437. How to Work with (Almost) Anyone

Nikki Miller:

Hello, everyone. And welcome back to THE ONE Thing podcast. I am personally so excited. Today, we have Michael Bungay Stanier, who is best known, many of you listening already know who this is, because he's best known for the Coaching Habit, one of my absolute top five favorite books best-selling coaching book of the century and recognized as a classic in many libraries, especially mine.

In his most recent book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, my favorite title, asterisk, Almost Anyone, shows how to build the best possible relationships with key people at work. He's also a Rhode Scholar and was recently awarded the Coaching Prize by Thinkers 50, the Oscars of Management. So I am so privileged, we are so privileged to have you today. Thank you for being here, Michael.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Oh, I'm delighted. And I love that you like the title of the new book because if you write a book, you know that writing the book takes about nine months and coming up with a title for the book takes about a year and a half. You spend all your time worrying about the title. And so when I came up with the title, I had to work with almost anyone. I'm like, this is the best book title I have ever come up with. So I'm glad you like it because I love it too.

Nikki Miller:

Well, you were smart too, because you can't -- I always have a marketing and sales mind. And I look at putting something on the shelf that's going to be super catchy, but you can back yourself into a corner because I'm sure someone's going to stop you at an airport or at one of your events and say, Michael, your book said I could work with anyone. And I've got this one person who's totally impossible. So you gave yourself an asterisk. You said it's almost.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Well, exactly. And quite frankly, I don't know how to work with anyone. I have plenty of failures in my past to people I've tried to work with clients and people who I've led on a team and bosses I've had. Believe me, this book is in part built on the scars and the failures of my own working relationships.

But I do think, almost all of your working relationships can be better. They're not all going to turn into magical unicorns jumping around and burping up rainbows, but all of them can get a little bit better. And this is what this book is about. How do you practically go about actively shaping the working relationships you might have.

Nikki Miller:

Well, what I love about this book and any really great principle and development in any book is that you talk a lot about working relationships because to most of us, that's where this is going to be most relevant because we don't necessarily get to always choose who we work with. We've got a lot of different personalities, a lot of big different skill sets, no matter what you do or what industry you do it in.

And yet I can't help but think that if someone reads this book and I did, and I'm so excited to unpack some of these principles because it's wonderful. And if someone reads this, they're going to be hard pressed not to find something that's very practical and application for their personal relationships.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Well, I mean, it's the same with the Coaching Habit book, actually. When I wrote it, I wrote it for people who are in an organization leading a team going, look, I like my work, but I'm kind of exhausted. How do I elevate my leadership, so I get to work less hard, but have more impact? But I really try and write my book, so they've got a kind of an evergreen resonance. So you don't have to be a manager, you don't have to be a leader to find the book useful.

Look, I am no Esther Perel. I can't claim deep expertise in intimate relationships. But I love Esther Perel and Terry Real and Dan Siegel and John Gottman, all of these kind of iconic names in the space of intimate relationships. And I know that work really well. So definitely that influences this book.

Nikki Miller:

Well, you mentioned that in the Coaching Habit, I think a lot of people could read that book and realize how it translates, but most of them probably picked it up because they themselves were a coach or a manager who looked up and said, I need help in how to communicate and motivate and coach my people. And that book is such a great practical application for that. And I'd love to hear why you wrote this one because it almost seems like you pick it up from the opposite perspective. Like I'm having trouble being a team member or working with a boss. That's not my communication or coaching style and I need help.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Yeah. I got to a point where I had finished off a book. A few years ago, I said, look, I'm trying to be a writer. That's my goal. And it feels weird because I've written a bunch of books, but I think that writing books makes you an author.

Nikki Miller:

I was just going to say, I think you were achieving that goal.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

But for the difference for me is I author tech, like I've got some books that I've written. But a writer is somebody who orients to saying, look, writing is at the heart of the work that I do. It's the heart of the, you know, I read, and I write and that's the main thing I'm trying to build my life around. And part of that is going, okay, so I keep writing, I keep moving on to the next book.

So I hit a moment where I'm like, so what's my next book going to be? And I'm always trying to solve a real problem for people. And I know when I look back on my own working career of 25 or 30 years now, I'm like, man, I've had some ups and downs with the working relationships. When I've had really good working relationships, it's just made the work delightful. Didn't even matter what the work was. The work was just a joy to do because I had this great working relationships.

