Esther Perel: Build better relationships at work

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/95676966435a5da5

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You don't necessarily need to know what people are fighting about.
Because you want to find out what they're fighting for.
The subject is irrelevant.
This week on the show we have therapist, author, and podcaster Sare Perrell.
Her coveted advice on relationships is the centerpiece for books, her TED Talks, and her podcast. Where should we begin?
We talk with Estare about cultivating healthy workplaces and how to keep co-founders from having ugly breakups.
Sixty five percent of startups fail because of relationship breakdowns. Between founders. Yes, founder conflict.
And why we must insist on more human connection at work, even
And perhaps especially.
Amid rapid technological shifts.
We are float people.
And what AI is trying to offer us is a flawless reality.
And it prides itself on that. If people are by their very nature imperfect and unpredictable, we need to help them.
Live with that.
Before we get to my conversation with the stare, we gathered some of our production team to try out the conversational card deck she just released.
It's a spin off of Astares original Where Should We Begin a Game of Stories. This new edition called Where Should We Begin at Work is specifically for co-workers.
The first question we pulled out of the deck is what is your go-to emoji instead of using words?
Masha, I can tell you're itching to go first.
I actually realized that I only use emojis at work. I don't use them as much with my Gen Z friends, but my go-to emoji at work is the
High five.
Hi, my name's Aaron.
I think my favorite one is the um
That's a good one.
Hi, my name is Lee Tal.
I stand out as a Gen Xer because I use thumbs up, which is so boring. And I was told by someone else younger that do not use thumbs up, like that's offensive.
It feels a little best of aggressive. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Oh, really? I'm like okay.
I know you hate me.
These cards are designed to deepen connections between colleagues and, in this case, surface intergenerational misunderstandings in a playful way.
I don't mean anything it's passive aggressive, I swear.
Also, Brian on our team, he has made some custom emojis, which I don't even know how to do. Like we have Johnny, which is Nicky's dog.
That you can just react to things as Johnny.
How about you, Trish? My favorite is the dancing party dyno. Yeah.
Which is not just an emoji, but a dancing dyno emoji when something really good has happened.
I'm Jeff Berman.
Your host.
And I would say that talking with Hister Perelle for this week's episode is most definitely worth a dancing dinosaur emoji.
You gotta have incredible talent at every position.
There are fires burning when you're going out. Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing.
There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. We haven't made it. Just how you do it.
This
is masters of scale.
Stare, welcome to Masters of Scale.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I am so excited to talk to you. I think most of us know you as
a relationship wizard who helps people who are in intimate romantic relationships.
And your work has expanded into work relationships. And I'm curious, other than sex, what's different about work relationships from personal, intimate, romantic relationships?
I would say there's a lot of similarities at this moment.
But there's also very big differences. I mean one of the
Interesting similarities is the crossover that has s taken place.
recently in the last years where
The language of psychology has entered the business world and we talk about authenticity and trust and vulnerability and psychological safety in the same breath as we're talking about performance indicators, but on the other hand
In the romantic sphere, in the personal intimate space, people are talking about the deal that they didn't sign up for and the hedging their bets. So it's a very interesting thing how the the business world has entered the personal space
And the psychological personal vocabulary has entered the business space. It's a form of emotional capitalism is where they both meet.
On the other end, what is unique to the workplace
At this moment, A it's global.
B it's remote.
C it's distributed.
For it has five generations working together.
We used to have five generations living together, but that no longer happens in the West, but we work together.
We brought in belonging and community at work, and it both of them have evolved to an identity economy.
Yeah.
In love I want you to bring out the best version of myself, and in work I want you to help me with my sense of meaning, my personal development, my sense of self fulfillment, my purpose.
It's a fascinating
meeting ground between those two sfirs
And why they have come to actually mirror each other in this way is is another question, but it has a lot to do with the breakdown of communal structures and of religion.
The other
breakdown that you allude to there in the business world is
We frequently no longer share space.
And
I miss the interstitial time. I miss the walk to get a coffee and the catching up, the ability to read body language and and pick up on nonverbal. And now we're on Zooms and and by and large we disappear from each other. What are you seeing is working?
to improve communication and connection in work relationships that are primarily remote.
The first thing I would like to say is that what you just highlighted is not
Benign.
It is huge.
People say, well uh you do you think people should come back to work in person?
