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.

Sales and Middle Management: Twins Separated at Birth

Sales people and middle managers generally don't hang out together. It's too bad, because they have a lot in common, and what works for one would often help the other.

Middle managers are, by definition, in the middle - senior management above, junior management or employees below. Less obvious but just as true is that sales people are also in the middle, between their company and their customers. This leads to a whole host of parallels:

• The success of both middle managers and salespeople is largely (arguably totally) dependant on others. Middle management depends on senior management to pick the right direction and make the right decisions, and they depend on their direct reports and people down the line to execute and provide good feedback. Sales people depend on their companies to provide the right products at the right prices with good delivery execution, and they depend on their customers to buy. This lack of direct control in both directions can and does make the people in the middle crazy.
• The primary function of both middle management and sales people is a communication conduit. Middle managers absorb and distill information coming up from below and transmit it to senior management so better executive decisions can be made. They also pass information and decisions from senior management down to the troops below. In addition, there are feedback loops in both directions; middle managers (hopefully) have a role advising senior management on what decisions are likely to work, and provide feedback to their reports on how well they're doing implementing senior management strategy. Sales people transmit information about their company's products to customers, and transmit feedback from customers back to the company.
• When things are going badly, both middle management and sales people are often targets. Did senior management make bad decisions, or did middle management fail to communicate and execute? That's a call senior management makes when things go poorly, and how often do you hear a CEO admitting to a bad strategy? If a product isn't selling, is it the company's problem or are the sales people weak? In a downturn the lowest performing salespeople are often the first to go even if the problem is a market or product issue. Also, in bad times middle managers and salespeople are often messengers bearing bad news (this strategy isn't working, this product isn't selling). Everyone knows what happens to those kind of messengers.
• When things are going well, the value of middle managers and salespeople is still suspect. Things are going well - does senior management really need to work through a middle manager? Why can't they talk directly to line employees (or customers for that matter)? Our products are selling well; do we really need to pay salespeople that much?
• Pretty much everbody thinks they know better than middle managers and salespeople. Senior management knows the business and management better (that's why they're senior, and make multiples more than everyone else). Line people know what's really going on in the company, and management is out of touch. Companies think they know what companies want better than their salespeople, and customers think salespeople don't understand their needs.

Given these parallels, I think the core issues with both occupations are remarkably similar:

• How can you make good things happen when you don't have control?
• How can you communicate most effectively?
• What's the best way of giving feedback, direction, and advice?
• What's the best way to interact with people who might not respect you or your role?
• How do you demonstrate you add value?

I think the answers are pretty much the same for both salespeople and middle managers, which is why I deal with both in this blog.