And when I had really bad working relationships, man, it sucked the life out of me and of the work. Even though intellectually, I was really excited about what we were working on, the fact that this relationship was not great, really tainted the whole experience. I knew that was a thing. I also knew that I had a tool that I had used for 20 years with some success, and I had never really found a place to teach it.

And it's this idea, this is the key idea of the book, which is you should have a conversation about how you work together before you start working together. And it sounds really obvious when I say it like that, but it's not that common because the work always pulls us in, the work always feels urgent and important and critical and do it now. And that's the most, that's our comfort zone anyway.

But then there was a really specific catalyst for this Nikki, which is three years ago or so my dad died. And I was back in Australia living in my mom and dad's house as he had come home from the emergency unit from the hospital. And we knew he had a terminal disease. We knew he had some weeks or months left to live. Living with mom and dad, and they had had this really great relationship for 55 years. Like they were really tight. They really loved each other. They really liked each other. They were a good co-parenting unit. They just had a terrific partnership as a married couple.

But it was a bit kind of fractious in the house and you can, for all the reasons, you can guess, my dad is dying. My mom is trying to care give the man she's loved for 55 years and look after him. He's not doing the things he used to do. Mom has to do different things around the house. And I was sitting there, and I know enough about the way the brain works and our memory works to be worried that 55 good years, we're going to be tainted by three months of kind of tough times, the last three months of dad's life.

So in an active, I'm not sure what it was, full hardiness because we are not a family that sits around and does touchy feely conversations at all, I suggested that mom and dad sit down and have a conversation about how they wanted to be with each other over the remaining weeks or months of dad's life. A conversation about how they were going to be rather than all the conversations are having at the moment about oxygen tanks and hospital beds and all the other kind of tedious stuff.

And my parents couldn't have been less enthusiastic about that idea. Like my mom in particular, that sounds like the worst thing. And I'm like, I know it's terrible.

Nikki Miller:

Of all the things we have to do right now, that's what you're suggesting.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

But I can be persistent when I need to be. And I kind of nudged them to have this conversation and it was tender and it was awkward, and it was loving, and it was a bit messy. They did so well. And I really think it helped make those last days they had together a little more joyful, a little better for both of them. And I was like, man, if I can do that with my parents, I was trying to write the book at the time, it gave me this real kind of concentrated purpose to say, this is a really powerful tool for work, but for all relationships going, how do you actively shape the relationships you have so they can be the best possible version of that particular relationship?

Nikki Miller:

It's such a beautiful story and such a beautiful example. Thank you so much, by the way, for sharing that. I'm so sorry about your dad.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Oh, thank you.

Nikki Miller:

And it's such a beautiful example, though, that especially in times of stress, which often is it captivates the majority of our life, or when you're in a stressful situation like that in your family, we have in our head, these expectations that live about how we would like everybody to treat us and how we would like everybody to behave.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Exactly.

Nikki Miller:

But we don't have a framework for telling people that. And often, we don't, and then we get frustrated and yet we don't really know how to name why we're frustrated. And when I read this, you're referring to the Keystone conversation, I think, right? Correct me if I'm wrong. But I think you're referring to the Keystone conversation in the book. And I think some of the best principles are the ones that feel the most intuitive and the most obvious. It's the ones that you read and you're like, oh my gosh, well, duh. Why, why? Yeah. Yes. Why am I not doing that? And that's sort of the thought I had when I read about the Keystone conversation. So can you give the listeners a bit of a framework for how you have one of these conversations and work in life?

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Yeah. So let's set up the purpose of a Keystone conversation. And the purpose of a Keystone conversation is to build this best possible relationship with the people, with your key people, the people who influence not just the success of your work. In other words, the impact, but the happiness you have when you do that. And so that certainly is the people you lead if you lead a team, certainly your boss if you have a boss. But it could be a colleague, it could be a vendor, it could be a customer or a client or a prospect.

Any one of these people have an influence on your success and your happiness, which means that they're candidates for this Keystone conversation, a conversation about how you work together before you get into the work itself. But let's define what a best possible relationship is. And I think there are kind of three key pillars to a BPR. It needs to be safe, it needs to be vital, and it needs to be repairable.

Nikki miller:

Oh, I love that.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

So safe is something that lots of us are familiar with because it's been 10 years or more since Dr. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, really kind of made popular this idea of psychological safety. This idea that it's got to feel safe enough for people to be able to speak up and not just speak up, which is where she started in her work, but just to kind of be themselves. Lots of people don't feel safe. And when your people don't feel safe, they're not bringing their full self to the work that they do. And we all benefit for people bringing as much of their full self as they can to the work that they do.

