Kevin Glynn's decision to leave a steady job and start his own business was difficult, but one key factor made it easier: Kevin's best friend, who'd been by his side throughout his four years at Goldman Sachs, agreed to make the jump with him. Today they're business partners.

Gallup's Q¹² survey, the 12 questions designed to predict business success, include this one: Do you have a best friend at work? At first glance, the question may seem squishy and irrelevant. Gallup researchers concede it's often the subject of intense debate; several clients have asked to have it removed from their employee surveys.

Gallup considered removing or changing the question, but chose not to, for a simple reason: It's amazingly good at predicting team performance. A yes answer consistently differentiates between highly productive work teams and mediocre ones. Jim Harter, Gallup's chief scientist of workplace management and well‐being, and coauthor Rodd Wagner wrote: “Something about a deep sense of affiliation with the people in an employee's team drives him to do positive things for the business he otherwise would not do.”

Perhaps more surprisingly, this one question, when analyzed company wide, is a powerful predictor of corporate performance in a variety of measures, including profitability, workplace safety, customer loyalty, and even inventory control.¹

This finding is in direct contradiction with the fourth myth identified in Chapter 3: The most important tools for a good leader are power and control. Follow‐on research has yielded other fascinating correlations: Employees with a best friend at work are better able to manage stress—not that they don't experience the same amount of stress as everyone else, but they're better able to deal with negative stress because they're not alone.

Having a best friend at work also correlates with higher levels of job satisfaction and, as a result, lower turnover. People want to stay in a place where they're having a good time and enjoying strong social connections.

For many of us, of course, our best friends are outside of work—but that doesn't mean our relationships with coworkers are unimportant. Jane Dutton has researched and published widely about the intersection of psychology and business performance. Dutton has discovered that even casual relationships—even momentary encounters between workmates, such as a brief chat in the break room—can, if they're positive, significantly enhance work performance. In a 2004 interview published in the Journal of Staff Development, she said: “Interactions constitute an organization's social fabric, the lived values and norms of how things are done within the organization. That social fabric in turn either increases or decreases the capacity of individuals to collaborate, to create new things, to facilitate information sharing, and to adapt. There's a deep connection between these small everyday interactions and an organization's overall performance.”²

Every year the financial news and opinion website “24/7 Wall St.” compiles a list of the Worst Companies to Work For, and the results, almost invariably, point to toxic relationships between organizational leaders and employees. One of the 2016 survey respondents, a former employee at one of the companies on the list, wrote: “Corporate leaders don't truly respect or care about their employees. They only care about making money off of them.”³

Research also indicates that social relationships are a powerful indicator of individual health. As we pointed out in Chapter 5, the long‐lived residents of the Blue Zones tended to have strong family and social ties, which shouldn't be surprising: If, as Gallup's research indicates, relationships help relieve harmful stress, it follows that connecting with others may actually lower the risk of stress‐related disorders related to cardiovascular function, insulin regulation, and the immune system. Several researchers have shown that caring behaviors boost levels of oxytocin—known as the “tend and befriend” hormone—and reduce levels of the fight‐or‐flight hormone, cortisol.⁴ A team of researchers led by Courtney Detillion of The Ohio State University even discovered that animals heal faster from wounds when they're together, rather than when they're apart.⁵

Brigham Young University professors Julianne Holt‐Lunstad and Timothy Smith and Bradley Layton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill examined data from 309,000 people and found that a lack of social ties is associated with depression, late‐life cognitive decline, and earlier death. In fact, low social interaction increased the risk of premature death from all causes by 50 percent, the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. This means, astonishingly, that a lack of close relationships is a stronger predictor of early death than either obesity or physical inactivity.⁶ A growing number of researchers are suggesting that the quality of our relationships may be the single most important contributor to our health and longevity.

Relationships, of course, also contribute to our psychological well‐being. Psychologists Ed Diener and Martin Seligman wanted to understand what it was that distinguished the happiest people from the rest. What they found was that the happiest individuals enjoy good, intimate relationships with people they care about and who care about them. These relationships can be romantic or they can be friendships. The key is to have one or more people in your life you can share the good times with and who can give you emotional support in difficult times. As the ancient proverb goes: “Friendship doubles joy and halves grief.”

