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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Eradicate office drama and transform your workplace relationships with proven leadership strategies
In Leading Relationships, Steve McClatchy, esteemed leadership mentor and entrepreneur, offers a clear path to improving workplace dynamics. This essential guide tackles the pervasive problems of workplace drama and ineffective relationship management, providing readers with practical tools to build trust, confidence, and respect among colleagues.
Delving into his flagship Five Levels of Maturity framework, McClatchy outlines how to progress from basic interactions to deep, meaningful connections in both personal and professional contexts. The book equips leaders with strategies to handle common challenges such as accountability, conflict resolution, and feedback delivery. It also covers specific issues like managing public criticisms, direct disrespect, and workplace gossip, ensuring leaders can maintain a positive environment even in tough situations.
You'll:
- Learn to recognize and enhance the maturity of your workplace relationships to foster a collaborative environment
- Master conflict resolution techniques that preserve integrity and respect among team members
- Gain practical advice on providing feedback that motivates and supports, rather than alienates, colleagues
Whether you're a manager, executive, HR professional, or consultant, Leading Relationships is your definitive guide to cutting through workplace conflict and enhancing leadership efficacy. Transform your personal and professional relationships and create a more dynamic and supportive work environment by ordering your copy today.
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Seitenzahl: 319
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
PART 1: Why You Should Lead Your Relationships
CHAPTER 1: The Role of Relationships in Business
My Clients Have Already Answered These Questions for Me
This Is Why Companies Should Care About Relationships
First, Make Sure You Have the Capacity to Build Relationships
Good Relationships Are Crucial to Business Success
The High Cost of Low Trust
The Health of Our Relationships Has Real Physiological Effects
Good Relationships Are Vital to an Organization Accomplishing Their Work
Notes
CHAPTER 2: What Builds Great Relationships?
What Actions Establish, Increase, and Destroy Trust?
What Is It Like to Work in a Low‐Trust Environment?
Notes
CHAPTER 3: What Gets in the Way of Building Great Relationships?
The Ego Is Your Best Survival Tool and Your Biggest Obstacle
Relationships Have to Meet the Needs of Both Parties
Games and Competition
PART 2: How You Should Lead Your Relationships: The Five Levels of Maturity
CHAPTER 4: Level One: Recognizing and Acknowledging People
Let the Games Begin!
What If Everything Isn't Fine Between Us?
You Don't Automatically Start at Level One, You Have to Reach It
Are You Saying …
CHAPTER 5: Level Two: Exchanging Facts and Honoring Agreements
Exchanging Facts
Honoring Agreements
Addressing Broken Agreements Without Damaging the Relationship
The Broken Agreement Script: The Four‐Part Response for Addressing a Broken Agreement
Broken Agreement Examples
Conditions for Addressing a Broken Agreement
A Dead Moose: A Problem You Can't Ignore
Serial Broken Agreements
Playground Rules Don't Apply Here
CHAPTER 6: Level Three: Navigating Differing Opinions
Differing Opinions on Business Strategy: Build a Business Case
When Business Case and Mission Clash
CHAPTER 7: Level Four: Playing to Strengths and Working Around Weaknesses
Admitting Mistakes and Apologizing When Necessary
The Negativity Bias
Concentrate on Strengths, Work Around Weaknesses
Giving Positive and Corrective Feedback
Common Feedback Pitfalls
Conditions for Delivering Corrective Feedback
The Corrective Feedback Script
Receiving Feedback Graciously
Notes
CHAPTER 8: Level Five: Understanding Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivators
Whys and Wants
Level Five Comes with High Stakes
When Level Five Is Nonnegotiable
PART 3: Use the Five Levels of Maturity as a Leadership Handbook
CHAPTER 9: Managing the Maturity Level of Others
What Are Your Relationship Biases?
Can You Coach Someone to a Higher Level of Maturity?
What to Do If Someone Fails
Knowing Which Relationships You Can Take to a Higher Level
Note
CHAPTER 10: What Can Level Five Do for You?
Brand Yourself as a Level Five Leader
Why Do You Feel Threatened?
