How do you handle the delicate art of mending damaged professional relationships. Even the most well-intentioned leaders can find themselves having caused unintentional but impactful harm. But fear not, this episode is your roadmap to restoring trust, leveraging emotional intelligence, and the transformative power of a heartfelt apology. We unpack the intricacies of issuing apologies that pave the way for genuine healing, while steering clear of common pitfalls that can further fray the fabric of trust.
Are you willing to take the daunting step into accountability that will allow you to powerfully shift your relationships?
If you want to be able to navigate the rocky terrain of relational repair and emerge with stronger, more resilient bonds with your team, this is the episode for you!
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
How do you handle the delicate art of mending damaged professional relationships. Even the most well-intentioned leaders can find themselves having caused unintentional but impactful harm. But fear not, this episode is your roadmap to restoring trust, leveraging emotional intelligence, and the transformative power of a heartfelt apology. We unpack the intricacies of issuing apologies that pave the way for genuine healing, while steering clear of common pitfalls that can further fray the fabric of trust.
Are you willing to take the daunting step into accountability that will allow you to powerfully shift your relationships?
If you want to be able to navigate the rocky terrain of relational repair and emerge with stronger, more resilient bonds with your team, this is the episode for you!
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Speaker 1:
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:
Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Now, today, we are going to be talking about how to repair a relationship. That is, when something went wrong, how do you make sure that it doesn't end the relationship or lead to bitter feelings? And we're talking about this obviously in a work context, but this is for every relationship across the board. I think this is a skill so many of us could do a better job with, so let's dive in. Al writes in.
Speaker 2:
I've been managing my team of 10 for about the past year. During this time, my company's been going through a merger and a lot of things were changing. I don't think they handle all of the changes well and there was a lot of impact on me and my team. I feel like I took the brunt of it from both sides. I was trying to help my team, but they were upset with the process and me and I was getting a lot of pressure from our executive team During all of that. I know I wasn't always my best self. There were times when I would snap at people because I was stressed, and there were times I shut down my team when they were trying to make suggestions. I apologized after, but it feels like it doesn't matter. I still feel like my team is mad at me or they just don't want me as a manager anymore. I feel like apologizing more and more seems weak and won't do anything. Is there anything else I can do? So, first of all, thank you for writing in, al, and I can appreciate what a tough position you've been put in.
Speaker 2:
One of the realities of life is we can often be stuck in these situations where maybe we're not responsible for everything that's happened. There's other people, other things happening around us, and at the same time, though, we are responsible for trying to help other people in this situation. In this case, you have a team that you are genuinely trying to help and support, and also having this additional burden and this additional stress on yourself. So I will acknowledge that's not easy, and this really plays into what I believe is one of the hardest parts of leadership, which is you become a leader, and if you're listening to the show, you definitely want to be a good leader because you're trying to be responsible, you do really want to help people, you want to protect your team, you want to make sure they have good outcomes and feel good about things, and it is one of the biggest pains and hurts of leadership is you have to acknowledge that the impact that you have is not always a good one. That can be really heavy and painful to sit with this idea that you put your heart into something, you cared about someone and you tried so hard and it didn't have that impact. You do probably have to sit with that, al. I can imagine it's not always easy to try to sit with this pain. And now what you're trying to do is try to find a way to say I feel this pain, I feel this responsibility. Can I do anything about it? Or do I have to just say nope, I couldn't do anything, the situation is bad, I can't repair those relationships anymore. I couldn't do anything, the situation's bad, I can't repair those relationships anymore.
Speaker 2:
So by acknowledging by writing in acknowledging that the team is upset still with some of these impacts that you had is a good starter step to saying I want to be accountable. At the same time, you can acknowledge maybe the bigger situation wasn't your fault. You were in a tough position, your team was in a tough position and you are ultimately responsible for how you showed up with your team. And now we're going to work on what we can do with that to repair that relationship. First, I'm going to just suggest to everyone the more work you can do, not just on leadership tips and tricks, but especially on your own emotional regulation. Your emotional intelligence is really helpful. We are human. No one is perfect. There's, of course, still going to be things that raise our emotions and it's going to be harder to respond instead of reacting from that space. And the more and more that you do this work, the less and less instance you will have of this Right there. This is a really great benefit to doing that kind of work, as you will find yourself more able to regulate in these moments doesn't mean you won't still unintentionally harm people, but it will lessen some of these impacts of being stressed and maybe snapping at someone or doing something that you weren't intending to do.