So the real question is whether we develop the potential of the relationships in our lives. And the answer to this depends on whether we make them a priority. There is much research showing that people whose primary objective is to make money are unhappy. There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting material success, but when striving for it comes at the expense of relationships—when making money becomes the top priority—then that is a heavy psychological price to pay. In the words of Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University: “Social relationships are a powerful predictor of happiness—much more so than money. Happy people have extensive social networks and good relationships with the people in those networks.”⁷

On the global level, there's a lot of research out there about how happy different countries are, and more and more countries are looking at Gross National Happiness, GNH, as a measure of a country's health in addition to GDP. Some of the countries that consistently appear high on the rankings are Denmark, Colombia, Australia, Israel, and the Netherlands. Why are these among the happiest countries in the world and not other nations? When researchers asked this question they came up with a clear answer. The one common denominator in all happiest countries in the world is that people there feel that they have strong social support—there is an emphasis on relationships, as a priority.

Despite being the richest country in the world, the United States has never been high up on the world happiness rankings—a phenomenon Richard Easterlin, a professor of economics at the University of Southern California, became famous for pointing out in a 1974 article titled, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence.” The short answer: Not really. The United States, alongside other countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Singapore, has become richer without improving well‐being overall, a circumstance now known as the “Easterlin Paradox.”

Sadly, modern life puts up many roadblocks to building strong relationships. The number one reason people give for not investing in their relationships is that they don't have time. This is another way of saying that, on the whole, our priorities have changed, greatly to our detriment.

Another challenge is that our relationships are becoming less real, as virtual encounters increasingly replace actual meetings. And although there are numerous benefits of the technologies that allow us to connect electronically, this is not enough. Ed Hallowell writes in the Harvard Business Review about what he calls “the human moment,” which he defines as an authentic interaction that involves complete emotional and intellectual attention. As he puts it,

“To make the human moment work, you have to set aside what you're doing, put down the memo you were reading, disengage from your laptop, abandon your daydream, and focus on the person you're with. Usually when you do that, the other person will feel the energy and respond in kind. Together, you quickly create a force field of exceptional power I have given the human moment a name because I believe that it has started to disappear from modern life—and I sense that we all may be about to discover the destructive power of its absence.⁸

Imagine if more of our encounters had this particular quality! To create this force field of exceptional power, we need a real connection. Having 1,000 virtual friends is no substitute for having that one intimate friend. Facebook is no substitute for face‐to‐face interactions. The amount of time we spend interacting with others through screens explains the increase in loneliness levels—which, among other things, is associated with depression and heart disease. As John Cacioppo, loneliness expert, notes, the greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are. As appealing as online interactions are, we sometimes need to disconnect to connect.

Given the clear evidence that real relationships contribute so much to individual health and happiness, and to organizational success, why not make them more of a priority in the workplace?

Relationship Enablers: Authenticity and Positivity

It probably seems that it might be easier to form positive relationships out in the world, where you have, theoretically, billions of people to choose from, and where friendships often develop naturally, almost effortlessly. In contrast, the working environment is a much smaller sample of humanity and is likely to contain a few people with whom you can't imagine yourself being compatible. And yet, given the long hours most of us spend in the workplace, your happiness and the success of your organization largely depend on your ability to form healthy relationships. How can you do that? In addition to making relationships a priority and creating opportunities for real connections, the two key elements researchers found to be indispensable to healthy relationships are authenticity and positivity.

By authentic we mean the strict dictionary definition: “not false or copied; genuine; real.”⁹ You can pretend to enjoy someone's company—but you're probably not fooling anyone. You're more likely to form a constructive relationship if you can take the two necessary steps toward authenticity: first, knowing yourself, and second, being yourself.

In his book On Becoming a Leader, the late Warren Bennis, founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, wrote: “Until you truly know yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, what you want to do and why you want to do it, you can't succeed in any but the most superficial sense of that word. You are your own raw material. When you know yourself, you are ready to invent yourself.”