But Nikki, as I was writing this, I was like, but safety is not enough. It's necessary but not sufficient. I've had working relationships that have felt really psychologically safe and they've also felt slightly boring. It's like having a warm bath and I don't like baths. I'm like, I'm a shower person. I'm like, oh, this is not joyful for me.

So the other second element of a BPR, best possible relationship, is vitality. So you want it to be safe. You want it to be vital. And by vitality, I mean, full of life. So this is if you like psychological bravery and ability to push and challenge and provoke and sit in ambiguity and make a mess and take a risk. In every working relationship you have, you're trying to find that right dance between psychological safety and psychological bravery, safe and vital.

And then the third of the three pillars of a BPR is repairability. I mentioned before these great writers like Esther Perel and Terry Real and Dan Siegel and John Gottman, all these big names in the space of intimate relationships. But if you read across their work, there's a kind of two-part insight that always shows up. The relationships that survive and thrive are the ones that get repaired. That’s part A.

And part B is most of us suck at repairing relationships. Most of us hide, give up, back away, nurture resentments, swallow it down, eat our feelings. We do all of that. And this capacity, this willingness, this courage to be somebody who repairs a relationship, who says, hey, I'm noticing this is not going that well, ow do we get back to where we were? That's a huge commitment to being able to build and sustain a best possible relationship.

Nikki Miller:

I want to spend some -- oh, go ahead.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

No, no. So that's why you have a Keystone conversation because there's a goal here, a BPR. You had a question.

Nikki Miller:

I do because what I would offer, well, the framework was so helpful and like I said, I think it's going to be an intuitive aha for anyone who reads this. My absolute favorite conversation in the book was this idea that a lot of people teach you how to get into relationship. Not a lot of people teach you how to successfully maintain them.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Right.

Nikki Miller:

And my favorite question that you ask of the questions that you outline in the book was, what do you do when things go wrong? And I noticed you didn't say, what do you do if things go wrong. And it made me feel better as someone who maintains a lot of relationships that I'm not the only one who steps on my own toes or my own words sometimes and has to come back and say, I'm so sorry, it wasn't my best self that day.

And so thank you so much for talking about this because you're right, we aren't really taught how to repair relationships. And so then the resentment ensues, we get frustrated. And once again, we're not articulating why we feel that way. So can you give some best practices around this?

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Sure. I mean, the starting point is to realize that people are messy, confusing, irrational, complicated, divas. And I'm not even talking about other people. I'm talking about you. You are messy, complicated, confusing, irrational, diva. As much as you like to think you're not, you're like, you're crazy. And so is the other person. Quite frankly, you think about it, it's vaguely miraculous that any working relationships or any relationships at all work.

Nikki miller:

We're all losing it.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

We're all our own version of a hot mess. And we're also glorious. I mean, we're messy and we're glorious. They're both true, those statements. So this idea of this Keystone conversation is one of the ways of giving yourself a chance to thrive with that other person. And just as you've set up so beautifully, there are kind of five core questions that you might want to ask and answer when you're having a conversation about how we work, how we might work well together.

So let me go through the five questions just as a kind of headline. And then we can pick which ones are worth kind of digging into. So the first question is the amplify question. And the amplify question is, what's your best? In other words, because that's a slightly awkward question. I don't like it like that, because it's really asking, when do you shine and when do you flow?

Like Nikki, you and I have just met. And I know a little bit about you, you know a little bit about me, but actually we've just made up a whole bunch of stuff about who we are and who that other person is and what they want and what they'd be good at and what they'd not be good at. And if you and I were working together, or perhaps let's say Scott was here and you and he were having a conversation about that, it would be really interesting to have a conversation to go, “Hey, Scott. When you're creating and podcasting, when do you shine and when do you flow?” And it would be really interesting for Scott to hear from you, Nikki, when do you shine and when do you flow? Give us this idea of what are you at your best when you light up?

You talked about the flow state. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Czech psychologist that everybody in North America mispronounces his name. That's how I mispronounce his name, but he talks about the flow state when kind of like time speeds up and slows down and you're in that kind of sweet spot, what does that look like? And it's such a good question to start with, because it doesn't start with what's broken. It starts with let's amplify the good. Let's kind of lean -- this is kind of leaning into positive psychology and appreciative inquiry and all sorts of these change programs that are all about, let's amplify the good.