Speaker 2:
Be kind to yourself also recognize that there are great things you can constantly be doing to improve these kinds of situations, and it is really important that we work to improve these situations because, of course, there is this extra layer that we need to talk about, which is what happens when there's relational harm from someone and there's a power dynamic like there is in this case ALU, are leading a team, so there is that extra influence and say you have over their lives. Now, if you've listened to the show before, we talk a lot about power. I use the base of right use of power, which is a phenomenal thing you can look into and recognizing that when we have less power in the situation so in this case, like your staff team do there is this increased vulnerability. And when you have an increased vulnerability and someone does something that causes some harm to that relationship, that can have a huge impact. In fact, I would say that most trauma comes from experiences where someone with power misused it, even if unintentionally, can be very, very harmful to not just the relationship but to you, because you were in this vulnerable state.
Speaker 2:
We really want to make sure, as leaders, that we are taking responsibility not for everything that happens, but that we are the ones making sure that these relationships stay healthy, and in this case, that means that you are the one stepping forward to do this relational repair once you recognize that any sort of harm has been done, intentional or no. Now, on the flip side of this, the good news is, it is incredibly empowering to people when they do get healthy apology and relationship repair from someone who is in a power position I don't know if you've ever had, say, a parent or a teacher or a mentor or one of your former managers apologize to you in a very genuine way, to acknowledge what happened, to take that accountability and then work with you to move forward. It can be an absolutely amazing feeling. So if you're listening to this right now, planning your own relationship repair, how you're going to do this, kudos to you, because it is a really powerful experience for people. We want to create this feeling, this sense that they are understood, that they are acknowledged and cared about, and so how do we do this? The first thing we want to be aware of first of all is and this is the biggest one how we are showing up to these conversations, not just in the moment where we might have been frustrated and maybe not acting in the way we wanted, but if we are coming back to this person, we are first of all approaching them because we are the ones being responsible for the health of the relationship and we are doing all that we can to make sure that we are regulated, that we're aware of what defensiveness might come up, and are really working to let that piece go, that we're really focused on curiosity and empathy instead of trying to get an outcome met right, that they need to forgive us.
Speaker 2:
That might be a sneaky, insidious thought there, and there are going to be some thoughts that come in. There's going to be some patterns that want to come in because this process is not comfortable. It is not comfortable to recognize, first of all, that you did this harm like we talked about. It can be quite painful. It's not comfortable to recognize maybe there's some more work you need to do on yourself, or maybe that your good intentions and all this effort that you put in didn't roll out the way you hoped.
Speaker 2:
With this discomfort, we need to be aware of some sneaky things that might happen. For example, a common one would be, while you're're apologizing, adding some blame for someone else. So in this situation, it might be al if you said something like you know I'm so sorry and really you know there's so many situations all these other things are happening at work that made me snap at you and so it's an apology, but it's putting the blame to someone else because that feels more comfortable than saying this is on me. On the other hand, too, you might go the other way and you might go into oh my God, I'm so sorry, this was entirely my fault. I can't believe I did this. Oh, I must have hurt you so much, actually taking too much blame and, in some ways, making it more about me and my experience than it is about the other person.
Speaker 2:
Other things that can come up, maybe you in my experience than it is about the other person. Other things that can come up maybe you have a bit of a defense of your good intentions or maybe you withdrew and felt a little disconnected because there is some shame hanging around around the situation. There's a lot of ways that you can try to emotionally protect around the situation rather than sitting with this messy pain of what has happened. So the first thing you have to do is recognize what are some of your patterns that have maybe come up in the past before, when you felt bad about a situation and you were trying to make apologies or trying to repair that relationship. Once you recognize what some of those things could be, make sure that you can be aware of them and try to let them go as much as possible for these conversations. This is what happens usually People stop and they say they're sorry, but maybe they do have this disconnect. And that's what's going to happen if you don't do a little bit of this pre-work. And what will happen is the other person can feel that they can feel when there's a genuine apology, with empathy and curiosity and focused on this connection, and they can feel when someone is saying sorry because they're feeling defensive or they're trying to protect, or they're trying to prove a point, or they're trying to get an acknowledgement of an apology. Once we figured this out, once we figured out how we're going to show up, we want to figure out what the other person might want from this apology. If you have really great relationships with your staff, you can preemptively have these conversations. Recognize hey, relationships aren't always perfect. If something happens.