A Leader Doesn't Try to Win in a Relationship
The Best Criteria for Promotions
Succession Planning
Level Five Leadership Embraces Change
Incorporate These Concepts into All Your Relationships
APPENDIX A: The Concentric Circles of Leadership Model
APPENDIX B: The Dos and Don’ts of the Five Levels of Maturity
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
FIGURE 3.1 I use this Employment Motivation Checklist in my workshops to ins...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
APPENDIX A The Concentric Circles of Leadership Model
APPENDIX B The Dos and Don’ts of the Five Levels of Maturity
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
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FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DECIDE
leading relationships
build meaningful connections, eliminate conflict, and radically improve engagement
Steve McClatchy
Copyright © 2025 by Stephen McClatchy. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per‐copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750‐8400, fax (978) 750‐4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748‐6011, fax (201) 748‐6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permission.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Is Available:
ISBN 9781394289387 (Cloth)ISBN 9781394289394 (ePub)ISBN 9781394289400 (ePDF)
COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY
This book is dedicated to my eleven brothers and sisters. Big families grow even bigger personalities. There isn't enough room on this page for how much you all mean to me. I just want to say once and for all that I was the best tennis player in the family. Now I will know who read this by who argues with me next time I see them.
Introduction
Leadership is a never‐ending journey of continuous improvement. It's up to you as a leader to make sure your organization is continuously getting better and faster at serving the needs of your customers. To support that drive toward excellence, you need to build and maintain a company culture of respect and teamwork that encourages healthy relationships among colleagues, and fuels engagement, creativity, and innovation. In this atmosphere, your team can focus on creating quality products and services, instead of focusing on drama and games of ego and competition.
This book presents concepts and skills that leaders need in order to:
Create and uphold company values so that every relationship can be functional and productive, and teams can focus on serving the customer.
Identify and avoid toxic relationship games that can destroy company culture.
Resolve and reduce employee conflicts.
Hold people accountable for their agreements, including executing their job responsibilities in accordance with company values, without damaging the relationship.
Make all business decisions with the best interest of the customer in mind.
Build a business case for all opinion‐based conversations and decisions.
Highlight strengths and work around the weaknesses of the people on your team.
Give positive and constructive feedback that improves the performance and productivity of the recipient, shows the recipient that you are a partner in their career, and confirms that you want them to be successful.
Boost engagement, improve retention, and increase employees' job satisfaction.
Build your company culture around the Five Levels of Maturity and remove toxic ego games from interactions across the organization.
Meet the standards of behavior that can be expected from leaders who consistently work at Level Five Maturity.
Conflict and competition within teams are obstacles to productivity that cause turnover, drain resources, and get in the way of doing business. The concepts and skills in this book are the answer to these distractions. They are the building blocks of the healthy relationships you need to cultivate in your team so that you can more effectively serve your customers and lead toward continuous improvement in your business.
PART 1Why You Should Lead Your Relationships
More than anything else, business leaders want their business to be successful, which means customers choosing them over the competition, and delivering their products and services in a profitable way. Business leaders have to be continuously working on quality, speed, and reducing cost to create the greatest value for the customer, so that their product or service is chosen every time the customer has to make a purchasing decision. The most profitable way for a leader to spend their time is on the systems, processes, and structures that make their business better, faster, and more efficient, but a myriad of relationship‐based issues get in the way of that focus. Communication problems, collaboration problems, turf wars, exclusionary alliances, conflict, people not meeting their obligations, tardiness, and absenteeism are all obstacles to running a business efficiently and focusing on serving the customer. These issues create relationship problems that can drain company resources, including requiring the business leaders' attention and distracting them from customer‐focused strategies.
As I rattle off these problem areas in my workshops, it seems like every head in the room is nodding along with me. Relationship problems create a complex environment that hinders teamwork, collaboration, innovation, creativity, concentration, and productivity. This gets in the way of doing business efficiently and focusing on the customer. This kind of dysfunctional company culture is often what leads clients to seek professional development consulting. When I ask clients why they are seeking professional development on this topic for their teams, classic answers sound something like this:
“We did an engagement survey that showed that our people are burned out and disengaged.”
“We're losing people. Our retention numbers are down, and the cost of acquiring new talent is rising.”
“We grew too fast and promoted people who weren't ready. They don't know how to lead or manage other people, and it's causing HR problems.”
“Our teams are spending more time arguing and talking behind each other's backs than producing content.”
“Ever since we hired this one team leader, that team has developed a toxic atmosphere, and they missed their last deadline.”
These are the kinds of symptoms that begin appearing when companies don't purposefully build a healthy workplace culture. As relationship problems develop, employees lose engagement with their work. In fact, Gallup's landmark Q12 Employee Engagement Survey1 specifically revealed a direct correlation between the quality of an employee's relationships with their supervisor and colleagues and their level of engagement at work. This ultimately affects morale and retention in the organization.
