Solo Mission Series: Relationship Management at Work

A single vague message can kick off a week of tension, not because anyone is incompetent, but because the brain hates uncertainty and relationships strain under pressure. Our host, Jay Johnson, takes a solo deep dive into relationship management at work and shows how two common stress patterns, anxious and avoidant attachment behaviors, quietly hijack communication between managers and employees.

We walk through what “anxious” and “avoidant” look like in real workplace moments: the employee who keeps following up for reassurance, the manager who goes quiet and calls it efficiency, the status update that feels like micromanagement, and the short reply that gets read as rejection. You’ll hear why these are patterns, not labels, and how anxious pursuit and avoidant withdrawal create a predictable loop that hurts engagement, retention, and performance.

Then we get practical. Jay shares a clear leadership toolkit with scripts you can use immediately: how to name the loop without blaming the person, how to install a calming clarity cadence, how to use a pause phrase when the heat rises, and how to replace assumptions with the “fact, story, ask” framework. We also cover repair scripts, bounded reassurance, and a directness with dignity rule that protects psychological safety while keeping standards high. 

If you want less drama and more traction in your manager-employee relationships, subscribe, share this with a leader on your team, and leave a review with the one script you’re going to try first.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Transcript

Relationship Management Defined For Leaders

Anxious Patterns And Certainty Seeking

Avoidant Patterns And Self Reliance

Where Anxious And Avoidant Collide

The Brain Science Behind The Loop

Scripts And Routines That Stabilize

Seven Day Challenge And Closing

Jay Johnson 0:39

Welcome to the Talent Forge, where together we're shaping workforce behavior. I'm your host, Jay Johnson. This is a solo mission. Just me, one topic, and one outcome. Practical behavior change that you can use immediately. Because here's what I know to be true. Most workplace breakdowns don't happen because people lack skill. They actually happen because relationships strain under pressure. People misread signals, there's unmet expectations, unspoken stories, and a number of patterns that we don't even realize are running. So today we're talking about relationship management and specifically how two common attachment patterns, anxious and avoidant, can quietly hijack the relationship between managers and employees. These aren't labels, this isn't therapy. These are patterns of behavior that show up when stress is high, clarity is low, and the stakes feel personal. If you've ever had someone cling harder when you pull back, or pull back harder when you lean in, you've seen this in action. And by the end of this episode, you're going to have language, tools, and a simple plan to reduce friction, build stability, and lead relationships back to clarity without losing performance and without losing yourself. So let's get into it. So relationship management is a leadership skill that I don't think people pay enough attention to. And oftentimes it's considered like, oh, I've got to be the manager, and I'm, I, you know, if I'm not nice, people aren't going to like me. Or it's about popularity, or even something like uh avoiding conflict. What I'm actually talking about is training towards the ability to stay steady when things get tense, unclear, or emotional. So because most strain manager employee relationships don't actually break down over competence, they tend to break down over the patterns in which we communicate, interact with each other. And these patterns are actually related to relationships in general. So this is kind of going to serve as two things. Number one is to help those relationships in the workplace. But secondly, these can actually help show up in your personal relationships, whether that's with friends or with your partner, spouse, or loved ones. The two patterns that we often see the most in a conflict are going to be the anxious patterns and the avoidant patterns. All right. And I'll dig into each of those. If it's an anxious pattern, we often hear things like, are we good? Where do we stand right now? Or why haven't you replied? For the avoidant patterns, it's more of a withdrawal. And you hear, I'm fine, I don't really need anything. Let's not make this an issue. When you put those two things together in a workplace, you get a lot of friction. Uh, it comes from the confusion, the silent stories that we tell ourselves, and those can create real problems, both from engagement, from retention, and from another other a number of other aspects, including just general performance. So, in today's lesson, we're gonna learn how to spot these patterns early and lead relationships back to clarity without turning this into therapy. So, what we're gonna do today is define relationship management in a way that leaders can actually use. We'll break down some different anxious and avoidant patterns and how they end up showing up at work