Speaker 2:
What are some of the things you appreciate in repairing relationship? Why not ask? It's a great place to start, but let's talk about a couple of the common pieces. The first one and you've got to start everything with this is this piece of empathy. Now, what does this look like? The piece that you really want to include is that the person, in this case, who has been harmed, has an opportunity to share their experience. It is really big for people to feel understood and acknowledged and accepted for whatever their experience. It is really big for people to feel understood and acknowledged and accepted for whatever their experience was, and in this situation, all you have to do is ask what the experience was like, listen, don't make any assumptions, don't tell them why, and share your intention. Literally just listen, listen at the end of what they've shared. It's great if you can reiterate to them of what you heard, right, what emotions they felt, right, very basic active listening, but just really showing that you did hear their experience and that their emotions around it are valid, with no other justification, no other comments, can be an incredibly powering thing for them, just to feel understood and heard.
Speaker 2:
The next part of this can be a bit of a double-edged sword, which is do you want to share about your experience and your intention? Now, the reason this can be so double-edged is because it can come from a genuine place of empathy and we're creating a connection and this could help them maybe understand something that they were hoping to understand. Now, as we've already talked about, this could also be one of those defensiveness traps of I want to share so they understand. So I feel emotionally validated. So check yourself if that's what you're looking for and if it's not, and if you genuinely can ask them are you interested in hearing about my perspective or what my intentions were? You could open that conversation potentially. Just be careful with this one, because it's usually where people go, is they go to intentions, and it can really invalidate all of this other beautiful empathy that we were building before.
Speaker 2:
In this whole setup, as we're talking, we probably want to include a genuine apology. Right, and this isn't long winded. It doesn't need to explain things. It shouldn't use the phrase I'm sorry. You felt. Literally, you just want the chance to say I am sorry that I had that impact on you.
Speaker 2:
Relationships, of course, with all of this, have these patterns of how we interact. We tend to react in certain ways again and again, and something that can be really helpful, as we're thinking about okay, we've made this apology is this repair piece, a great thing you can use for repair is talking about how you could shift behavior in the future. What different actions could you have done in that situation? And if you think about, for example, al's situation she mentioned that multiple times she had snapped at people or shut people down and recognizing that when someone does something that is harmful to your relationship multiple times and just says I'm sorry, you probably start to disbelieve them. That word loses all meaning because they say, oh, I'm so sorry I snapped at you and then they do it again.
Speaker 2:
So, especially if you're looking at long-term relationships like, say, the people on your team that you want to support people in your family these long-term relationships you want to acknowledge this is what I did, that I recognized caused harm. I heard why from you, how it caused you harm. Here is something I am willing and able to do in the future that would shift that. Maybe it's not going to be perfect at first, but the acknowledgement that I'm actively going to change something so this harm does not happen again. It's really important. We don't want to be the person that uses the word sorry and burns out its meaning.
Speaker 2:
We want to talk about the actual change that we could make and then, finally, we can ask what other pieces could be used to repair this relationship. Maybe there is a specific action that this person would really appreciate, or maybe there's some way that we could connect further to really understand each other and make sure these kinds of things don't happen again. And you might ask this question and they might not have an answer, and that's fine. Now it can be something that you leave the door open to that. If they think of something in the future, some way that could continue to improve your relationship, they'll be able to say it.
Speaker 2:
This is just a couple ideas, some base ideas of once this harm has happened, once you want to repair a relationship. Here's some of the components that you might want to use. First, have that piece of empathy. Maybe share some of your experience too. If it's the right situation that you are apologizing, that you are talking about changing behavior for the future and about what you could do to repair harm Doesn't have to be in that order, doesn't have to be all that order, doesn't have to be all of those steps, but really get a sense from this person of what they're needing.
Speaker 2:
Like I said, you have this amazing ability in your hands now to repair not only what happened between the two of you, but even maybe help them repair some relationship with other people in power, now that you are treating them in a really ethical and responsive way, because you are a leader who's stepping into this. So I want to thank you so much for stepping into it. I want to thank you so much for AL, for sharing your story. I look forward to continuing our conversation and if you have a story, a question that you'd like to share with us, the link for how to do that is in the description below and as part of that, I love to offer a gift of a session to make sure we've really gone into that question, really answered it. And again, I do want to thank you so much. If everyone in the world could experience an ethical leader who offers quality relationship repair, the world would be a better place, and I appreciate you putting in the effort to learn this. Thank you, have a great week.
Speaker 1:
We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.