The survey identified 12 employee needs that drive engagement, 10 of which directly relate to workplace culture. An organization's culture is a composite reflection of the amount of trust that is in every one‐on‐one relationship within that organization. Every relationship within a team has an effect on the team's culture and therefore on the engagement of every employee on that team. If businesses can address and improve relationship issues in their organization, they will increase engagement, improve morale, increase retention, and improve employee satisfaction, enabling teams to be more customer‐focused and more effective.
Having good relationships with the people at work is the biggest contributing factor to satisfaction in the workplace. How much happier, more productive, more engaged, and more dedicated would employees be if relationships at work were smooth, respectful, and functional? Or even pleasant? Would they be happy to come to work every day? What would that do for company culture?
And it's not just about business relationships. What if they learned skills that made their personal relationships better also? What is it like to be in a personal relationship with you? In every relationship you have, what are you offering the other person? Are you rooting for them, or against them without realizing it? Do you tend to bring competition into conversations and relationships without meaning to? Do you subconsciously size yourself up against others in every situation? Do you have people in your life who do this? Do you find it to be emotionally draining? This spirit of competition and trying to win gets in the way of building healthy relationships and, as we will explore, gets in the way of doing business. Understanding this obstacle to success in relationships is the first step toward managing it so that we can focus on building fulfilling, mutually beneficial relationships in our personal lives and in business.
Good relationships don't just happen haphazardly without leading them in the right direction by setting a standard of behavior toward each other. Building trust, treating the other person with respect, encouraging the other's success, avoiding competition where it doesn't belong, honoring agreements, and highlighting the other's strengths are the skills needed to make relationships great. Leaders are tasked with mastering these skills so they can remove the issues that get in the way of building great relationships and doing business together.
The quality of our relationships is a determining factor in the quality of our life experience. If we can understand what is holding us back, improve what we bring to the table, and improve how we manage what the other person brings to the table, then we can improve all our relationships. In our personal life, this means an increase in happiness and quality of life because we relate better to the people who are important to us. In business this means avoiding office politics, games, drama, and conflict so that we can turn our focus back to the customer, driving revenue and results, and accomplishing the company's mission and goals.
Note
1
State of the American Workplace Report, Gallup, 2017,
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/238085/state-american-workplace-report-2017.aspx
CHAPTER 1The Role of Relationships in Business
Good relationships are the foundation of our personal lives, but their place in business is less clear. Is it really necessary to build good relationships in business? An audience member approached me after a keynote speech and said, “These concepts are all great, but my company doesn't have a mission statement or company values. Relationships don't matter in our culture, so how am I supposed to fix any of these issues?”
My answer was that his company absolutely has a mission statement, although it may be unwritten. It's “make money.” And the values of the company are “Anything that helps us make money is valued.” This may sound funny or possibly distasteful to you, but I'm not making fun of them here. It's actually a valid default mission. All businesses exist for a reason – to make a profit. Even nonprofit organizations need to raise more money than they spend, or else they will be ineffective in supporting their causes and unable to continue their charitable work. Many people have deeply rooted beliefs about money being evil or the pursuit of profit being evil, but businesses themselves are not capable of good or evil; they exist only to make a profit for their shareholders.
Sometimes I use the example that you aren't alive just to breathe, but if you can't breathe, you won't be alive for long. If a business doesn't make a profit for a prolonged period of time, it will cease to be in business. It will have to close. Then its employees will no longer have jobs to support their families. Its customers, who we hope benefited in a positive way from their products or services, will no longer benefit from them. Its vendors will lose a client and consequently lose revenue. Shareholders will lose their investments, which support their retirement. Its charities will no longer have a benefactor.
Basic economics teaches that one business closing can have a ripple effect proportionate to the size of that business in its market. The people involved in a business will suffer real consequences if it fails to make money. So, “make money” is the default mission underlying any additional expressed mission statement a company might have, because if it doesn't make money, it will have to close, and then that business and its stakeholders can't accomplish any additional mission statements either, no matter how meritorious those might be.