I I say absolutely people should come back to work in person, maybe not every five days, but it that's not enough.
Because the people who are coming back.
Are socially atrophy.
Mm. The people that are coming back have been desocialized and have lost skills and the younger ones never developed them.
And so to just come to work and sit next to you at my laptop while you're sitting at the other laptop, each one in our cubicle, is not creating any connection, is not creating any different type of communication. It's basically we are there but we are not present.
we are in a state of artificial intimacy, you know, mediated by by the devices.
Sarah has just released a new edition of her conversational card game called Where Should We Begin.
at work.
I created a first game originally during the pandemic because I thought what am I gonna do? I'm gonna talk about how people are l disconnected, isolated, lonely
Or I'm gonna do something about it. That I can
provide that fits my identity. And so I created a game thinking
What should people talk about in this moment? How do they laugh even when things are really serious? How do they ask daring questions without it becoming therapy speak?
People started to play Where should we begin? The game of stories.
And then I began to notice that when they wanna bring them at work, they would have somebody taking out the cards with the pink triangle, which were the sex questions.
The new version removes those spicy cards from the original game to make it appropriate for play with colleagues and fine tunes the questions based on the data backed insights of her partner, the HR company culture amp.
It's a clever example of letting insights from customers lead your product development.
I bring
Mai clinical eksperiens
And Culture Amp brings the data science, the people science that back some of my
suggestions. So we develop together what are the four main dimensions of relational intelligence in the workplace. And what are the best prompts that can elicit the experience of these dimensions in the workplace between it's two, four, ten, you know, large groups. So
The science
gives me the confidence back with data things that I
Sense think.

Cannot
Deliver at scale and they offer that. So it's an incredible merit of complementarities and and skills.
Can you talk to us a little bit about
how the game works and some of the questions that are in this hundred card pack. How do you envision people using it?
Maybe
Just before I tell you how we'd use it, I'll tell you
Why it matters.
the business world understood for the first time that
Companies with strong relational intelligence
Basically have a better culture.
If they have a better culture.
They have a better engagement, and if they have a better engagement, they have a higher performance.
Yeah.
That is now validated and corroborated by tons of data from Culture M. At the same time
Relationship skills for most of history in the business world have been considered soft skills, and soft skills usually meant feminine skills, and feminine skills usually meant that you can idealize them in principle and disregard them in reality. It was a nice thing to have, but that's not what you get promoted for.
What has changed is that relationships is the competitive edge at this moment. It's the one thing for the time being that AI cannot compete with yet.
So there is a rush in the business world and in the tech world to
create cultures that have strong relational
Skills.
And it's skillsness not even the word. It's really a form of intelligence. It's much richer than skills.
So it looks like this the game.
Just so we we can see it.
It's a one deck.
For folks who are just listening, it is uh like a large deck of cards, effectively, almost like a tarot size deck of cards. And then you open it in like a box of chocolates. You know, I am Belgian after all.
And then you have questions like the feedback that I wish I had heard sooner in my career.
The last time I was really proud of our team.
Now you can see in each question where you would play this. Onboarding
Off site.
Team building, management, feedback session, one on one with colleagues.
This one I really love a first impression I had of a colleague that has changed.
What is the first impression of a colleague that you had that has changed?
In my own team
I had a person who I thought was very
kind of flat affecting
Terrific sense of humor.
Dry
Didn't think that had a broad range of reactions and emotions until one day
Something happened in their family.
And
I just asked and what's happening? And I said, you know, I am a person people talk to about this.
If you've care to, please let me know.
En I saw a range.
An arc of emotion
from grief to hope to sorrow to loss to to fighting and I just thought wow.
I wouldn't have known.
Any of this. We could have worked another three years, and I would continue to just say a great sense of humor.
Now, if you don't like the question, by the way, when you play, you just say this I'm d I'm not inspired by this. I I can't come up with anything and you move on to the next. The goal is not to have to answer everything.
You can do it virtually, you can do it in person, you decide what's the best u use of it. It has multiple ways of being handled.
It feels like we had an era in kind of the mid teens leading up to COVID where there was this
Emphasis on bringing your whole self to work.
But my sense is that there's been a pullback from that.
that that didn't feel great and people want boundaries and you know, come to work, do your job and go back to the rest of your life.
I'm curious, one if you if you were seeing that or if that is a a a skewed perception and
How that
tension between bringing your whole self and having work life balance, how that plays out in your mind.