So we start off by going, let me tell you when I shine and when I flow. And if that's the only question, the only exchange you have, that is super helpful. Because I'm like, oh, this is you at your best. And this is me at my best. It would be cool if we got more of that when we're working together. And so you're already off to a really great start.

The second question is the steady question. And it is, what are your practices and preferences? So it's really a kind of exchange about the logistics of how you run your life and how you live your life, because it is amazing how irritating it is when people get some of that miscellaneous stuff wrong. We share pronouns now in a way that we never did 5 years ago or 10 years ago.

But when I'm in this conversation, I'll even just tell them about my name. Like, my name is Michael Bungay Stanier. So, it's a slightly complicated name. When I got married, I took my wife's surname, and we combined it together. I went from Michael Stanier to Michael Bungay Stanier, but we didn't put in a hyphen so there's this invisible hyphen and nobody's quite sure whether Bungay is my middle name or it's actually part of my surname. And then nobody's quite sure how to pronounce it. I mean, you were kind enough to check before we hit record, but I once got a letter addressed to Michael banging Spaniel as a particular. I don't know, high point and low point in terms of getting --

Nikki Miller:

Sounds like a bond villain, Michael. You kind run with that.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

I know. Exactly. I need a little hairless cat I guess as part of it. And my name is Michael. It's not Mike. So some people like to just unilaterally shorten my name to Mike and I'm like, I'm really not Mike. This is a mic, the thing I'm speaking into. I'm a Michael. And so that's just an example of a little thing that says if you had just started calling me Mike or had shortened my name to Stanier or called me Michael Stainer or any of the things that people get wrong, that would just irritate me.

And so this second question is about everything from are you a morning person, had your own meetings, how do you manage tasks? How do you do follow up? How do we talk about feedback? Do you use Slack? Or do you use Zoom? Or do you use whatever? It's just that exchange of the logistics.

The third and the fourth question are related. They're the good date and the bad date question. And the key insight behind both of them is that patterns from our past repeat again in the future. So it's really helpful to talk about that because you can learn from your history and tell the other person this will show up again. Let me give you a heads up about what that looks like, both the good and the bad and the ugly.

So the good day question is, what can we learn from past successful relationships? Like, it's really helpful if I say to you, Nikki, when I've worked with somebody like you in the context that you and I are working in, and it's been fantastic, let me tell you what the other person did that made it so great for me. And also let me tell you what I did that I thought contributed to being a really strong working relationship. And there's all this is a gold mine of past precedent about this is the magic dust, this is where the glory lies.

So if you and I were co creating a podcast together, you're like, I'm abandoning The ONE Thing, I'm going rogue, I'm dropping Scott, I'm off to do this thing because Michael has made me an offer I can't resist. And you and I were building a new podcast. We could have this conversation about when we've co created or co-hosted things together and it's been great, what did that look like? What did you learn? What did the other person do?

What did you do?

But then there's the bad day question. What can you learn from past frustrating working relationships? And so often we kind of pretend they didn't happen. We skirt around that. But it is such a helpful and powerful thing to share, which is like, let me tell you when it was miserable or when it got screwed up or it just wasn't great. And particularly, let me tell you my role in making this not good, because it's actually pretty easy to blame the other person for everything that goes wrong. They were a sociopath, they were crazy, they were this, they were that, they were the other. You can just go on and on and on and on about them, but actually, it's not that helpful to the person you're in conversation with.

But when you go, let me tell you how I get in the way of my own best intentions. That's really powerful. When I'm working with people, particularly people I've hired and are on my team, I'm like, let me tell you how I will screw this relationship up. Also, let me tell you how I would suggest you manage me when I screw this relation up. I mean, like in my team, one of my nicknames is the vice president of bottlenecking. And it never shows up immediately. Like first month, I'm like I'm fine, but it's going to be this moment where I lose that. And it's like, that's too hard. I've got too many other things to do. I don't have an answer. And it would just get stuck with me.

But people know that, when they know I'm bottlenecking, their job is to write me an email or Slack, whatever, and say, Michael, I need your decision on this by Thursday. If I don't get it by end of day Thursday, I'm going to make this decision and we're going to carry on without you. And so they have a way to manage one of my own various imperfections. So really helpful and really powerful.

Nikki Miller:

I love that. Super helpful. And I think from a team perspective, when you have a leader or a team member who says that it says to me, you're self-aware enough that I can feel safe coming to you when you're affecting the outcome that we're both trying to work toward. And alternatively, I know we've all been in the relationships or the conversations where someone's saying, well, that person was crazy. And to me, that's a red flag that you have no self-awareness whatsoever. They very well may have been crazy. And how could have you have shown up differently?