and why they end up colliding. We're gonna talk through some real examples, whether that's manager to employee, employee to manager, or peer-to-peer. We're gonna cover the behavioral science, what is the threat response, the uncertainty, the belonging aspects, and protesting versus distancing. I'll also give you a toolkit, scripts, routines, and tactics that I'm personally using in my own relationships, but also really are effective in a number of different cultural uh implementations that we've had organizationally. Finally, we're gonna give you a seven-day challenge to build stability and trust with intention and purpose. So, one important note up front attachment style language can be helpful, but it's not a diagnosis. It's just a tendency or a pattern of behaviors when we're particularly under stress. So, in work, we use it as a lens for these patterns to better understand and predict how behaviors are going to come about. And by understanding those and being aware of them, we can get into the behavior change. So let's talk about relate. What does relationship management really mean? This isn't just like that soft underbelly side of people skills, but this is really a science. And relationship management at work is the ability to do three things consistently. First, it's gonna be about reducing ambiguity. There's so much uncertainty that we face every single day, is that, and you know, I always make the joke when you get a call, I need you to come down to my office in a history of no one with somebody like, yes, I'm getting a raise. It's almost always gonna be something that we go to the negative. And that's just how our brain functions. So relationship management at work, the first piece is about reducing that ambiguity. The second piece is about regulating emotional temperature. And what do I mean by regulating emotional temperature? Well, we know that human beings can escalate, and it can often be a tit for tat. So somebody raises their voice, you raise your voice higher, they raise their voice higher, and the next thing you know, we're yelling at each other. Regulating the emotional temperature is about being able to take the step back, create some calm and some security, and being able to navigate that forward effectively. Lastly, the third part is about creating clear agreements. Now, these can be prescripted agreements that we have, what happens when X occurs, or they can be agreements with ourselves of how am I going to show up when either I'm triggered, or how am I going to show up when this pattern presents itself? So most strained relationships are really built out of three ingredients uncertainty, unmet expectations, and unspoken stories. And people often think the problem's personality, but it's not. It's it's really the lack of clarity, predictable communication, and our inability to repair when friction occurs. When those things are missing, the anxious and avoidant patterns tend to fill the gap. So let's dig into that and see what those look like. Anxious and avoidant patterns in the workplace are something that are a natural phenomenon. Where does the anxious and avoidant patterns come from? Typically, they come from how we adapted to our needs being met as children or even babies. And this has an effect on our relationships. The science behind this is really interesting and it continues to grow. So let's talk a little bit about the anxious patterns in the workplace to start off with. Now, one of the things that you hear is you hear the word anxious, and it probably goes to a number of different connotations, but let's let's kind of take that out of the equation. Because when we're talking about anxious attachment patterns, it's very specific. These anxious behaviors, they're not needy. It's certainty seeking when there's a lot of pressure or when there's a lot of ambiguity. And what it can often look like is frequent check-ins. So if you've got that employee that's, hey, just following up, just want to know where we're at with this. Hey, what's going on with this? That may be a sign that that person is experiencing some of the anxious pattern behaviors, especially if it's overly used. Another example would look like reading tone into short messages. So you send out a direct message saying, Hey, I need you to follow up on this report. And the immediate response back is, Are you mad at me? That may be an indicator of anxious patterns at work. Uh, another one is escalating quickly to get resolution. So this might be if uh they don't get the answer that you know the immediate manager wants, they go to the next level, the next level, because they want to get to that resolution really quickly and basically resolve whatever ambiguity, uncertainty, or um misinterpretation that they have. That's another piece that we can be looking for is overexplaining. And this is a big one because misinterpretation is ambiguity and uncertainty. So there's oftentimes in the anxious pattern a number of different over-explaining, excessively long emails, or repeating ourselves. Now, uh, one other one that I want to bring up here is a sensitivity to perceived distance. And again, I want to make sure that we're not getting into