The Powerful Yet Simple Secret of High Engagement Leadership Communication

Is the Real Key to High Engagement Leadership The Same One That Unlocks Healthy Couplehood?

As a seasoned professional counselor and organization development consultant, I've always had the sense that when it comes to the human side of organizations, there’s really no clear boundary between these two roles.  

When it comes to building active employee engagement and reversing the incredibly destructive and costly effects of active employee disengagement, the critical stress point in your organizational culture is fundamentally located at the employee-manager interface. More specifically it's located in the conversations that take place or don't take place there. 

High engagement leadership is all about the quality of the conversations and social exchanges that you have with your employees. It’s all about crafting the kind of positive emotional bonding experiences that couples’ counselors use to help save and positively transform dysfunctional marriage and family relationships.

But it's more about organizational bonding than interpersonal bonding. That is, it's about bonding based on shared organizational values and culture. 

A recent management tips post from the Harvard Business Review actually quotes evidence-based research from the world’s leading couples counseling scientist Dr. John Gottman without actually citing him as the researcher behind the formula.

The article basically offers 3 tips on how managers and team leaders need to communicate and relationship build with their employees.  All 3 tips are rooted in Dr. Gottman’s now famous  5:1 rule of effective couples’ communication.

Dr. Gottman is the relationship scientist who developed a method of predicting relationship failure and divorce with over 90% accuracy based on how a couples communicates about their hot button issues over just a 3-5 minute observation period. 

The article starts by suggesting that managers look at every social exchange as an opportunity to learn more about and connect with their employees as individual human beings.  

They also suggest that people naturally seek positive emotional connection and experiences through mircro- “bids” (Jon Gottman’s term) for attention and positive reinforcement through “questions, gestures and looks”. 

They go on to state that managers need to focus on developing their sensitivity and responsiveness to these social connection cues.

It's recently been shown that the #1 reason even the best organizations are hemorrhaging top talent is because these employees think their boss is a jerk. You can't imagine how many times I've heard similar, less socially appropriate statements in my counseling room! 

Finally the HBR management tips post concludes by saying:

“Research shows that the ratio of positive to negative interactions is 5:1 in a successful relationship. You don’t need to pay someone five compliments before offering criticism, but do be mindful of the ratio.”

This 5:1 positive relationship principle is really key here. The basic idea is that the most emotionally healthy couples actually experience or share 5 emotionally positive verbal or social exchanges for every 1 negative 1.

For example, if there’s been a heated disagreement over money management or a recent augment with the in-laws, there will be a supportive complement, some highly effective emotionally active listening, some extra help with the housework and an affectionate giving-in to each other’s decision choice.  

Here’s how Dr. Gottman explaining his 5:1 rule in his own words:

I agree that yes, there are many similarities between the relationship dynamics at the manager employee interface in an organization and the partner to partner interface in healthy couplehood. After all, these are both Person to Person Relationships and this is the P2P Engagement Blog!

Yet with a background in couples' counseling I also have to add that it's very important to keep work relationships emotionally healthy through the setting up of clear boundaries. These are boundaries that distinguish between professional and unprofessional emotional relationships in the workplace, in order to to help quell the epidemic of work related emotional and sexual affairs. 

"The Quality of The Conversation Determines The Quality of The Leadership" - Bluepoint Leadership Development.

An truly epic short leadership development video I found recently, posted by Bluepoint Leadership Development, clearly and succinctly captures the essence of high engagement leadership in a purely healthy organizational context. 

This video offers a thought provoking, fast and easy to use checklist for assessing the quality of your conversations and your capacity to cultivate active engagement as a leader, manager or team leader. 

It's basic premise is the same as Jon Gottman's magic relationship formula but in an organizational context; - that effective organizational and team leadership is all about seeing the dozens of conversations we have each day as high leverage opportunities to create connection and organizational bonding and to mitigate organizational dysfunction and disengagement: 

Leadership Conversation - 10 Point Quality Checklist:

1. Do you welcome challenging emotional issues or avoid these? 

2. Do you routinely invite coaching and feedback or are you closed to this information? 

3. Are you genuinely appreciative and affirming of others or do you just simply flatter them? 

4. Do you embrace differences and diversity or gravitate only toward like minded people? 

5. Do you frequently blame and criticize others or readily embrace your personal responsibility?

6. Are you totally empathetic and present or distracted, detached and self absorbed? 

7. Do you provide feedback to truly help others or to fix and correct them? 

8. Do you have a natural optimistic bias or one that is negative and pessimistic? 

9. Are you open, vulnerable and truly seeking to learn or dogmatic and defensive? 

10. Do you seek to influence and educate others or sell and persuade them? 

Image courtesy of: Victor 1558

4 Extraordinary Marriage Quotes and What They Can Teach You About Strengthening Your Relationship Right Now

As an experienced couples’ counselor and organizational relationships expert, I've developed a serious passion for sharing what the best relationship and marital therapy research can teach you about saving or building a stronger, healthier and more resilient relationship.