It's not always easy to be yourself. Wanting to please others, wanting to maintain authority, the demands of your role, and pressures from above to conform can all get in the way of being authentic. It takes a fair amount of poise and courage to trust and follow our internal compass—but it's necessary if we want to lead and relate to other people effectively. “Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself,” Bennis wrote. “It's precisely that simple, and it's also that difficult.”¹⁰

Bill George, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and the former CEO of medical device manufacturer Medtronic, conducted in‐depth interviews with 125 highly successful corporate leaders, and after reviewing 3,000 pages of interview transcripts, his team—like thousands of researchers before him—was unable to produce a dependable profile of the ideal leader. The only conclusion he was able to reach was that leaders succeed by being true to themselves—by drawing on their own unique combination of experience, passion, and skill.¹¹

Of course, being authentic won't do you much good if you're authentically mean‐spirited. Positivity—kindness and concern for the well‐being of another—is critical for enjoying healthy relationships. One of the leading researchers on relationships, John Gottman, is best known today for the models he developed to predict whether a marriage would succeed or end in divorce. Gottman engaged hundreds of couples in conversation and categorized them according to carefully defined criteria of how positive and respectful they were toward each other in their interactions. After doing so, he predicted which couples would stay together and which ones wouldn't. His predictions were 94 percent accurate 15 years later. Respectful, positive conversations were an almost perfect predictor of the success of the relationship.

In an article he later was interviewed for in the Harvard Business Review, Gottman argued that these types of interactions are just as important to success in the professional realm. “It sounds simple, but in fact you could capture all of my research findings with the metaphor of a saltshaker,” he said. Instead of filling it with salt, fill it with all the ways you can say yes, and that's what a good relationship is. ‘Yes,’ you say, ‘that is a good idea.’ ‘Yes, that’s a great point, I never thought of that.' ‘Yes, let’s do that if you think it's important.' You sprinkle yeses throughout your interactions—that's what a good relationship is.”¹²

It's important to note that Gottman isn't saying you should never say no—avoiding conflict at all costs is, by definition, inauthentic. But to thrive, the relationship has to lean strongly toward the positive—to say yes often, when it's possible.

It's also worth pointing out that being authentic poses a challenge on those rare occasions when you find you genuinely dislike someone—if who you really are, your truest self, is a person who finds someone else really irritating or even infuriating. But there's this: In the workplace, you probably have no choice but to interact with that person. Forming a positive relationship might be more difficult than you'd like, but it's important to remember that people, no matter how simple they may seem, are complicated and multifaceted. They have families, hobbies, and things they care about that can reveal parts of themselves you weren't aware of. You may not enjoy it at first, but you'll have to do the work of discovering things about this person that you can authentically relate to. And you may discover, as common sense and research into the seeming magic of mirror neurons and oxytocin suggest, that your positivity evokes something in that challenging person that you find…likeable. Seek and you shall find!

We illustrate the effect of combining authenticity and positivity with a simple matrix that gives us four different modes of relating to others, as shown in Figure 7.1.

Everyone spends some time in each of the modes depicted, and it's neither possible nor helpful to type yourself as one of the four. We think it's more useful to ask yourself: How much time do I spend in each of these zones?

Look at the top left: When we're high on authenticity, but not necessarily pleasant, we're acting as drivers, trying to push others into action. This can happen when we're highly motivated and task oriented, but when we're in this mode we're not paying much attention to the emotional welfare of others. We're just trying to get things done.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, at the bottom right, we're high on positivity and low on authenticity. We're being nice, but we don't mean it. We call this type the pleaser, but depending on one's position, it's a posture that can also manipulate. This mind‐set places the highest priority on being liked and gaining approval, even if it means hiding ourselves. We're in pleaser mode when our words are chosen primarily in terms of what we think others want to hear.

When you're low on both authenticity and positivity (bottom left), you're detached both from your own sense of self and the needs of others and therefore unlikely to be kind or constructive. We've found it to be an unusual state of mind, because there's no advantage to being both false and mean—but we all have our moments.

