Talking T.R.U.S.T. Part Two: Relatedness & Understanding Perspectives

During a recent coaching session, one of my clients mentioned that she'd been dealing with a colleague who was really mad at her. "We used to be friends," she told me, "and now that I'm in a new role, and I need things from her, she NEVER responds to my Slack or email messages."

She couldn't point to a specific event where things went from cordial to cold, so I asked to look at a few of those Slack messages. What I discovered was fascinating. But before we get there, a little more neuroscience.

Is Tech Killing Our Ability to Understand Each Other’s Perspectives?

In the early 1990s, a group of Italian researchers discovered that specific cells in the brains of macaque monkeys fired “when the monkeys grabbed an object and also when the monkeys watched another primate grab the same object." They called these cells "mirror neurons" and hypothesized that humans had them too.

There's still much we don't know about how mirror neurons function in our brains. However, the general wisdom is that they engage when we get within 10-15 feet of another person, lighting up our intuition and ability to empathize. 

Now with many employees working from home, if your human interactions happen on Zoom, Slack, email, or text, it’s much harder to “read” what’s happening for someone else. And misunderstandings are bound to happen.

Actively Listen to Better Understand Perspectives

The longer you let misunderstandings lie, the more difficult it is to resolve them. When I looked at my client's Slack messages, I noticed that the other woman hadn't ignored her: she consistently responded to every message. I pointed this out to my client, and she said, “Yeah, but she’s refusing to answer one important question.” 

So we scanned her original messages for that critical question, and guess what we discovered? It wasn’t in there. At least, not in the clear, concise way my client assumed it was.

Instead of checking in to clarify, she quickly climbed to the top of the ladder of inference (more on that in my last post) and started to entertain all sorts of fantastical ideas about her colleague. She was operating with a profound lack of understanding, and that was leading to a rift in their relationship: no understanding, no relationship, no trust.

I asked her if she could initiate a transparent conversation (I told you transparency would be back) with her colleague – over the phone, not Slack or text – and go into it with nothing more than curiosity. She had two primary goals: 

1. Listen to Understand Perspectives: When we do this, we increase oxytocin – the feel-good hormone, and decrease stress-inducing cortisol. We enter the conversation to establish rapport and prime the exchange for mutual trust, openness, and respect.

2. Actively Listen to Connect: This approach activates empathy and turns on your mirror neurons, allowing you to remain open to the other person’s perspective. It also lowers uncertainty, which is the last thing anyone needs more of in their day-to-day. 

Thirty minutes into their conversation, my client had all the answers she needed. Her colleague apologized, the air was clear, and they had new agreements moving forward. Best of all, they understood each other’s perspectives, and their relationship was back on solid ground.

In my next post, we’ll dig into two more elements of our T.R.U.S.T. model - S for “Shared Goals” and T for “Test Assumptions.”

In the meantime, leave a comment below and let me know if you’ve experienced something similar to my client’s story:

• When was the last time a misunderstanding took you up the ladder of inference?

• And how did you make your way back down? 
  

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