This fundamental truth of business raises some questions. If business is an atmosphere that exists to make money, where do relationships fit in? If we build great relationships, does that increase the company's revenue? Does it improve things like efficiency and productivity? Does the customer get a better experience when colleagues have better relationships? That may be difficult to quantify when everything is going well, but it starts to become clear when we can't get along. What if we make things difficult for each other, create a tense or even hostile work environment for the people around us, and don't trust each other? Is there a real cost to the business? Is getting along just a bonus thing that makes work more pleasant, or is there a real business impact from poor working relationships, even if the business does not espouse any values except making money? Does having good relationships really contribute to our ability to beat our competition, and be profitable, and accomplish our purpose as an organization, or is it just something that would be nice to have?
My Clients Have Already Answered These Questions for Me
I have a client in the food industry whose brand is fading. They're not where they were 20 years ago as a company, and they need to reinvigorate their brand. They need to innovate and streamline and find out how to become relevant to a new generation who doesn't have the experience with their brand that the previous generation did in a pre‐global market with fewer players. They know what they must do, but they're having trouble getting it done because they can't agree on how to attack the problem. They've got employees who have been with the company for more than 30 years who have valuable perspectives, skills, and experience, and they've got young people whom they hired for their new ideas, energy, and potential, plus everyone in between. Now their multigenerational team members argue over strategy, misunderstandings, and disrespect. If they don't get their team unified toward reinventing their brand, they will be in danger of fading into oblivion.
At the same time, I have another client in the sports industry who is at the top of their market. They are experiencing an unprecedented surge in demand, sustainable growth challenges, and pressures to find the right talent among the swollen applicant pool. Everyone wants a piece of them right now. They have an incredible opportunity to capitalize on this popularity. They are on the brink of taking their business to new revenue heights, but the CEO just spent a whole afternoon dealing with HR issues because two of his senior executives in crucial departments don't get along, and they can't seem to get the next campaign off the ground. His time is so valuable right now, and instead of brainstorming ways to capitalize on their new “household‐name” status, he has been defusing tension and policing petty arguments within his executive team. The opportunity in front of them won't last forever, and the CEO is very frustrated that his people aren't all hyper‐focused on grasping it and doing whatever it takes to work together to keep the momentum going.
Another client of mine, with a popular niche clothing line, is frustrated because they have been missing repeated opportunities for growth. Their patriarch, who is no longer involved in the day‐to‐day operations, wanted it to be a small company but left them with debt to pay. The current executives, who are all related to each other, cannot agree whether to grow the company. Some want to honor the patriarch's vision for the company, but some see expansion as the only way to pay off debt and grow profits. Their disagreement and financial pressures threaten to disband the company altogether because the executives are guilting each other over their opinions.
Another client in the entertainment industry hired me to help reconfigure a top executive's role because she was knocking it out of the park as far as her department's revenues go, but her department had so much turnover that overhead was threatening the profit margin. She had trouble staffing her events because she was driving away good people right and left with her abrasiveness.
My government agency clients know they need to work on speed and quality in order to spend taxpayers' money more efficiently and effectively. What taxpayers want is for the government to provide services at the lowest cost and the best quality. Poor relationships in the office get in the way of that, increasing costs and impeding efficiency.
This Is Why Companies Should Care About Relationships
This is nothing new. I hear stories all the time about power plays among colleagues, hostile work environments, resignations tendered due to social issues at work, using job titles as a barometer for the validity of new ideas in meetings, withholding pertinent information to punish certain colleagues, purposely taking things out of context in order to embarrass others, and boardrooms taking sides in arguments regardless of the effect on the customer.
No, this is not sixth grade. These are real, educated adults with business experience. They are put in situations where they have to work closely with people they didn't choose. Without some preparation and guidelines, a lot can get in the way of these relationships being successful, and unsuccessful relationships within a company will get in the way of the company being successful. This is why companies should care about relationships. They are not going to attract and keep top talent and future leaders if the company culture is toxic. When I speak about this topic of relationships, everyone in the room usually has a story to share. Employees know when relationship issues are hindering their work or affecting how they feel when they go home at night.
First, Make Sure You Have the Capacity to Build Relationships
You can't work on business systems or address customer needs until you address the relationship problems that are in the way, yet you can't solve relationship problems when the people responsible for solving them are burned out. The feeling of burnout is a lack of excitement and improvement in your life when today looks just like yesterday and the day before, and nothing is happening today that will make tomorrow or even next year any better. When you're burned out, it affects how you treat people and affects your capacity for relationships with others. If I don't feel good about me, blaming you or criticizing you can make me feel better about me. If I don't have any progress or excitement in my life, I will find it difficult to cheer you on in yours. Unless I am in a good place, something good happening in your life will only make me feel worse about mine. Now instead of cheering for you in your marathon this weekend, I hope you trip. Instead of congratulating you on your job promotion, I am jealous and wonder why I haven't been promoted. Often the root cause of a relationship problem comes from either person not having the capacity for a relationship at all because they are burned out and not in a healthy place to be interacting with someone else, so they wind up mistreating the other person.