the word sensitivity as though that's some sort of a weakness or some sort of like a maladaptive. The sensitivity here is really, think of it as a scientific instrument. We want our instruments to be very sensitive to the data that's being put out there. So this sensitivity is not a weakness, it's actually a strength. But if there's a perception of distance, i.e., maybe you were tuned out during a meeting, you may get somebody who is in the anxious patterns that notices that more so than, say, somebody that would be in the avoidant patterns. Now, the last one that I want to talk about is the difficulty in waiting without reassurance. That is a common behavior that we see. And what that means is we often then feel like maybe they're nagging, maybe they're um, you know, maybe they're just overly needy. And this is where that kind of comes into play, is because the waiting is actually painful for somebody with the anxious attachment pattern. So we may see them push and push in order to get whatever reassurance that it is. Now, this isn't needy, it is certainty seeking, much like we said above. So the internal driver here is if I don't stay close to the signal, I'm losing or I might have lost safety. And in work language, if I'm not visible or if I'm not being reinforced, I'm at risk. And that is a pattern that we see pop up in the workplace. Now, let's talk about the other side of this, the avoidant patterns in the workplace. This can often come across as cold or disengaged. And it's a really interesting concept when we think about the avoidant pattern, is in many cases it was a survival function. It was, I can just be independent, I can do my own thing, and I can protect my own autonomy, even if there's pressure, even if there's stress all around, just leave me alone, I'll get it done. And how this shows up behaviorally is uh you may get very minimal updates unless forced from somebody that is in the avoidant pattern. They're just gonna say, I've got it, and leave it alone. I've let me handle it. I'm working through it, it's under control, don't you stress about it. That's a very strong set of patterns of behaviors that we would see from avoidance. Another set would be the disliking of emotional conversations. For an avoidant pattern person, that's gonna feel uh overly intrusive, stepping into maybe some boundary areas that they are not necessarily gonna want to go down. Um, but that dislike of emotional conversations, it also feels to the avoidant pattern like a waste of time. Let's just get the job done, move forward, get it, get it over with, and it becomes very practical based. Now, there's a shutting down that happens from avoidant patterns, is particularly when something gets stressed or when emotional conversations uh pop up. So this behavior is one to watch for, whether it's shutting down, going quiet, disengaging, disembarking, that's when it starts to get um, that's when it starts to get something that the person's essentially pulling back or withdrawing. Avoidant patterns may delay feedback conversations. Uh, they may also look at feedback conversations as unnecessary because it's the other person's responsibility to get better, to improve themselves, or to you know, take the initiative to start the conversation. So we may see an avoidant uh personality delay those feedback conversations from occurring. Um, avoidant, they may or may not prefer email or text over live clarification, uh, mostly because they don't want their time encroached upon or anything else. They can read the email or text at their own convenience. It doesn't have to be immediate communication. So they may prefer that. Now, if it is something where they want direct results or they need to just move forward, it's going to be very uh non-emotional. It's gonna be a direct request, and it's probably gonna be intellectualized. Last but not least, what we see avoidant patterns do at the workplace is avoid things like the social or relationship talk. Now, they'll focus on the tasks or the results of the tasks, but the digging into the sticky humanness of everything is not necessarily something that they're gonna want to engage in mostly. One key aspect to think here is the internal driver for avoidance is if this gets emotional or messy, it's there's no control, it's chaos. So this is one of the things that they try to avoid. So, in work language, if I engage too much on the interpersonal side of things, I'm gonna get pulled into drama. Before I go into where these collide, and you can probably already see where this is going, I do want to make a note. The patterns of behavior that I'm sharing, these are not all that it's not it's not that these are a foregone conclusion. These are different patterns that may pop up in different situations. I share these with you so you can be looking for uh whether or not the people that you're interacting with, maybe they lean a little bit more towards the anxious side. Maybe they lean a little bit more towards the avoidant side. Now, there is a third attachment pattern called the secure pattern. And this is the person that's probably uh not necessarily leaning into those uh overly used patterns of behaviors that