What Do Successful Personal, Reporting, and Client Relationships Have In Common?

John Gottman can watch a married couple interacting for 15 minutes and predict with 90% accuracy whether that couple will still be married 15 years later. Based on his system, I think he would probably be able to predict the success of manager-subordinate and salesperson-client relationships too.

Gottman looks at bids and bid responses between people to draw conclusions about their relationship. In Gottman’s terminology a bid is an attempt by one person to establish a connection, and a bid response is how the other person reacts to the bid. Responses fall into three categories: turning towards, turning against, and turning away. Some examples:

BID	RESPONSE
Husband (on the couch calling to his wife in the kitchen): “Honey, could you bring me a beer?”	Wife Turning Towards - “Sounds good, let me join you. How’s the game going?”
	Turning Against – “Get it yourself, you slob!”
	Turning Away - Silence
Employee sends an email with some requested information to a manager.	Manager Turning Towards - “Thanks for the quick response. Could you include some background on the Ragamuffin account?”
	Turning Against – “Incomplete as usual, where’s the background on the Ragamuffin account?”
	Turning Away – No response to the email
Salesperson following up with a call on some emailed information	Potential Client Turning Towards - “It was interesting but we’re not doing anything until the next budget cycle. I have your contact information and will let you know.”
	Turning Against - “Stop spamming me.”
	Turning Away – Doesn’t return the call

Gottman’s research shows contempt (on the part of either party) is the best signal a relationship is headed down the drain.

Here are some other takeaways from Gottman’s research:

• In a successful relationship, there are a lot of bids going on; a happily married couple may engage as many as 100 times in ten minutes while eating a meal. Not all of these bids get “turning towards” responses, but the ratio is high. Couples headed to divorce engage much less and have a much lower ratio of positive responses. Obviously, there are not going to be as many manager-employee or salesperson-client interactions, but an absence of interaction is bad, and a low ratio of positive responses makes infrequent interaction even worse.
• The overwhelming majority of interactions are trivial; even in the best relationships there is not a lot of sharing of deep feeling and soul searching going on. It’s the frequency and ratio of positive to negative responses that’s important, not the topic.

All this rings true to me in both my personal and professional relationships. What is truly amazing to me is how many managers and clients operate almost exclusively in the “Turn Away” mode, when a quick “Turn Toward” acknowledgment of an employee’s or salesperson’s effort is so easy.

I first read about Gottman’s work in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. If you want to dig deeper, I recommend Gottman’s book The Relationship Cure.