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, crazy, not crazy, doesn't really matter. What's your role in the mess? How did you collude in that thing that didn't work so well? Because that's where the juicy stuff is. And I love your insight and I agree with it, which is part of the power of you answering this question is that it creates a strong kind of contribution to the psychological safety within the relationship because it's an act of courage and an act of vulnerability and an act of humanity to say, look, this is me. This is me messy.

The fifth and final question is how will we fix it when things go wrong? And this kind of takes us back to the way you asked the question, which is wonderful, which is to say, look, part of the power of this question is twofold. One is it says things will go wrong. I know at the moment, because you're at the start of this working relationship, you're like, ooh, it's going to be amazing, and this is going to be the first ever working relationship that has no problems in it at all. It's going to be special.

I'm like, nah, it's going to go wrong. Or even if you're in the halfway, you've been working with this person for a while and you're like, you're using this as a chance to reset and reboot. There's this hope that maybe it will be perfect going forward, but it won't. It always goes off the rails. Sometimes in a big, dramatic melodramatic way where everybody's kind of throwing things and shouting and waving their hands around, but mostly not, right? Mostly it's a misspoken statement. Somebody's didn't have breakfast. There's a misremembered promise. There's all sorts of ways that the fabric gets a little bit ripped.

And then the other powerful element of this question is it states a shared commitment to fixing it. How will we fix it when things go wrong? Not should we bother fixing it when things go wrong? It's how will we fix it when things go wrong? And even if you're not really sure, because it's like, oh, I don't know. Actually, you do know, you do know how to make amends, how to step up. And the book gives a bunch of different tactics to help with that, but the real power is you giving each other permission to talk about it when things go wrong as a way of acknowledging and saying hey, we talked about this and here we are, it's going off the rails of it or I'm a bit disappointed or frustrated or a bit sad or a bit angry. What can we do to kind of make this better?

Nikki Miller:

And I love having a framework for how to approach that conversation, because I think the biggest challenge is that if we don't have a framework for how, then we won't bring it up. And then it festers, and then it compounds, and then we start to look for any evidence that we can find that the story that we've created about this relationship is true.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Yes. So I love that you're naming that. And that's a really powerful tool. So let me make that more explicitly.

Nikki Miller:

Please do.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

You said, confirming that the story we're telling ourselves is true. And so the key insight is how many stories we tell each other about what's going on. And let me share a framework. I actually teach this in the Coaching Habit book. So you'll remember this, Nikki, perhaps. But it's a framework I use to prepare for giving feedback, but it's also just a framework I use to orient and understand the world. And it's got its roots in something called nonviolent communication, which was named and taught by a guy called Marshall Rosenberg.

And he sort of says, look, everything that's going on falls into one of four different buckets. It's either data, feelings, judgments, or wants or needs. Data, feeling, judgment, wants or needs. And when you're swept into a mess, all of that stuff gets jumbled into your head and an unholy cocktail of drama and kind of like misery and kind of all of this sort of stuff. So it's really helpful. This is a version of emotional intelligence as well to kind of go, actually, let me see if I can figure out what's really going on. And so what are the facts? What's the data? What do I know to be true? What are my feelings about this situation?

It's ironic, but actually the more aware you are of your feelings, the more rational you are in the decision that you're making. We kind of think if I can suppress my feelings, I'm going to think better, but it turns out the opposite is true. So people will have different models for their feelings. I have a five-feeling model, mad, sad, glad, ashamed, and afraid. That covers pretty much all of it for me. So I'm always going am I mad, sad, glad, ashamed, and afraid? In a mess, I tend to be mad and sad and ashamed and afraid. I've normally --

Nikki Miller:

A nice cocktail there.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Yeah, exactly. I've got all of that. Then the third bucket that you might want to put some of the stuff in your head in is your judgments, which are your opinions or your interpretation of all the stuff going on. And we are judgment making machines. We are brilliant at it. So you'll have judgments about three different things. You'll have judgments about the other person. They are bad. They are weird. They're crooked. They're trying to unseat me. They're trying to have a coup. They're out to get me. They're incompetent.

I mean, you can kind of, you know, the longer you linger here, they'll kind of more, it comes –

Nikki miller:

The more elaborate the story becomes.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

I know. Exactly. Then you've got judgments about yourself. I'm a bad manager. I'm a bad leader. I'm a brilliant leader. And this is betrayal. Whatever it is, you got all sorts of stories you tell yourself in the moment. And then you got judgments about the situation at hand. This is a terrible business plan. This is a terrible organizational structure. This is a terrible project, whatever it might be.

