuver. You can tell the two people that you’re having them work together on this thing, and that one reason for that is you want them to have a stronger working relationship. 

-eric