I've described. That secure pattern, that'll be a topic for a different day because what we're really talking about here is managing relationships when these two patterns are creating the conditions for conflict or for misalignment. Now, the collision occurs here because anxious patterns tend to move towards connections when they're stressed, while the avoidant patterns move away from the connections when they're stressed. So anxious pursuit ends up feeling like pressure to the avoidant, and the avoidant distance feels like rejection or abandonment to the anxious. So you don't just have workflow issues, you have relationship narratives forming. And I'm I'm guessing that those of you listening have probably experienced something along the lines of feeling like this manager just doesn't give me the time of day, or oh my gosh, this manager is constantly on me, or this person is constantly checking in, and I'm an adult, I can handle these things. If you've had or heard those types of conversations, you may be looking at anxious and avoidant patterns. The cool thing here is that we can actually address those patterns in ourselves and we can help navigate those patterns externally. So let's look at a couple of common scenarios that we might see. And the first one that we're going to look at is anxious employee and avoidant manager. And you've probably seen this play out in the workplace where the employee is looking for clarity and the manager is just not there. So the employee might start with a hey, I'm checking in. Did you see my message? And the manager's response is simply, yep. Um, do you have any feedback? It's fine. All of a sudden, it's fine, creates this vacuum, and the anxious brain is gonna fill it with this story. Oh my gosh, they're unhappy. I'm failing. I didn't do this right, I'm not safe. The employee is gonna then probably try to increase check-ins, add more detail, try to be perfect, and the manager is gonna experience that as like, wow, this is so much pressure, and end up withdrawing more ultimately. And we've seen this play out in a number of different ways in the workplace. Both is gonna both are gonna think that the other person's the problem. Let's look at a different scenario. And in this scenario, it's an avoidant employee and an anxious manager. And we've probably seen it where the manager wants frequent updates and alignment, and they start with, hey, where are we at? What's the plan? And the employee's frustrated response is, I'm working on it. The manager then responds with, Can you send a status update? And the employee simply says, Well, there's really not much to report at the moment. Oof. The manager's gonna interpret the distance as risk. They hiding something? Are they have they not started? Are they disengaged? Are they not working on it? Do I need to shift this priority? Do I need to report this up? What do I need to do to mitigate this situation? So the manager ends up tightening control, more meetings, more check-ins, more pressure. The avoidant employee feels micromanaged, withdraws, gives less information, and becomes even harder to engage. We've probably, again, seen that play out. Let's look at a third scenario where we're talking about anxious and anxious. This is where everything becomes urgent and a fire, and every delay becomes a threat. And the relationship ends up becoming a constant loop of reassurance seeking, overprocessing. Are we aligned? Did I upset you? Let me let's just meet again. And all of a sudden, you see a busy team collapse into relationship management that's not intentional rather than actual performance management. The last scenario, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time here, it's not super common. Um, and I'll tell you why in just a moment, but scenario four could be avoidant and avoidant. And this is where nobody addresses the tension. Everything just stays fine until suddenly it isn't. Avoidant relationships generally don't explode early, they just erode quietly. Part of the reason that this is not as common is because avoidance, and this is uh this is science that has come from uh Dr. Levine. Uh, avoidance really accounts for only 25% of the population. And the odds of avoidant interactions generally are a little bit lower. And part of the reason is because uh there's generally no relationship to speak of. So it may be something that you could have a couple of managers and employees who both share the avoidant patterns. Um, they either leave each other alone and everything works fine, or alternatively, it is one of those where when a problem happens, it's gonna be one of those quiet erosions that ends up blowing up and turning to a fire at the very last minute. And we've probably seen some of those cases too. All right. So, what's the science behind this pattern? And here's what you actually need. And I'm not gonna get into a whole bunch of uh relationship-based jargon, but let's just put it to this. Number one, the brain hates uncertainty. Uh, in our ancient brain, uncertainty meant uh we uh extinction. You know, uncertainty increases the idea of perceived threats. If we don't know how to manage it, if we don't know what's coming, we