And then finally, you got your wants and your needs, which is this is what I want to be different. This is the change I want, the shift I want in what's going on. What happens is we get sucked into our judgments. This is the story that you talked about, and we think our judgments are true. This is the killer. This is the flaw. We think our judgments are true because they sound true because it's you telling yourself this stuff and you're like, I'm a very smart person.

Nikki Miller:

Very convincing, yes.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

I’m a very convincing person. And it's in my own interest to think that I'm right. So we get pulled into the story, but what happens is when you decant all the stuff in your head into these four buckets, you find A, you have far fewer facts, far less data than you realized. You're like tiny, tiny little bits of fact. You've got a vast amount of story, of judgment, of opinions. You can see how your feelings feed your stories. I am angry because they're betraying me. That's a feeling judgment combination.

And then when you're getting clear on what you want or what you need, you're seeing the escape hatch, the way that things might shift around that. All of this is a very long way of me saying, I love that you said, this is my story because actually one of the ways you repair a relationship is you go, I'm making up a story about what's happened. I just wanted to check out how this lands with you or not.

And it's a really powerful tool because you acknowledge it's a story, whether the person says, yeah, that's true, or yeah, that's not true, there's a way that neither of you lose face in that conversation. And it's a neutral and generous way to start building a bridge back because it says, I've got to, you know, I'm probably making a whole bunch of stuff up here. I've got a story in my head that you don't like me or that you're hurt because of something I said, or that you've got different plans on the plans that I have. Let me check that out. Sorry, that was a big, a very big aside, but I love what you said about the storytelling.

Nikki Miller:

Please don't be sorry. It's so helpful. And I think that the beautiful experience there, when you can have that conversation is that you likely hear that the person on the other side has a story too. Well, it's funny that you say that, Michael, the story I was telling myself is that you don't like me. So we're just two people that came to this relationship thinking we don't like each other when all we want to do is figure out how we can get along.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Right. And this is the core insight behind the book. And you're nailing it, Nikki, which is to say when we're working with people, we do a whole lot of inventing about what's going on, what they think about you, what you think about them, what you both think about each other, what you both think about the work at hand. And if you can have a conversation where you keep checking in on the quality of the relationship, you're less likely to be distracted by the story and more able to stay true to the other person and do your best work on the work at hand.

Nikki Miller:

For sure. And one of the things that reminded me in our organization and in Keller Williams, we have this idea that we teach people how to treat us in business and in life. And when we're hiring someone, we do this, or even before to make sure we're in alignment, we do this exercise that we call the win-lose document, which reminded me a lot of your read me document in the book which is, we call it this is how you win with me and this is how you lose with me.

And over the years, as I've taught leaders that model and others that are similar premise. In other words, this is how we should behave together, this is how you can win with me, this is how you will definitely lose with me. I also sometimes see people go to the other side that it creates, especially when they're maybe not as an involved leader, it goes to the other side that they create this expectation that people have to abide by it.

And I say, from my perspective, it's more informational. And I especially want to lean into it so that when I'm having a hard conversation, I can approach that person the way they want to be approached the way that it will help them to hear me. Do you ever see this come up when you're teaching this aspect?

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Yeah. I've got an opinion about this. And this may be -- I hope this doesn't ruffle feathers too much within your organization.

Nikki Miller:

I hope it does.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

So I think the power of the win-lose document is less as a tool to help other people and it's more as a tool to help yourself. Because honestly, the How to Work with (Almost) Anyone is a workbook, but it's kernel is a self-help, self-development book which is like who are you, how do you work, when are you at your best, when are you not at your best, how do you show up in relationships.

And the active of being able to go here's how you win with me, here's how you lose with me is a variation on the question that I've already shared, which is to say, this is me. This is how I flourish. This is how I flourish with other people. This is how it goes off the rails when I'm working with other people. This is how I get in my own way. And that's really powerful.

I think it's, let's call it naive or at least optimistic to say that if you have a document and then you then send it out to other people going, here it is, read this and therefore know how to work with me. Like, well, that's never worked for any relationship ever. I mean, can you imagine like with your partner or your spouse or boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, going, I'm just going to forward you a document about how to win, lose with me. I expect you to read that, absorb it and then behave appropriately.