But is there any genuine and practical wisdom in those popular short relationship and marriage quotes that we often see on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest? Can these quotes really teach us anything useful about relationship self-improvement? 

As it turns out, can they ever! 

Some of these quotes are seriously packed with relationship transformation wisdom that you can start to apply right now to improve or even save your relationship!

I've been on the lookout recently, for high impact short marriage quotes to tweet out to my almost 15,000 loyal twitter followers on my @P2PEngagment account. 

The Challenge here is that many of the most popular relationship and marriage quotes out there can actually provide some pretty bad advice. Yet I've still manged to find and tweet quite a few of what I consider to be emotionally healthy quotes for couples who want simple and effective strategies to help save a marriage on the verge of collapse or to maintain already strong and vibrant relationships. 

4 of these quotes dramatically out-shined the dozens of others I’ve shared. These quotes provide so much valuable insight in so few words that I just had to write about them here and share what I've learned from them. 

These 4 extraordinary relationship quotes have strongly resonated with many of my twitter followers as measured in their high rates of being re-tweeted, “Favorited” and repeatedly Twitter top-listed among the dating, relationship and marriage keywords I target while on Twitter. 

They've also enjoyed many positive twitter comments and responses. I strongly recommend that you share them with your partner, family, friends, followers, fans and readers too.

Here are the 4 extraordinary marriage quotes in question, along with a brief overview of how surprisingly on point they are with what today’s leading relationship experts are telling us about building healthy vibrant marriages and families. 

As you'll see they're  as powerful as they are short and to the point:

1.   “A good marriage is a contest of generosity.” - Diane Sawyer

This is by far the most popular of all the marriage quotes I've posted on twitter so far. And it’s not surprising.

Diane Sawyer may not be a marriage therapist but she sure managed to capture some of the most important modern relationship advice in just 8 words.

You see, "generosity" implies giving something of serious value and in your relationship, value is determined by you and your partner's shared values, which in turn help define your most important relationship needs.  

Do you know what your partner's top 2 or 3 most important relationship needs are right now? And remember, it’s not what you think their needs are but what those needs are in  reality. 

What your partner needs most from you and what you think they need can often be 2 very different things and it's up to both of you to zap that relationship knowledge gap every day. It's one of the many reasons why effective couple communication is so critical.

Next, “a contest” implies that more than 1 partner is being generous. And it’s not really a contest as much as it’s a positive, behaviorally contagious and snowballing virtuous cycle.

You see, the more you give your partner in terms of meeting their  most important relationship needs, the easier and more spontaneous it is for them to be generous with you. 

And it’s not just those big deep relationship needs like those found in spiritual, emotional or sexual intimacy that count here.

It’s also those small acts of loving kindness that are cumulatively just as powerful and important as the giving and receiving of true spiritual, emotional and sexual connection.

The best recent marital science shows that it’s the little things, like surprising your partner with a fresh cup of coffee, doing their preferred activity (say, on your weekly date night) over yours or (especially for the men) doing a little extra of that already evenly divided house work that really boost a relationship's resiliency and health. 

These little things add up. They're the small solid bricks that build a strong, lasting and vibrant relationship and that help sustain the deeper forms of intimacy.

 Yet in some relationships, the greatest generosity can be in the pure and unconditional receiving of the gifts of love and sacrifice.

There is nothing stronger and more beautiful than the love of a wife for a military husband who comes home with a serious physical and/or emotional injury, unable to give for now; strengthened and healing in his or her partner's pure love.

There is nothing stronger and more beautiful than the love of a husband for a wife who, diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, doesn’t know if she'll be around long enough to reciprocate her husband’s generosity of love and unconditional caring.

2.   “To get divorced because love has died, is like selling your car because it's run out of gas.” - Diane Sollee

When I first read this quote I was literally stunned by its subtle brilliance!

This quote fully captures what the top relationship scientists and marriage and relationship therapy researchers have proven again and again over the last 20-30 years.

The truth is, love doesn't die. It just shrinks so small that you can't see it anymore. When you don't nurture love, It gets layered over with external life stress and overpowered by the fear, hurt and anger of not having our deepest relationship needs met for too long.  

It turns out that just about any relationship can be saved and utterly positively transformed. The most emotionally distressed couples can regrow and fall back into their once vibrant state of being in a profound state of love again.