can't predict it, we can't predict it, we can't prepare for it, we can't prepare for it, it's gonna take us over. So people generally react to uncertainty by trying to regain control. Now, the anxious pattern regains control through connection and information. The avoidant pattern regains control through distance and self-reliance. And we see how those two things can be great strategies. I mean, if we think about like, hey, if everything's going wrong, taking care of yourself and just managing it and getting it done and going through it, well, that can be a powerful survival strategy. But we also know that in the long term, hey, uh connecting with people, working together, we can build that out. We've all probably heard the phrase, if you want to go fast, go by yourself. If you want to go far, go with the team. And that's really what this comes down to. Those two things who that are seemingly incompatible create the conditions for conflict. Second, our threat response blocks good interpretation. This is a really important aspect of the science of our brain here. When people feel threatened, they can interpret neutral cues as negative cues. Uh they end up being hyper-focused or hyper-vigilant, they narrow their attention span and have a disability to zoom out of the situation and sort of see the bigger picture. Um, when people are threatened, they stop asking questions from curiosity. They're generally more interrogative and they're uh less about exploration and fact-finding. It's much more about get to the point, give me the answer, give me security. And then lastly, when they're threatened, what do we do? We tend to protect our identity. So tone ends up becoming attitude, silence becomes disrespect. A short message becomes rejection or some kind of internal mechanism for um you know offending me. The third aspect that's really important from the science side is repair. And in this case, repair when these breaches occur, it actually matters more than perfection. See, healthy relationships are never Going to be conflict free. A healthy relationship is really going to be repair rich. And I want you to hold on to that. It's repair rich. The best teams are not the ones that never strain. In fact, if you look at any of Lincioni's work, it talks about good conflict actually drives higher performance. The best teams are the ones who can return to clarity, respect, and agreement pretty quickly. So the tactics today are really built around reducing ambiguity, increasing predictable communication and predictable behaviors, and then making repair normalized. So let's get into some of the relationship management toolkit. These are tactics that you can use immediately. And I'm going to give you some scripts and accountability steps like we've been doing in some of our past solo missions. The first tool I'm going to talk about is naming the pattern without labeling the person. Now, we don't want to start calling people, oh, you're anxious, or hey, you seem to be avoidant, or you're a withdrawal. We don't want to do that. That's literally just going to continue to create uh anxiety, frustration, and avoidance. But what we're going to name here is the behavioral loop. So if we were to script this out, this might be how it sounds. I think we might be in a loop here. What I'm seeking is clarity, and it seems to be coming across as pressure. We both seem to be getting frustrated by that. Could we reset how we're communicating about updates and establish some expectations? That's a very mature way of addressing the anxious avoidant loop. It's going to make the relationship share the issue, not a single person. It's nobody's fault. It's that this is the issue. And let's be on the same side of the table and address it. So the action step here is use we're in a loop language. That's something that's going to trigger a hey, let's take that healthy reset step back and move forward with a little bit more structured communication and a little bit more structured expectations. The second tool I'm going to bring into the space is the clarity cadence. Okay. Predictability is calming. Now, predictability, we don't like the mundane. The brain doesn't like to be bored. Predictability is not about mundane or boredom. It's really about being able to be safe and secure that we know what's coming next. And this is the single most powerful relationship stabilizer, particularly for the anxious dynamics. Now, with predictable communication and the clarity cadence, we want to set a cadence. So for example, I might say something like, you're going to get a weekly update every Thursday by 3 p.m. It's very specific, it's very clear, they know what to expect, and that's going to give me the space to have my own autonomy by being very clear in that cadence. Another example, hey, we'll do a 15-minute Monday morning check-in. Or if something changes, I will commit to giving you a message the same day. These clarity cadence statements are going to allow the anxious patterns to calm down when the system is predictable. We know when we're getting updates, we know when we're getting information, we know when we can ask our questions. The avoidant pattern is going to feel