I have spent the last while writing about healthy conflict on teams: why it matters, what kills it, and what it asks of each of us. Today I want to go underneath all of that, to something that has to exist before honest disagreement is even possible.

An agreement about how we will work together.

I have been deepening my study of team coaching lately, the kind that goes beyond coaching one individual and instead works on the relationship between people. One idea from it has continued to stay with me: Designed Team Alliance. The name sounds more formal than it is. It is really just an open conversation between people about how they want to work together:

What matters to each of us? What do we each need? How we want to handle it when things get hard?

And before we get to teams, here is the interesting part. It works between two people in all aspects of our lives: You and your manager. You and your direct report. Even business partners or spouses.

Have you ever actually had this conversation? Neither an implied one nor informal agreements that build up over time. A specific conversation done on purpose, out loud and explicitly.

It's okay! Almost nobody has. Usually, we start working with someone and just begin. We turn a dating relationship into a marriage, and from there sometimes, we become parents together. We figure each other out by trial and error, and we call the errors "personality differences." Some typical situations that you may have experienced or observed:

• A manager assumes their experienced new hire wants independence, so they stay out of their way. The new hire wants guidance and more interesting work, and reads their manager's distance as disinterest. Neither ever says these internal thoughts out loud.
• Someone spends months learning how their boss actually works: What they want in an update. When to raise a problem. Every interaction is a small guess towards a larger hypothesis.
• Two colleagues rub each other wrong for a year over what turns out to be a difference in how they each define "urgent."

None of these are personality problems. They are expectations that were never made explicit.

Most friction or tension between two people is not a clash of personalities. It is a conversation that never happened.

What it looks like done well

A manager I once had sat me down in our first week working together and asked: Who are you? What makes you tick? How do you like to be communicated with? What motivates you? What worries you?

I loved that she asked. And looking back, I wish I had asked her the same questions in return. We worked well together, but it took me a long time to figure out how she operated, and I was doing it by observation and feedback. A real alliance runs both ways. If we had made it explicit in both directions, I would have gotten there so much faster.

That is the whole idea. This is not a formal process nor a detailed contract we each sign. It is two people telling each other, simply and candidly, how they work and what they need, and agreeing on how they want to be together.

These days I even bring this thinking into how I hire. But that is a story for later in this series.

Try it

Pick one working relationship. Your manager, a direct report, a close collaborator. Some questions to get you started:

1. How do you like to work and how do you like to be communicated with?
2. What do you need most from me right now?
3. What should I know about you that would take me a year to figure out on my own?
4. How do you usually act when things get tough? What would you prefer from me?

Then answer them yourself. Both directions. That is what makes it an alliance rather than an interview.

One more thing. This is not a one-time conversation, and that is where I am going next.

If this has sparked some curiosity, I would love to continue the conversation at diane@ptminsights.com.

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