For example, we know that one of the most destructive forces in relationship and marriage is a pattern of frequent verbal criticisms and emotional shutdowns. 

Partners in these dysfunctional relationships paralyze each other out of healthy communication and meeting each others needs because those very needs have become so deeply frustrated. There is so much pain as a result.

  learn to hear and meet the underlying need and the criticisms, anger, hurt, arguing and shutting down vanish into thin air. Emotional shut downs and “just walk always” become impossible in fully re-expanded true love.

One of the biggest obstacles to saving a dying relationship, even one devastated by say an emotional affair, due to chronically unmet needs, is the couple's own faulty belief that their relationship is beyond repair. 

 Saving or radically improving a distressed relationship just takes learning and applying some very basic communication and emotional repair skills. It also takes practice and couples need to know that there can and will often be mistakes in the learning process.

Positively transforming a relationship also means that both partners fully and mutually commit to the relationship itself, and that they each allow for the incredible power of love to do what it was designed to do; - heal and grow infinitely.

3.   “The most important marriage skill is listening to your partner in a way that they can't possibly doubt that you love them.”  -Diane Sollee

 In this marriage quote Diane Solle eloquently captures what we have all heard so many times about growing a strong and resilient marriage: It’s all about the communication!

But Diane nudges our understanding of communication 2 steps further. She does this through emphasizing the critical role of effective, active listening. But it’s not just active listening she's talking about, it’s emotionally active listening.

What’s important here is learning to really hear our partner’s fundamental need to feel loved, emotionally protected and to come before any other person in our life.

The question is begged in this extraordinary relationship quote: 

Is there anything more powerful, healing and love expanding in the area of relationship communication than for our partner to know that we are really hearing their deepest feelings and listening and responding ultimately, to their very emotional essence?

Not only does listening instil the kind of deep connective wiring through which we re-energize one and other's relationship love-batteries through listening and heightened emotional responsiveness but that energy is then directly channelled into healing and repairing past and current emotional hurts both big and small.

 Learning to listening with love provides a kind of laser targeted emotional repair process for your relationship.  And a laser welded broken heart, like a properly welded metal structure, is stronger than it was before it was ever broken!  

4.   “Be presidents of each other's fan clubs.” - Tony Heath

I love this quote by Tony Heath. It captures the real day to day stuff of healthy love and marriage.

For example, we know that in the healthiest happiest and longest lasting relationships couples have 5 positive exchanges for every negative exchange (disagreement or argument). We know that they tend to see each other and life with an at times, “unrealistic positive outlook or bias.” It's all in how they choose to see life and one and other.

The love, life and relationship glass for these couples is always at least half full if not continuously overflowing.

Emotionally healthy couples are all about frequently expressed gratitude for the many blessings they share including, simply being there for and with one another in the moment. 

Emotionally healthy couples are almost always in positive scan, looking for the slightest excuse to catch each other being good, to appreciate what many less emotionally healthy couples take for granted in this beautiful life every day. 

 What are your partner's top 3 most important relationship needs right now? What are your top 3 most important relationship needs? 

On a simple scale of 1 to 10 how effective are you both at meeting each others needs? 

If that number is low? What's getting in the way? 

What do you love most about your partner? What are the top 3 most loving and supportive things your partner says or does for you on a day to day basis?

Why not get into positive scan and share with your partner right now? It's contagious! 

A 3 Step Strategy to Get the Anger Out of Your Relationship

How Uncontrolled Anger Can Destroy a Family

The best available marriage researchers can actually predict divorce with over 90% accuracy based on the presence of excessive criticism/defense and “marital contempt.” They can actually detect this negative, marriage-destroying pattern of communication in less than 5 minutes of watching how a couple discusses their top 1 or 2 "hot button issues".

For many marriages, un-managed anger can also be a very serious and even dangerous problem.  In the worst cases, uncontrolled anger can lead to partner violence and child abuse. At the physiological and health levels, chronic anger can also destroy our health and lead to unhealthy coping strategies such alcohol and drug abuse.

The bottom line about anger in your relationship? If anger is a problem and you want to build and maintain an emotionally healthy marriage that lasts for decades, it's critical that you take steps to get the anger under control ASAP. Here's what you can start doing right now to get the toxic anger out of your relationship:  

To Put it Simply: "When we Get Angry, We also Get Stupid" 

As it turns out, there’s actually an inverse relationship between anger and the ability to think clearly, communicate effectively or problem solve.  The problem is, a healthy marriage and strong family life absolutely depend on these communication skills. As I’ve often told my anger management clients:

“- The angrier we get the stupider we get.”

