Dr. John Gottman is one of the more insightful students and teachers of relationship management. While the core of his work is focused on married couples and relationship breakdowns, it turns out that your relationship with your manager is another type of relationship, just like your relationship with the person you’re dating or married to. As such, many of the same principles apply.
One of his more insightful observations is that there are four core behaviors that, when repeated regularly, kill relationships. Engaging in these yourself is a major risk factor for relationship breakdown, and equally so for the other—your boss, in this case—engaging in them. So merely being aware of these four characteristics helps you notice them in yourself and in the other. Upon you noticing these characteristics bubbling up, you can do what you can to try to minimize them. Here is the list, with some comments on each one as they may apply to your work relationship with your manager.
The first is criticism. Gottman separates that from complaints. It’s natural to be unhappy with something the other does and complain about it, but he argues that criticizing the other leads to breakdowns. In the work context, criticism is often essential—that’s how we improve. The way to square the circle is to separate out criticism of the individual or personal characteristics of the other, with criticism of the work itself. Criticize your manager’s work as needed, always in a respectful way, but make sure your words are focused on the results and work themselves, not on his production of the work nor any of his personality characteristics. The fine line to walk is when talking about repeated behaviors, and a useful trick is to talk about how his actions seem to you, rather than his intentionality behind them. If needed, add in, “I know you have the best intentions and your heart is in the right place” as many times as needed.
The second is defensiveness, which is a common human response to criticism. As instinctual and common as this response is, it tends to take the negative start (criticism) and magnify it into a negative cycle. One of the best defenses is to be aware of when you or anyone becomes defensive, so you can try to defuse it, even within yourself, as soon as you notice it. Start by observing it in others, and once you start seeing it in others it becomes easier to notice it within yourself.
The third is contempt, when you mock or insult the other, often in subtle ways. By the nature of your relationship with your manager, you probably rarely show contempt towards him. That’s usually the most obvious offense to get you fired, and that much is common sense no matter how young you are. But two points are worth remembering. One is that often, once you feel contempt for someone, it manifests itself in very subtle ways, like in words you use that imply condescension. So, pay attention to those. The other is that if you do indeed feel contempt for your manager, even if you control yourself in demonstrating it, it’s important to understand why you feel contempt for him because, in those cases, it may be a sign that it’s time for you to find another job.
One particular type of contempt is particularly common and particularly important to watch out for passive-aggressiveness, that is, making seemingly-positive but actually-negative/insulting (or indirectly insulting) comments to someone. Passive-aggressiveness should be seen as a nuclear bomb for relationships, and to be avoided at all costs. And not just in business relationships! If you feel yourself getting passive-aggressive, you may want to go through the more difficult process, out of the bounds of this series, of overcoming it. In the short term, you may want to start with the easier path of being passive, while you practice how to channel your energies in a way that’s more focused on positive outcomes. From the eyes of your manager, a passive employee isn’t ideal (lacking proactivity) but doesn’t have the radioactivity of the passive-aggressive employee.
The fourth and final one is stonewalling, that is, not doing what you need to do or preventing the other from doing what he needs to, in a silent or invisible way. What’s natural in work relationships is that work you’re less excited about, you’ll naturally stonewall. It’s human nature, you can’t avoid it. But stonewalling to a non-trivial degree is one of the strongest ways in which you can turn a manager who likes you against you when there is work that needs to be done and it just doesn’t happen and your boss doesn’t understand why. Often, he’ll keep reminding you with subtle and quiet hints, in a slow escalation until it becomes serious. One of the hardest parts of minimizing stonewalling is admitting to yourself that you’re actually doing it, and trying to understand why. Once you’ve done that, working around it to turn the stone wall into a stone door becomes much easier, and you’re the only one who can look inside of you.