Nikki miller:

Or else.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Yeah, it's kind of got a touch of I'm going to say a little arrogance, but it's kind of got a high, what I would call a high status thing, which is I'm right, you need to understand this and behave and change your behavior appropriately. Where it gets really rich is when you both have some version of a win-lose document, and you meet and you have a conversation, how will we co-create this relationship?

Because a win-lose document sort of says, I'm the entity, learn how to work with me. This book and these processes is, you're an entity, I'm an entity, our relationship is a third entity. How do we create the best working relationship possible? And that is a shared, shifting, co-created experience.

Nikki Miller:

Thank you for that perspective. I think it's going to be so helpful. I think so often we get stuck in the ego of sharing what we believe and how we want to be treated, not realizing that it's equally as important to get the other person's perspective, if not more. And then to your point, to co-create how we want to behave in the relationship. What are we going to do when we don't do it right, when we have a miss?

One of my favorite things I was telling you before we got jumped on, but I want our listeners to hear this too. This was a fun book to read. Michael and I were chatting before we got on and I said, sometimes you're slugging through a development book. It's just valuable and yet, not the most exciting to read. And I have to tell you --

Michael Bungay Stanier:

It's like trying to eat undercooked kale. You're like, I'm sure this is good for me, fiber, vitamins, all of that. But am I having a good time here? No, I'm not.

Nikki Miller:

No. Am I enjoying myself? Absolutely not. But will I keep slugging away? I'm sure. Yeah, maybe. And yet I can tell you, I plowed through this in literally two days. I loved it. And it was so much fun to read. And one of my favorite things was the tidbits at the end. You literally call them the tidbits at the end.

And I was thinking to myself what a reader might think every time I'm reading one of these books, and I know I'm going to get the privilege to interview the author, I think about, well, what would our listeners think or what would they want to know? And I could hear somebody asking, will this work on my boss? Or will this work on my partner? Or will this work on this person? And you talk about this in the book, and I'd love for you to give the perspective here.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Sure. Also, thank you. First of all, thank you for saying the nice things about the book. One of my design philosophies about writing is what's the shortest book I can write that would still be useful. So I'm constantly trying to take words out because I'm like, it's hard to get people to turn the page. And if people feel like this is a short book, there's a chance they might get to the end of it.

But you're asking a really important question, which is like, okay, how do I do this with my boss? In fact, how do I do this with anyone? Because my bet is that people listening to this, part of them are nodding their head going, yeah, that's sort of obvious now. I think about it. I should have a conversation about how we work together before we start working together. And then another part of them is thinking, but this feels a bit weird and a bit awkward and a bit, I don't know quite how to get going on this. I don't know how to start on this.

Nikki Miller:

Yeah. Or what if we're already working together, it's already sideways.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Exactly. So the most powerful thing you can do is be the person brave enough to start this conversation and understand that, okay, how do I be the person who reaches out, to say could we have a conversation about how we're working together? If you're at midway through a relationship, hey, can we have a quick chance to reset or have a rethink about how we might tweak things to work even better together? The person who has the power and the status in the relationship, really, it's useful to understand who that person is.

If you're that boss, if you're the person, then you have this opportunity to set this up. You have this opportunity to role model what vulnerability and intimacy and honesty looks like to the extent that you want to because if you're the more senior person or you have the status, basically, the level of vulnerability that you display will be exactly the level of vulnerability that is displayed back to you. You will determine that.

It gets trickier if you're going, I'd like to have this conversation with my boss, because you can make up all sorts of stories about why this is a terrible idea, why your boss doesn't want to have this conversation, and why it's not really your job to have that. But one of the things that I hope this book is provoking is a sense of shared responsibility in the quality of your working relationships. If you're like, oh, I can't do anything about any relationships with anybody who's vaguely senior to me, then you're going to spend your life with not great relationships with senior people who are influential for your career and for the work that you do.

And there may be a more limited version of the Keystone conversation you want to have with your boss the first time. And I know if somebody who is a boss, if I had somebody come to me going, “Hey, Michael. Loving working with you so far, can we have a conversation because I'd love to learn how to work even better with you and so that you can work better with me to bring out my best”, I'd mostly be going, I'd love to have that conversation because yes, I'd like to have a better relationship and yes, I love that you're taking responsibility for our working relationship. I actually see you in a better light as a result of that.

But it's also true that this book is called How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, and I've certainly had bosses in my past where I'm like, yep, not going to be having that conversation with that person because I just know it's destined to fail.