Our IQ, literally our human intelligence, drops rapidly as our anger intensifies and escalates.  For some, this can mean dropping from the level of an intelligent, educated professional, to the level of an angry,  tantruming 2 year old. For those prone to “explosive anger” all rapid drop in brain power can happen in just a few seconds!

To protect your marriage and your family from the devastating effects of excessive anger, it’s critical to get the anger out your most important relationships. Here’s 3 part strategy for quickly and effectively identifying an excessive anger or  aggressive behavior pattern and for getting that anger out of your relationship and out of your life for good

1. Become an Armchair Anger Management Expert – There’s no rocket science to anger management. It’s just a set of skills based on a relatively small but important body of knowledge.  If you can read and understand this blog posting, you can easily learn all there is to know about anger control in just a couple of months.  In fact, you can learn the basics in about 20 minutes.

For example, you'll need to get to know your particular “Anger Style,” your most common “Anger Triggers” and your “Anger Cues.”  Is your anger style one of “bottling up”? Do you allow the psychological effects of stressors to accumulate inside over time, like a pop can that gets a good shake several many times as the hours or days go by, only to explode when it’s finally opened?

Or, are you more prone to the instant “explosive anger style”, where all it takes is 1 specific trigger to cause you to blow your top right on the spot?

Anger triggers are just what they sound like; -  any person, place, behavior or thing that sets off your anger response. Some common household anger triggers include: a nagging or overly critical spouse or when the kids simply don't do what they're asked to do or when they're acting up.

There can also be secondary anger triggers like high stress levels at work, money management problems and general marital distress.  Learning how to identify and manage secondary triggers like these can be a powerful way of reducing the negative effects of the primary triggers that can set off anger in the moment.

Anger Cues, on the other hand, are the bodily symptoms that can signal you that anger is coming on or that it’s already happening. Commonly reported anger cues include rapid heart rate, muscle tension, furrowed brow, clenched fists and  rapid shallow breathing.  Some people tend to talk more quickly and more loudly as they become increasingly angry.

One of the most important goal of anger management is for a person to really get to know their anger cues. It’s always best to stop the anger escalation process as soon as it starts, before it get out of control.

The idea here is that anger cues can be used as signals that remind us to start our individual anger-control strategy, like taking a break, taking a brief brisk walk or self-invoking the relaxation response to keep us calm.

To start your daily study of anger management, here’s a link to one of the best available summaries of anger and anger control on the internet. It’s from the American Psychological Association (APA).  For people with potentially serious or even occasional anger issues, this may be one of the most important site visits of their lives:

Control Anger Before it Controls You

2. Master The Relaxation Response. As you’ll learn in the the APA Anger Management Series, one of the most powerful anger management strategies is learning to self-invoke the relaxation response in order to get and stay calm during otherwise high stress situations.  With just 20 minutes of daily practice, a person can learn to self-invoke the relaxation response (totally relax their mind and body) in just a few seconds.

As I've outlined in previous posts, learning how to relax is one of the most critical parenting and marital communication tools there is. Mastering the relaxation response can also have a powerful positive effect on our emotional and physical health. It’s also great to be able to calm one’s self completely before or during important job interviews or public speaking engagements.

Here’s one of my favorite online resources for relaxation training. It’s from the University of Arizona Counseling Center. It’s not flashy but it’s a free site, and the short video and audio downloads are based on the best available relaxation response research:

Clinical Relaxation Training, Fast, Simple, Free

3. If all else Fails, Get CBT Counseling. Remember, the jails are full of people who were unable to control their anger. The excessive, life interfering aggression that can results from uncontrolled anger is simply not something people should allow to continue.  

If you’ve self-identified as a person with an anger problem, you need to put a stop to it right now.  If you're unable to put a basic safety plan in place (i.e. you find yourself getting uncontrollably angry) even after learning and practicing some basic anger control strategies, I strongly advise that you get some brief counseling help.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with an anger management focus is a great choice to help someone get a more serious anger problem under control fast. CBT is proven to get strong, lasting results in as few as 3-7 sessions. So you or your loved one won't spend thousands of dollars for an endless number of sessions they many not get any practical results. Insurance companies love CBT because it’s cost effective and because it's results driven.

For couples experiencing or who are at risk for partner violence and or substance abuse issues, Behavioral Couples Therapy is a best available counseling option. For individuals, partners or children at immediate risk of harm, it’s critical to contact your local authorities ASAP. Safety has to come first. 

To find a therapist in your area follow this link. Select your location, then refine your search for CBT and Anger Management:

 Local CBT Therapists for Anger Management