This is why personal leadership is important. My definition of leadership is improvement. Leadership should not be reserved for a few people at the top of the corporate power structure. Leadership is a choice you make, and in every situation there is an opportunity to lead. With this practical definition, anyone, in any situation, can be a leader regardless of their job position. Instead of being a title that you hold or a seat that you sit in, leadership is a result you produce by making something better than it was before. It requires vision of how your life, relationships, and business could be better in the future, and it requires purposeful actions today to bring about those changes in the future.
Personal leadership is a commitment to continuous improvement in some area of life.
Before you can lead your relationships in the right direction, you must practice personal leadership so that you have the capacity for relationships with others. Without it, the maintenance tasks in life can fill your days and weigh you down, leading to burnout. Personal leadership is leading, or improving, yourself by doing what you don't have to do every day: setting and pursuing goals that will improve your life and make tomorrow better than today.
Without a goal before you, life becomes stagnant. Tomorrow will look just like today and so will a year from now, and five years from now. The world around us is always changing and progressing in some way. If you aren't continuously progressing or improving something in your life, burnout will set in as you fight just to complete the daily maintenance of life. Pursuing continuous improvement and leading your life forward, instead of just managing whatever life throws at you, builds positive self‐identity, which is the foundation of personal leadership, and which is necessary to build healthy relationships with others. A positive self‐identity is what enables a leader to effectively lead others instead of competing with them out of jealousy or feeling threatened by their energy and accomplishments.
For more about this topic, see my book, Decide: Work Smarter, Reduce Your Stress, and Lead by Example (Wiley, 2014).
Once someone has committed to improvement in their lives and they build a positive self‐identity based on that rather than sizing up against others, then they have the capacity for building great relationships with other people.
Leading relationships means encouraging, establishing, and supporting functional, respectful relationships among business colleagues, managers, employees, and clients so that we can build trust and confidence in the people around us, stop competing with each other, and focus on serving the needs of our customers. The same concepts and skills used to lead business relationships can help us purposefully lead (improve) our personal relationships too.
Good Relationships Are Crucial to Business Success
Think about your own personal experiences. Think of a time in your career when you had a difficult relationship with a colleague, boss, vendor, or client. What happened between you? What stories do you tell about working with that person? How do you feel when you hear their name? Have you heard other people tell stories like this about difficult people in their workplace? What emotions come through? Think of your own story or one you have heard from someone else. Listen and look for any impact on the business due to these two people not getting along. Does it impact productivity, creativity, engagement, morale of their teams, innovation, how ideas are generated and shared, the pace and rhythm of work in their teams, their speed in responding to customers, the quality of what gets produced, or the ability to share feedback? Did you have to double‐check things, go through multiple approval or signature processes, and send everything in writing just to cover yourself?
Think about
creativity
. Did you feel free to express ideas without fear of being criticized or of someone else taking credit?
Think about
engagement
. Did you feel fully committed to the success of the project, or did you have a headache from eye‐rolling so hard all day?
Think about
innovation
. Did you feel free to suggest ways to improve processes without being accused of stepping on toes or being reminded of your subordinate place on the team?
Think about
morale
. Did you feel that your contributions were appreciated? Did negative attitudes discourage collaboration?
Think about
quality
. Did everything get done in the best possible way to serve the customer, or were you more concerned with internal issues? Did anyone skip a step in quality control because they didn't want to deal with a certain person?
Think about
retention
. Did someone in these stories leave a job because a relationship became too difficult to endure? If so, the relationship cost that person a job and the time it took to find a new one. It also negatively impacted retention for that business.
Think about
culture
. What if one of the people in that relationship was the aggressor and that person stayed behind in the company after driving out a good employee? Is there a risk of losing the next employee who works with that person, and the next, and the next? Is that company's culture now at risk because of one person?