We're at our best when we're both authentic and positive (top right), bringing the best of both worlds to our relationships with others. This is the benefactor mode, in which we're concerned about both the end and the means: We want to get things done, and we care about how they're done. In benefactor mode we empower other people to achieve things.

We call this top‐right square the Benefactor Empowerment Zone and encourage people to orient themselves in this direction whenever possible. You're in this zone when you're being true to yourself and interacting with benevolence. In this way, you're bringing out the best in both yourself and others. So although we all spend time in each of the four zones, an important question to ask is: How can I spend more time in the Benefactor Empowerment Zone?

Recognition and Gratitude

Do you have a best friend at work? is just one of the questions on Gallup's Q¹² survey that touches on workplace relationships—in fact, half of them focus on an aspect of interpersonal relationships:

• In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
• Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
• Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
• At work, do your opinions seem to count?
• In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?

These questions are more sharply focused on the how of relationships—specific types of interactions, practical approaches that encourage individual achievement and growth. The fact that half the evidence‐based Q¹² questions deal with relationships is a clear indicator that a successful organization—profitable, productive, with a committed workforce and satisfied customers—ensures that its employees feel valued and supported.

Most large companies and organizations understand this and have some type of formal recognition plan. Unfortunately, many tend to be impersonal and focus on the wrong things: years of service or the completion of specific tasks or projects. They also tend to take the form of onetime tokens—restaurant gift cards, plaques, pins, trips, cash bonuses—that bear little resemblance to the kind of recognition we value most from the people we care about the most.

A few years ago Bersin by Deloitte, a human resources advisory firm, published The State of Employee Recognition in 2012, an examination of employee recognition programs at 384 companies nationwide. The results were eye‐opening: U.S. companies spent an estimated $46 billion on these programs, but few produced measurable business results. Only about 17 percent of surveyed employees indicated their organizations strongly supported recognition. Also, 70 percent reported they were not recognized at all, or just once, annually, at a ceremony that often involved many other employees.

This distinction—between a program that emphasizes formal expressions of recognition and a culture of recognition, of which the formal program is merely a component—is the key to unlocking the potential of recognition. Companies with effective recognition programs had more than 30 percent lower voluntary turnover rates than those with ineffective programs and performed better in terms of productivity and customer service.¹³

What's the difference between effective and ineffective recognition? For negative examples we often refer to what earlier we called the gold watch era, in which loyal employees were offered tokens of gratitude upon retirement. For much of the industrial age, relationships between managers and employees—or even among employees themselves—didn't matter much and were even viewed by many as counterproductive.

But one industrial age study accidentally offered a glimpse of the future of performance management. In 1939, a group of Harvard Business School professors studied Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works plant, outside Chicago. The team wanted to study the effect of light levels on productivity, so they increased the lighting on the production floor. As they'd predicted, employee productivity went up—but that was the team's only unsurprising result. When they reduced light levels back to normal, productivity continued to go up. And when they lowered the light even further, to levels that were lower than the initial ones, they were amazed when productivity continued to increase. The researchers were baffled until they later spoke with the employees: The increased output, they learned, had nothing to do with the lighting. The incentive to work harder was the fact that researchers were paying attention. The employees felt that somebody cared about what they were doing, and that their work mattered.

The groundbreaking Hawthorne study explains the importance of recognition. So how do we create a recognition‐rich culture that yields such results for an organization, for a work team, or even within a one‐on‐one relationship? By recognizing others and their work authentically and positively—to acknowledge their contributions, openly and honestly, whenever possible. As Mark Twain once said: “I can live for two months on a good compliment.” In the best organizations, employees don't have to wait for anywhere near two months, or for a formal performance review—to receive (or to give) compliments.

Compliments are only valuable, however, when they're specific and work related. It's nice, we guess, to hear Nice tie, or Good job. But it's much nicer to hear Great job on that report, Ann. You illustrated a bunch of different ideas in a single graphic, in a creative way that made it easier to understand how they're all related. I loved the graphic. It really brought this issue to life.

Complimenting in this way not only makes a person feel appreciated. It can also help steer the person toward future success. Moreover, the relationship between the giver and the receiver of the compliment is strengthened, making it more resilient.