I think that people have always brought their whole self to work.
It's just been unconscious.
And we see
We bring two C Vs.
The official C V that has the resume of your titles and your job, and the unofficial resume.
Which is your relationship history.
And that relationship history.
is everything about how you actually show up at work, relate to authority, deal with asking for help, being with taking responsibility, deal with with uh depending on others, deal with how much you think that only you can do it because you can't rely on anybody
It's an amazing thing how people in the business world do not pay enough attention to this. And yet we know that sixty five percent of startups fail because of relationship breakdowns. Between founders. Yes, founder conflict. I'm struck by this sixty five percent.
statistic that 65% of startups that fail fail at least in part because of conflict between co founders. That's Noam Wessmann's uh research.
Given that, how should co-founders and how should investors who are backing co-founders be thinking about
that relationship management to minimize the chance that they're in that sixty five percent cohort.
I was beginning to be called in.
Into these situations, but like couples therapy, you often kinda say, why didn't you come a little earlier when stuff wasn't yet completely encrusted, you know? My colleague who created uh the game with me here was starting a company and and they went away with partners, the three founders and their partners for a few days.
Just to be together, just to get an understanding of who you are when you're not, you know, in this small
circle here between you and I or the three of us discussing what we're going to create. I thought that was a beautiful idea.
Tell me about your divorces. I mean every time I do founder workshops, the divorce stories are terrible.
Terrible. People carry grief and rage and frustration, and the way you ended your previous relationship.
Is going to influence.
A who you're gonna choose.
and B how you're gonna manage the next one. So
You want people to really have an opportunity to discuss
Their endings of previous businesses, the good ones
The ones where people stayed in touch and in a good way, and the ones where people just
carry with them a litany of resentments. You know, and what about conflict? We rely a lot on the work of a guy named Howard Markman who actually talked about it in the personal sphere, but what he highlighted is that
You don't necessarily need to know what people are fighting about.
Because you want to find out what they're fighting for. What they're fighting for is the form.
What they're fighting about is the particular subject du jour.
If the fight is that I constantly v am in a power struggle with you because I think that you're putting your priorities ahead of mine, it doesn't really matter if we're talking about expansion or hiring or layoffs. The subject is irrelevant. People fight for power and control.
Who's in charge, whose priorities matter, who makes the decision.
Pipple fight for care and closeness.
Can I trust you and do you have my back? Will you stand up for me?
You know, what are you saying behind my back, etcetera?
People fight over respect and recognition. Do you value my contribution? Do I matter?
Is my presence meaningful? Do I exist?
Here. So it's what I get and what you receive.
If you deal better with conflict.
You don't just fight better, you have better relationships.
All together.
Still ahead, more with the stair parell on how to build stronger relationships at work.
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If someone wants to get
Better.
at this. What do you recommend that they do to build these soft skills and position themselves for this next moment in the business world? It depends on your age.
Why because a boomer
has a retrofit, a boomer has had a whole other experience of working in a different way. A Gen Z and an alpha.
Has grown up
With
Predictive technologies.
That basically tell you where to go, what to eat, what to do, and they give it to you.
In a frictionless
Polished way.
And I
I'm a user of them, so it's this is not a AI and tech all good, all bad, seriously.
But basically
What you learn
is to have expectations.
With people.
That our best
on the algorithmic perfections that you have been trained on with the machines and with the applications.
So
People by definition are imperfect and unpredictable.
When you are constantly fed predictability and frictionless delivery
On demand of your every delight, you become incapacitated in your ability to tolerate uncertainty, unknown, unexpected frustration.
Conflict.
experimentation, making mistakes, then figuring out what you can be responsible for and how to change it. That
is the crucial realm of relational skills.
When you don't practice that
Then you become an avoidant.
You will create situations where instead of having a complicated relationship with you where I need to have a difficult conversation.
I basically
avoid. I cut off, I I disconnect, I I cancel you, I unfriend you, you name it. Most relationship problems are complex problems.
They're not problems that you solve, they're paradoxes that you manage.
and you manage them in a kind of a choreography. You dance, you know, I listen to you.
I tolerate hearing what you have to say that is completely the opposite of what I thought was uh it was was about. It doesn't mean that I agree.