Have you heard stories like this? How much is it costing your business that people are not treating each other the way they want to be treated? How much is it costing your employees in terms of personal health and well‐being? How much work interruption is the business experiencing because of turnover? Is there effective succession planning, including management training, so that the business can continue to move forward and thrive and learn from its past to create a stronger future? Or is there a scarcity mentality and efforts to keep people out of the “inner circle” at the top so that some people always know more than others and they get self‐esteem out of that? Is there a collaborative environment, or is everyone reinventing the wheel all the time because no one wants someone else to prosper and be in a position to threaten their job? Is there a supportive environment where people feel secure to share their ideas, or are you wasting the talent that you hired so that a top manager can retain control and feel empowered by that?
Work would be more enjoyable if everyone treated each other with respect. Studies show that people are much more willing to dedicate energy, effort, and mindfulness, and to work hard for their company if they have great relationships with their boss and colleagues. If the relationship isn't there, people are less likely to put in the extra effort it would take for the work process to succeed. The pace of business slows down when relationships are failing. If you don't insist on and maintain a safe, healthy work environment for your employees to collaborate, share ideas, and work comfortably with each other, then it will cost your company money through lost retention, less innovation, and lower market share among other ways. That has been proven.1
If your organization values the health and well‐being of its employees, then learning skills like conflict resolution, communicating effectively, and building trust is a no‐brainer.
Even if your company's only mission statement is “make money,” don't just think about relationship issues as Wouldn't it be nice? We would all be happier if we could just get along. You can connect these relationship issues directly to the bottom line of the organization just by listening to the stories of difficult relationships and how they resulted in shattered metrics for the business.
The High Cost of Low Trust
Research data reveals that the turnover of just one mid‐level employee can be a significant cost to a small company. In fact, replacing an employee costs on average 50–60% of the annual salary for that position.2 Turnover is not the only expensive result of workplace conflicts. Add lost productivity, increased sick days, increased medical claims, and legal costs attributed to workplace conflict for an estimated grand total cost of $200 billion per year to the US economy.3 That staggering figure proves that relationship issues are important to people, as if we needed hard data to know that. According to an annual employee satisfaction survey, “Relationship with Supervisor” consistently ranks as one of the most important elements leading to job satisfaction.4 Another recent survey revealed that more than 60 million US workers are dealing with workplace bullying, described as abuse, humiliation, or intimidation interfering with job performance.5 In the opening paragraphs to both of these studies, the problems are described as “unavoidable” and “global.”
Relationship issues affect our day‐to‐day workplaces as much as they affect our personal lives because we deal with real people in both settings. We have the same feelings and sensitivities at work as we do outside of work. People involved in workplace conflicts can experience a range of effects, including anxiety, depression, exploitation, anger, frustration, stress, helplessness, disengagement, and burnout. Once they are in that state, their personal relationships are usually affected, and then those suffer as well, compounding the effects on a worker's life. Especially with more people working remotely and able to work anytime, anywhere, there is even more transference of workplace stress into a worker's home life.
The Health of Our Relationships Has Real Physiological Effects
Studies clearly show that negative social interactions cause negative physiological effects on the body, and positive social interactions have positive physiological effects on the body.
Negative workplace interactions, poor relationships at work, and a company culture that does not uphold respect for others are significant sources of workplace stress. Stress causes complex physiological responses in the body, which can lead to chronic health issues, including medical, psychological, and behavioral problems, and is a major cause of workplace absenteeism. The impact of long‐term stress on the body has been linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer, and increased risk of physical injuries. Anxiety and depression have also been linked to stress, and depression is a significant factor in illness and disease, as well as a loss of productivity in the workplace. The instance of substance abuse (including alcohol, tobacco, and prescription drug abuse) is directly correlated to increased stress, and is a major contributing factor to work absenteeism, lost productivity, and increased incidences of workplace aggression and on‐the‐job accidents.6 One study even found that feeling ostracized or isolated in the workplace has the same effect on the brain as experiencing physical pain.7
The opposite of this is also true. Just as negative relationship interactions can cause negative physiological results, positive close relationships can help reinforce biological systems that promote physical healing and release happiness hormones, triggering satisfaction and joy. One study found that in response to positive social interactions the brain produced a powerful painkiller that sparks trustworthiness and motivation to help others.8
These studies report that our brains process positive and negative relationship experiences just as they process physical pain and painkillers.9 The effects of these interactions follow suit. Just as negative interactions cause physical and psychological problems, positive interactions can boost the body's natural ability to combat stress and build cardiovascular strength.
Employees with positive workplace relationships are not only healthier, but they are also more engaged, report higher job satisfaction, are more likely to stay in their jobs longer, have better concentration, and feel free to think more creatively.