Donald Clifton, the Gallup CEO we introduced in Chapter 4, teamed up with senior scientist Tom Rath in 2004 to write the book How Full Is Your Bucket? The book introduces the metaphor—simple, but validated by research—that we all walk around with an invisible bucket, which holds our positive thoughts, and an invisible dipper, which we use to either fill or empty other people's buckets.

In 2012, JetBlue Airways launched an employee recognition program called Lift that used social media to make recognition less formal, more generalized, and spontaneous. The use of social media empowered employees and managers alike to fill one another's buckets. It also enabled people to be recognized in real time—and significantly, for that recognition to be viewable by every employee who was active on the system. JetBlue's then chief people officer, Joanna Geraghty, said: “Simply saying thanks has such an incredible impact because people like to be recognized. People like to be called out for good work they are doing, for living the values.” Follow‐up surveys, administered just four months after the launch of the Lift application, indicated that it had increased employee satisfaction 88 percent.¹⁴

As we mentioned briefly in Chapter 5, one of the most powerful ways of filling our own and other people's buckets is through expressing gratitude. The easiest way to do this, of course, is to simply tell someone we're grateful, but research has shown that written expressions of gratitude have a greater impact.¹⁵ Martin Seligman, considered the father of positive psychology, tested the impact of several means of expressing gratitude on more than 400 subjects. By far the most effective—for both the giver and receiver of gratitude—was the “gratitude visit,” in which a person wrote and personally delivered a letter of gratitude to someone who'd never been properly thanked for his or her kindness.¹⁶

An employee may see her day‐to‐day work as uninspiring, her professional life as unsuccessful. But a letter of gratitude from a colleague can help her realize what a difference her work has made and how successful she really is, generating positivity in three ways: awakening or reminding the writer of her feelings of gratitude and the reasons for them; illuminating the recipient's own understanding of how much she is valued and appreciated; and reinforcing a point of contact, a connection, for the flow of future positive emotions within the relationship.

As we've pointed out, employees are more engaged when they're able to use their strengths—and research further indicates they're more likely to feel engaged in their work when they're recognized for what they're doing well.

A 2009 Gallup study of worker engagement, for example, presented more than a thousand employees with two statements and asked them to select the one with which they most agreed. Thirty‐seven percent of respondents agreed with the statement: My supervisor focuses on my strengths or positive characteristics. Among these respondents, 61 percent described themselves as engaged in their work. Only one percent described themselves as actively disengaged.

A much lower percentage—45 percent—described themselves as engaged when they agreed with the statement: My supervisor focuses on my weaknesses or negative characteristics. The majority of these employees were either not engaged or actively disengaged.

Gallup created a third category—ignored—for those who didn't agree with either statement. Among these, an astonishing two percent felt actively engaged in their work, whereas 57 percent were not engaged. Fully 40 percent were actively disengaged.¹⁷

Employees want to matter. As the American philosopher William James said, more than 100 years ago, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” There may be many reasons why organizational leaders are reluctant to express gratitude to employees: Leaders may think it makes them look weak. They may think employees will stop trying to correct their shortcomings. They may feel awkward or embarrassed, or think the other person will feel embarrassed. They may have been promoted within a hypercompetitive culture of criticism that focuses on correcting failure. Or they may be incredibly busy and not perceive recognition and gratitude as a top priority.

The overwhelming body of research we've studied at Potentialife has led us to offer this advice: Instead of ignoring the people you work with, ignore these reasons for ignoring them, which have repeatedly and exhaustively been proved wrong. You, your colleagues, and your organization are more likely to succeed when you recognize and express thanks for the best in yourselves and others. We know, based on our own work and an abundance of empirical evidence, that when you appreciate the good, the good appreciates.

Responding to Success and Failure

Recognition and gratitude are the fundamental building blocks of positive relationships. As we've pointed out, these relationships are key to good leadership—which is, at its core, about working with other people to get things done, no matter where you stand in the organizational hierarchy and no matter how formal or informal your role is.