safer because the system's efficient and it's bounded. It's not going to be micromanagement, it's not going to be people coming back constantly. So the accountability here is putting the cadence on the calendar. This is something that you can do to make it a visual representation. And it's also a check and a balance if you have to uphold a boundary. Now, tool number three here is the pause phrase. This is when we're starting to look at things like escalation. When you feel the heat rising, don't keep talking. Establish a pause phrase and mean it. Okay, so here's a couple of examples that you could script out. I really want to answer this well. If you can give me 10 minutes, I'll come back more steady and be able to give you the answers that you're looking for. It's very simple, it's very direct, it's very clean, and it's time-bound. So we're not withdrawing, we're not getting out of this. We're saying this is important. I need a few minutes to study, to regulate, and then I'm going to come back and give you the answer that we need to get through in this work uh dilemma. A second example might be I'm noticing that I'm getting reactive. Why don't we pause and reset so we don't lead down different pathways that are going to create damage? Okay, this is bringing awareness to the loop, to the patterns that are occurring. And it's also taking ownership of I'm getting reactive. Why don't we pause and reset so we don't move forward with any kind of challenge? Last one that I'll give you is I'm committed to solving this, not winning it. Why don't we slow down, take a moment, and see how we can navigate this together? Oof. Powerful language. First of all, you're re-establishing commitment. Second of all, you're pulling back to say, we're a team, I'm not looking to win. And third of all, you're creating the conditions of slowing down the nervous system reactions. This is going to prevent anxious escalation and avoidance shutdown. Now the action step here is choosing one of these pause phrases, practicing it out loud, and engaging it when we start to find ourselves in that loop. Tool number four, this is one that I've talked about in difficult conversations. If you didn't catch any of that, it's called fact, story, ask. And it's going to help stop anxious spirals and avoidant guessing. So we use this in a in a several different series, and the framework is very simple. Fact, story, ask. The fact is what happens. The story is how I'm perceiving it, or the story that I'm telling myself, and then asking. And that's digging in and getting the clarification question. So if I was to execute this, this is what it might look like. Hey, I didn't hear back from you for the last two days. That would be the fact. Uh the story I'm telling myself is that this isn't a priority, or that there's not an understanding of when the deadline is. That's the story. The ask, can you help me understand when you might need updates from me and how I should be communicating to get those updates when I need them in return? We go right to the ask to how do we solve this together? Now, this is relationship management at a high level. So using the fact story ask is a powerful way for us to identify what I'm observing, how I'm experiencing it, and then asking how we can navigate that, how can we solve it, or what are you experiencing and making sure that we're on the same page. Super great tool for managing some of these key aspects. The next tool, tool number five, is the two-channels agreement. Okay, so this is gonna establish some structure that'll prevent chaos. Most drained relationships mix two conversations into one. They mix the task execution and the relationship safety all into one. So what we're gonna do here is split them intentionally. This is what the script for that might look like. Hey, I'd like to talk to you and do two things here. First, I want to make sure that we align on the tasks and the timeline that we have coming up. Second, I want to make sure that we're good. Um, just a quick check-in to make sure that we're both on the same page, alignment, and that we're both moving towards that same goal together. Now, what that does is it divides out the two different pieces, allows for logical calibration of each of them, and is especially important with avoidant patterns because they can handle the relational part when it's contained and when it's respectful. If it feels like these things are getting blurred, the work and the relationship, at that point in time, you're gonna catch the withdrawal pattern coming in. So using this two-channel approach is a really powerful way. Now, the last tool I'm gonna talk about here is repair scripts, okay? Repair scripts. This is making repair normal and not dramatic. Repair doesn't need to be therapy, it doesn't, but it does require ownership and some clarity. So here's a couple of examples that you can use. Um, the first one, I don't like how that landed. I came in really hot, and that's on me. Here's what I meant to say if you'd give me the chance to say it in a more structured and steady tone. Okay, what do I do? I'm taking ownership. I'm saying I didn't love how I said that. I came in and you know the emotions