Nikki Miller:

Yeah, they are not open to that conversation. They don’t participate.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

They’re probably not open. I'm also aware how easy it is to quickly leave to that assumption that they don't want to have that conversation, that they're not open to that. So for sure, name those people who are your almost people, they're like not this person and not this person and not this person, and know that that leaves everybody else. And this is not just about making the good working relationships better.

If you think of the five trickiest, toughest, most kind of challenging relationships you have at the moment and what if those relationships were 5 percent or 10 percent better? I think for many of those that moves those relationships from being unworkable to workable, from unbearable to bearable, from impossible to being good enough. And I think that can have a really significant impact in your success, in your happiness.

I can't give you a guarantee that this is always going to work. There are going to be sometimes where you reach out and the person goes, yeah, no, I'm not interested in whatever this thing is that you're proposing. And there's going to be sometimes you have the conversation and it doesn't make that much of a difference, it doesn't shift that much. But there's going to be a lot of these conversations you have where it's just going to nudge that relationship to being that little bit better, a little bit stronger, a little bit more vibrant, a little bit safer, and that's better for you and for them and for the work that you're doing.

Nikki Miller:

I also think the world just needs more of this and people are craving connection more than they ever have in a meaningful way. And what a gift to open this conversation and have the opportunity to teach each other, to learn together. And I got goosebumps earlier when you said the most powerful thing you can do is be the person who's brave enough to start this conversation. So thank you for that.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Yes. Thank you.

Nikki miller:

I think it's so important.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Well, somebody said to me recently, and I loved it, nobody likes to be the first person to say hello. Everybody loves to be greeted. And I'm like I'm going to -- that's kind of my 2024 resolution is to be the person who says hello. And I'm not naturally wired that way. I'll get onto a bus or a streetcar or whatever else, and I'm not going to chat. My wife is a chatter. She's like, hi. I'm like, what are you doing?

Nikki Miller:

Don't talk to strangers. It's embarrassing.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Yeah, exactly. But even walking up and down my local street, in the last nine days, since the year started, I do what's called the eyebrow flash. It's a really classic thing.

Nikki Miller:

I got to see this.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

You just flash your eyebrows. You lift your eyebrows up, pick them up. And what it does is it's a deeply human act to say, I see you and I recognize you. And here's what happened. If you try this, you do that and you smile, people will smile back at you and you can see them walking away going, do I know that guy?

Nikki Miller:

What just happened?

Michael Bungay Stanier:

What just happened there? But it's my little way to kind of say, look, I'm trying to see you. I'm trying to say hello to you without actually having to say hello to you. And yeah, I think you can take that into this work, which is nobody likes to be the person reaching out going, hey, can we have this conversation? But most people are going to go, actually, I would like a better working relationship with you. So if this helps at all, then I'm willing to give it a shot.

Nikki Miller:

Yeah. Who wouldn't, right?

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Right.

Nikki Miller:

Michael, at the end of every one of these podcasts, we ask our guests, what's the one thing, aptly named, but what's the one thing you would want a listener to take away from this conversation?

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Well, it might be this, be the person brave enough to start this conversation. I think that's -- I'd be thrilled if people acted on this. But if you're like, yeah, I don't want to take that away from this conversation, I'd say the thing I'd like you to take away from it is, or I'll make this an invitation, a challenge, if you like, find some time to answer the question what's your best? When do you shine? When do you flow? Because the clearer and more articulate you can be about who you are at your best, the more you can communicate that to other people, the more you can communicate that to other people, the more likely you are to find yourself an opportunity of you being your best.

Nikki Miller:

And the more you can bring your best out into the world and design your life around where you're of your highest and best use, right?

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Exactly. Exactly.

Nikki Miller:

And if people want to connect with you, where can they find you? We'll definitely drop the book in the show notes. I'm so excited for our readers, excuse me, our listeners to get to read this, but where can they find you?

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Yeah. Look, if you want information about the book in particular, bestpossiblerelationship.com. That has the downloads of the five questions, also a video of me having a Keystone conversation with somebody on my team. So you can kind of see what it looks like and feels like if you're curious. For me in general, mbs.works is my website and there's a newsletter there. There's free content for all of the books that I've written. There's other bits and pieces as well.

Nikki Miller:

Thank you so much for being here today, Michael. This is just such a pleasure and I'm so grateful to get to be your student today. Thank you.

Michael Bungay Stanier:

Nikki, thank you. You're a great host. I appreciate it.

Nikki Miller:

All right. See you everybody next time.

Outro:

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