Just as important to the continued health of these relationships is the way we react to news, both good and bad. You might think the way you respond to success is no big deal, if you've already built a positive relationship with your coworkers—but the work of Shelly Gable, a psychologist at the University of California–Los Angeles, has shown it's not that simple. Your response to success can, ideally, lead to future success; at worst, it can strangle it in its crib.

Gable and her colleagues have shown, in fact, that how we respond to positive events, such as a person sharing his or her accomplishments with us, is a better predictor of relationship success than how we respond to negative events—and that the most empowering way of responding is what the article calls active constructive responding, or ACR.¹⁸ A matrix (Figure 7.2)—much like the one we used to illustrate authenticity and positivity (see Figure 7.1)—illustrates the point.

Let's illustrate the different responses with an example. Say a colleague, Dinah, has just come up with a new way of conducting inventory that could reduce both the time and expense of getting it done. It's a problem several people on the work team have been asked to analyze, and she's the first to have put together a plan. She comes to us, all excited, and tells us about it.

The worst response we could give is at the lower left, the passive destructive response. We might turn away, avoid eye contact, or change the subject. Or we might make a quick criticism of the idea—say, that it's not quite detailed enough to be useful—and then begin to talk about the work other people are doing.

At top left is the active destructive response, which isn't much better—here we find something to attack or critique, and focus on that, in a response that is entirely and vigorously negative: “That sounds like it's going to take a lot of training, and I don't know that in the end it's going to save us much time. I would have looked for a simpler approach.” The underlying cause of the two forms of destructive responses could be personal insecurity and feeling threatened by others' success or a general reluctance to recognize others positively for one reason or another.

The passive constructive response, bottom right, is at least positive. We might smile or say something innocuous, such as, “Good news. That's nice,” and then move on to other things. Although not as bad as a destructive response, being passively constructive fails to make the most of a positive event.

Ideally, we'd find a way to give the active constructive response, depicted in the upper right quadrant. We'd maintain eye contact, smile, and take a real interest in Dinah's ideas. We'd show enthusiasm, match her excitement, ask more questions, and reinforce the positive aspects of her plan—for example, saying, “That looks really promising. Tell me exactly what you have in mind,” and then proposing to share it at the next team meeting. Even if you don't think it's a flawless plan, you can remember the strengths‐based approach—developing its strengths and managing its weaknesses—when considering it against other options. And you'll have encouraged Dinah to do more and better thinking.

ACR is gradually becoming recognized and adopted as an important tool for improving relations within organizations, including the U.S. Army. The approach isn't about mindless ego stroking; it's about authentic engagement with a positive idea, appreciating it and keeping the excitement going. The response has to be genuine—even if we're not as excited about the topic to the same degree as the person sharing it, we need to acknowledge and encourage his or her enthusiasm. ACR creates what Fredrickson and Joiner call “upward spirals” of positive emotions—extending the sharer's enjoyment beyond the discovery or event itself, and building positive capacity so that the relationship will be better able to weather negative events.¹⁹

When things do go wrong, often spectacularly, our response to those failures is critical to the health of our professional relationships. At more senior levels, a leader's response to failure can affect the entire organization's future performance, as has been established in studies by Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School. When she was a doctoral student, studying with Richard Hackman, Edmondson designed a study to test his model of effective teamwork—to see whether teams that scored high on Hackman's effectiveness scale were less likely to make medical errors.

It was important research because—according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University—medical errors cause 251,000 deaths in the United States every year, the third most likely cause of death after heart disease and cancer.²⁰ After years of data collection and analysis, Edmondson had results that were statistically significant—but not in the way she'd expected. Groups that met Hackman's conditions for effectiveness made more mistakes, rather than fewer. It was a shocking result, one that contradicted decades of research, and it stumped Edmondson for a while. She had difficulty believing her results had produced such outliers, and after serious reflection, she arrived at a revised hypothesis: That the good teams didn't make more mistakes—they merely reported more mistakes.