were high. It's on me. I'd like to do that again. Here's what I meant. Okay, so that's a repair script, first repair script. Second one. This one's a little bit, this one goes for accuracy. You know, I'm thinking I made a big assumption when we were talking and I reacted to it. Would it be okay for us to reset and gain clarity? What am I doing? I'm literally owning the fact that uh a story that I was telling myself took over here and I responded andor reacted to it. And what I'm doing is I'm asking if we can reset, if we can actually take a moment to realign our perspectives here. The last one I'm gonna share is the quick reset. This is kind of the avoidant-friendly one, if you will. Hey, I want us aligned and moving forward. Here's the decision that I'm making and what I'm gonna need from you. Okay, why is that avoidant-friendly? It's very direct, it's fast, and I'm not necessarily big building this into a large conversation. I'm saying, here's what I'm doing, and this is what I'm looking for from you. Now, it's kind of a yes or no in that response. But what I'm also doing is making sure that I want us aligned and moving forward. That's going to be a key aspect here. So the other piece that we can bring into this tool is bounded reassurance. Now, some leaders accidentally feed anxiety by giving endless reassurance and then ultimately resenting themselves for it. Bounded reassurance here is clarifying standards and confirming the relationships. So this is what that script might look like. Hey, you're in good standing with me. The expectations X'd. Next check-in is Friday. If something changes before then, I'll let you know. It's very calming and accountable. And this is a powerful way to even interact with some of your high performers. Okay. I'm going to give you one bonus tool here, and this is a directness with dignity rule. Now, avoidant patterns respect clean directness, not emotional guessing. And anxiety, anxious patterns tend to not love the emotional guessing. So this is going to be a little bit of both here. But when we look at a script, it's very, very simple. Here's the issue, here's the impact, here's what needs to change, here's how we'll measure it. And I still see us as navigating this forward together. What this is going to do is it's going to prevent the avoidance from hiding behind vagueness, it's going to prevent the anxious from having the questions, and it's resolidifying the North Star. This is the mission. We're on the same team, we're moving forward. That's a directness with dignity that can be shared between the avoidant and the anxious because essentially it's going to bring in both of those different patterns and resolve the tensions that they have. So let's take a look at my challenge for you. All right, I have a seven-day challenge. Over the next seven days, I'm going to challenge you to do a couple of things. First, I want you to install some kind of a clarity cadence with one of the persons. Is that a weekly update? Is that a 15-minute check-in? Second, use a pause phrase at some point in time when you start to feel yourself being triggered. Whether you are avoidant, whether you're more anxious, you know, just put one of those pause phrases in there to create a little bit of space when you're feeling a moment of triggering and or uh uh and or stress, whether that's from ambiguity, whether that's from uncertainty or anything else. Last but not least is if you find yourself in this situation, I challenge you to do a repair and make that repair within 24 hours of a strained interaction. The sooner the better. The faster we get to the repairs, the less damage that you know that issue may cause over time. So over the next seven days, I challenge you to these three things and track it. Give it a simple score. Did I reduce ambiguity? Did I regulate the temperature? Did people leave, you know, you and the other person? Did you leave with more agreement or a clear standard of the relationship? Because that's what leadership's all about. So let me close with this. In the workplace, relationships don't break because people are evil. They break because people get stressed and default to patterns. The pursue versus withdraw, the protest and shutdown, the assumptions, the avoidance, the over-controlling and over-explaining. Your job as a leader or a manager or even a teammate isn't to be perfect, it's to be stable. And stability comes from predictable communication, clear agreements, and quick repairs. If you can do that, you can manage relationships with anxious patterns, avoidant patterns, difficult personalities, and high pressure environments all while not losing yourself. So this week, let's not fix people, run the system, clarity, cadence, repair. That concludes our solo mission for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope this helps you navigate those relationships and help you manage those because relationships are what drives our success in teams and within organizations. It's what builds our culture. So until next time, wish you all safe healthiness and wellness. And thank you again for tuning in to this episode of the Talent Forge, where together we're shaping workforce behavior.