I've realized that wow, you know, you didn't come an hour late because you don't care about what we're doing, but in fact you have somebody that you need to take care of there. And I understand that your face and your sour pus is a completely different story than what I had imagined. And I do what Peter Singer used to talk about in terms of conflict, the steps of the ladder.
of inference, right? I observe something, I make an assumption about it, from the assumption I make a conclusion, and from that conclusion I change my behavior.
Well, now I take my behavior and I look at the conclusion what is driving this behavior, which then lets me to see what are the assumptions underneath, then let me see that my observation was completely
Subjective.
Which means flawed.
We are flawed people, you know.
And what AI is trying to offer us is a flawless reality.
And it prides itself on that.
enter this next era, this AI era. And we're on the verge of having
AI agents that represent us and engage with other people's AI agents and
advance to the point of ninety eight, ninety-nine percent. So the humans can come in and and finish that last one or two percent.
What have you learned from the algorithmically driven world that we've been in for the last
fifteen, twenty years
That
Sam Altman should know that Anthropic and Google and Inflection should know what should they be doing differently based on what you've learned.
That's a question with a big responsibility. I think when you have a polarization
The point is not to convince the other people that what they do doesn't work or has danger in the in it, et cetera. Basically when you do polarity management and that's the beginning of the conversation
Polarity management usually you start by highlighting all the great things that are coming up.
with machines and AI learning and biological intelligence and affective intelligence, et cetera, et cetera.
Then
You go and you talk about all the weaknesses that have existed in the systems that we have known.
Then you go and talk about the weaknesses that exist in the new systems because every system has weaknesses. And only then do you highlight why it actually is important.
That
If people are by their very nature imperfect and unpredictable, we need to help them.
Live with that.
So
What do I do is I create tools that they can integrate that invite conversation.
That invite exploration, that invite curiosity, because these are the most important elements that make you feel alive.
You don't just want to survive, you want to feel alive. You don't just want useful information, you want curiosity.
We are embodied creatures. I don't care that we can replicate pieces of us in a machine. It's great. It's fine. That's not my point. My point is that we are people who touch, who smell, who look, who listen, who whisper. We have a whole sensorial world, and that world is essential.
to the fact that we are mammals
We are not just machines, we are mammals. And mammals play. Play is the most important adaptation for uncertainty. It is the way we practice uncertainty is by playing. And these things have existed long before humans ever came onto the planet. So
I say to them, Go and study biomimicry and learn about systems in nature and then see what is relevant for you in terms of the echo the social ecological systems in our society. It'll actually show you mutualities matter.
What I bring, what you bring, complementarity is essential to relationships. We have had new machines throughout history with whom we have learned to live and to do better certain things that we couldn't do before. So
If we could create a psychologie of complementarity.
Rather than of cancelling out and competition?
it would make a lot of difference for many, many things.
When I go to those companies, the very ones you just mentioned, I've been to a few of them and others, that's what I talk about.
Mm.
There's a sociological framework that divides our world into three basic spaces. The first space is our home, the second is our workplace, and the third is any other place where we find community.
This could be a church, a mosque, a synagogue, a barbershop, a coffee shop, a bar.
There's plenty of data to show that Americans are spend less and less time in these critical third spaces, and remote workers have mostly lost their second space. I wanted to ask Esther how that's affecting us.
So we lose the second space.
And now people say you gotta come back to work.
And I say
I think that's a great idea, but it's not enough to just show up.
You have to create intentional
Premeditated interactions.
And that's different ways of running meetings. That's part of where the cards come in. Start every meeting with one of these questions, rather than just with okay, who has the report?
Create sports.
create opportunities to eat together.
Do the things that for centuries human beings have done.
that really creates bonds that allow people for that are different to meet because this is where democracy resides.
It's in that mezzo level.
That space in between where you actually
learn to deal with differences. The third space, the library, the neighborhood, the community center, is the space where people used to come together around a shared mission with people that are different from them, which work has done as well. And once you lose that, you lose the space where you cultivate tolerance.
And once you lose the space where you cultivate tolerance, you increase polarization and you threaten democracy. This is not just psychological, this is sociopolitical.
I don't have a solution.
I think I can educate about what's happening, but I can't solve it. Does it put more burden on the romantic relationship is a different question.
And does it?
And
Home.
Today.
are carrying the burdens
Of a ton of needs.
and expectations that used to be distributed
In religion.
Extended family.
And communal structures.
And all these needs have been transferred.
Into work.
And into
Love, which are the two primary poles of our lives. So
We demand.