Back at the hospital, Edmondson tested the new hypothesis and discovered that the less effective teams did, in fact, commit more errors but tended to conceal all but the most egregious ones that could not be concealed—such as those that caused the death of a patient. The most effective teams did, when all was accounted for, make fewer errors.²¹

Tal—who was an undergraduate at Harvard, studying with Dr. Hackman when Edmondson was working on this study—had a déjà vu experience a few years ago, when the CEO of a large company brought him in as a consultant to help solve a serious problem: His employees were constantly lying to him. Dishonesty was a “sinister cancer,” the CEO said, that was growing at an alarming pace throughout the company.

Tal picked a few employees at random and talked to them individually. It didn't take him long to figure out what was going on: Every time an employee said something the CEO didn't like, that employee would be berated, often in front of others. To save themselves from this humiliation, they began to conceal things from him or simply to stop telling the truth—and instead of the upward spiral modeled by Gable and colleagues' ACR, relations plunged into a sharp downward spiral; when, occasionally, the CEO found out someone had lied to him, he became livid and castigated the person even more brutally.

Successful teams, Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson have discovered, enjoy psychologically safe environments—they know no team member is going to be embarrassed if he or she speaks out, asks for help, or admits failure. When each team member feels comfortable failing, the whole team can learn and improve. Learning can't take place if mistakes are concealed and most people are unaware of them—in such cases, it's more likely that errors will be repeated.²²

It's easy to create psychological safety when things run smoothly; it's more challenging when they go wrong. Angus is glad he didn't know Tal when he was a younger man with a shorter temper. In his early years at McKinsey, he could be hard on his teams. When under stress and pressed for time, he could really blow his cork—and this happened a lot. It happened once when he'd assigned a team to prepare a draft report for a client, based on an outline he'd left with them before he'd gone on a long trip overseas. The team worked on a tight deadline, often working late, and when Angus reconnected with them to review the draft, he didn't see what he was expecting.

Angus, to everyone's horror, exploded and literally tore the draft into pieces. They hadn't done as he'd asked. He'd left them an outline—why hadn't they followed the outline? They were going to have to start over. It was hopeless.

Fortunately for Angus, one of his team members was a French engineer who was used to working for difficult bosses, and who, unlike Angus, was apparently schooled in the ways of psychological safety and ACR. The day after Angus's rage had driven everyone out of his office, he found an envelope on his desk. Inside was the outline Angus had originally given the team—and which, Angus now realized, they had followed. Drawn over the outline was a giant smiley face.

Angus knew he'd screwed up. In a moment of jet‐lagged anger he'd wrecked the team's psychological safety. They'd lost their motivation, their creativity, and their willingness to take risks with him—and he was the one who was going to have to work hardest to regain it all. Angus isn't proud of this episode, but it was an event that helped him grow as a leader.

In the 1980s, the Israeli air force instituted a no blame policy, encouraging pilots and squadrons to report errors and near misses. Removing the threat of punishment created a safe organizational environment in which learning could take place—instead of punishment, correction and preventive action were emphasized. Five years into this new policy, the reporting of errors had increased—but the accident rate had been reduced by 50 percent.²³ One of our favorite sayings is: Learn to fail, or fail to learn. As leaders we need to embrace this kind of openness to failure toward ourselves and toward those with whom we work.

Another important reason for organizational leaders to create psychological safety is so that they don't lose their own awareness of what's going on. Daniel Goleman coined the term CEO disease to describe how people in the organization tend to withhold (usually unpleasant) information from a leader. As a result, writes Goleman in Primal Leadership, there is “an acute lack of feedback…Leaders have more trouble than anybody else when it comes to receiving candid feedback, particularly about how they're doing as leaders…the paradox, of course, is that the higher a leader's position in an organization, the more critically the leader needs that very feedback.”²⁴ If leaders don't receive the facts about their team's performance, or honest feedback on their own performance, they're unlikely to grow in their roles—and they won't receive this feedback unless they make it clear it's safe for employees to speak up. A psychologically safe environment is the antidote to CEO disease.

To cultivate relationships that are built for success, it is necessary to appreciate good news through ACR and to tend carefully to bad news while ensuring psychological safety. ACR helps amplify positivity, while psychological safety contributes to the levels of authenticity. And it is through the constant and consistent spread of positivity and authenticity that individuals, relationships, and the entire organization flourish.