Things at work.
that have to do with purpose and identity and meaning and self fulfillment and all of this, which we also demand in our romantic relationships. And I think we need to expand, you know, we can't use the word intimacy and love just in the romantic sphere. It needs to really expand
To friendships and to mentorship and to all kinds of other relationships that involve closeness and trust and recognition, et cetera. And yet you are
a paradigm of the ability to scale ideas to scale your impact and your reach. What have you learned over the last
twenty years about
Scaling ideas and impact.
I would say a few things. I think that
psychology for a long time
Was
Tucked away.
we were not able to advertise or do anything public and so we also didn't participate in the culture at large. We were not in the public square.
And that meant that other people would talk often about things they didn't know much about.
So
I decided at one point that I wanted to open my office.
I wanted you to hear the incredible revelations that happen in my office. And that was through the podcast Where Should We Begin, which is now eight years. It was the first therapy podcast, but not with patients. They have never been patients, but
There's enough people who wanna participate.
And then I wanted to bring the office
to the public square.
Which means to create with you in life events what actually happens in my office.
So that you could have that experience as well.
One of the things I say at every one of these events, which I think is really about
whatever, being a public intellectual or a thought leader or things like that, is that even when I sound very confident
I am sure of nothing.

And that
Is the difference of some of us. Some people are in the public square convinced that they are right and they have the answer.
Yeah.
And I am in the public square.
sounding confident because I have to be, but that doesn't mean that I think I know, I have it all figured out. And so
I give space.
For the debate
For the doubt?
For the dilemma?
For the complexity
And I help articulate all of that.
But again.
Complex problems are not problems that you solve, they're paradoxes that you manage. And I've kept myself on that level.
You know, you don't choose to scale.
That may or to be recognized.
People recognize you.
And from that place
Becoming relevant on a cultural
level is not something you orchestrate.
Fundamentally.
It's the listener.
Who shapes the speaker.
As we sit here in the spring of twenty twenty five, we're in graduation season
If you were standing before a group of new college graduates giving their commencement address
What's a piece of advice you would be offering them?
You know.
I just did a whole conference with
Twenty five hundred therapists and coaches and the likes.
And
I
had a phenomenal surprise. At one point I said, How many of you
are in the field as a second career.
And
probably half the people in the audience.
So I would say to the young student, where you start is not where you will go nor where you will end.
It doesn't really matter where you start. Start by finding people who will teach you
To work.
To think to solve problems.
Because it's like a teacher in college.
You can be passionate about a subject. If you have a bad teacher, they'll ruin it for you.
But if you have a subject you know nothing about and couldn't care less, but you have a teacher who can pique your curiosity, they will open an entire world to you.
So
Go for the teacher, don't go for the topic. Go for the particular manager, don't go for the company.
The urgency that Esther Perrell feels about preserving and improving our relationships at work is palpable.
And I couldn't agree with her more.
We are losing human connection at an alarming rate, which has effects on mental health, on community, civility, productivity, and even democracy.
Her new card game is Where Should We Begin at Work.
We'll put a link in the show notes.
And to take us out, let's listen in on a little more of our team playing a stairs game.
I'm Jeff Berman.
Thank you for listening.
All right, next question from the game. I will never forget my manager who
Dot dot dot.
Aaron, why don't we start with you on this one?
I'll never forget my manager who I worked at a studio.
As an assistant engineer and
They just never
looked out for the assistance. That place burnt through assistance. I almost left working in the music industry.
And then on the flip, the studio that I worked at right after that
The studio manager was the complete opposite.
I will never forget my manager who hated me, which I I think I can pretty safely say only has happened once in my career.
You're you're so not hateable, Letal. What happened?
It was I just I just failed on every front of this job. It was my first paid internship out of journalism school. I always disappointed her.
Marsha, were you gonna say something?
I had some good managers and some bad ones.
Uh
No.
What about you, Jeff? I feel like you've worked for some characters.
I'll go back.
to when I was in MySpace and Google bought YouTube and I was given the responsibility for figuring out our video strategy.
got a strategy approved and I asked my boss if he wanted me to go find someone to run it.
And he said, Well, you're gonna run it.
And I said, um
I don't know what the F I'm doing.
And he just stage whispered to me.
No one does. And it was one of those profound moments in my life and great lesson for for my whole career.
Masters of Scales await what original.
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