Safety + Courage: Partners to Creating Empowered Relationships

What relationships in your life are most important to you? Many people I’ve coached cite their partner, kids, parents, and friends on the personal side and managers as well as key partners on the professional side. 

An empowered relationship is one of mutual respect and growth, where both sides gain more from the partnership. 

Some relationships feel inherently unequal due to the power dynamics built in. Examples include teacher/student, parent/child, and the traditional manager/individual contributor relationship. Yet every relationship can become more empowered. Either person in the relationship can take the first step. And it enables even more trust for the person in the high power role to take the first step. 

So you want to have better relationships in your life? The top ways create this empowered relationship is with safety and courage, and especially the dance between those two themes. 

Safety

In our first 1–1, the best manager I’ve ever had, sat down with me over breakfast and told me that he unconditionally has my back, already thinks I’m awesome (we had previously had a mentor relationship), and that he will now start earning my trust by showing it through all our interactions. The impact of that conversation on me was huge. 

In an empowered relationship, there is unconditional assumption that each person is inherently good and has the best intent & assumptions in mind. Any goof-ups made, are just that, simple mistakes. 

Google and the Harvard Business Review (HBR) have done research on psychological safety, defined as the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. The highest performing teams have needed psychological safety to accomplish their audacious goals. And the ways you achieve it are through 1. approaching conflict with a collaborative attitude, 2. treating others like humans, 3. having difficult conversations with empathy, 4. replacing blame with curiosity, and 5. asking for feedback. 

To build safety into any relationship, keep the following 3 principles in mind. 

  1. Unconditional acceptance. This is the belief that everyone in the relationship is here for the mutual benefit of the relationship. They are inherently good and operating with good intent. 

  2. Curiosity not blame. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s part of being human. What’s interesting is not the mistake itself but how it came to be and what can be learned from it for the future. Approaching each interaction with a sense of curiosity not blame will continue to build the empowered relationship. 

  3. Consistency over time. Relationships take time and can be built up or destroyed with each interaction. You might be having a bad day and snap at your partner. Make that a one-time exception and instead create a long-term consistent narrative of respect and empathy. The interactions build upon each other, so every little greeting or pleasant coffee exchange, as well as the late nights working through an emergency adds up. How do you want to be in the relationship—kind, reliable, helpful, strategic smart, supportive, or something else? Intentionally decide how you want to show up for the relationship, and consistently show up as that word.

Courage

That best manager of mine was in no way a pushover. Because he’d taken the time to establish trust and make me feel safe, he was able to courageously give me hard feedback. He shared that when I was stressed in the middle of deadlines, the delivery style in which I interacted with other people could become overly direct and transactional. The impact on others is that the style of the interactions would take away from the actual content. This was hard feedback for me. However, because of the pre-established safety, I was able to listen, treat the feedback as a gift, and have the courage to open up and work through making changes. 

Courage extends beyond giving transparent feedback. Courage is about pushing yourself to do new things. Learning new things and making changes is really hard. And we all learn differently. Before someone can be pushed to do something difficult and for the first time, before we can be challenged to do something new, we have to feel supported. This is same whether it’s presenting the designs to the new CEO, writing that first blog post, speaking up and ask a question at the all-hands, or taking that first leap down the bunny slope on a snowboard. All the new things are scary. There’s the fear of looking stupid, the fear of messing up, the fear of public speaking, and the fear of falling flat on your ass. What helps with courage, and what helps to push people to do courageous things is the safety inherently built into the relationship. 

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. — Nelson Mandela

One first step towards courage is practicing transparent communication. This can lead to a hard and potentially awkward conversation, yet for both partners to grow, it’s important to:

  1. Have a clear understanding of what your needs, as well as what you have to offer in the relationship

  2. Provide clear, specific, and timely feedback to your partner. Feedback is both positive—how your partner acted with trust & respect, examples of what she did well— as well as growth-oriented. This HBR study suggests that the ideal ratio of positive to negative feedback is 5.6 to 1. Over time, providing both the positive as well as negative feedback shows consistency and continues to build safety. 

To dive deeper, check out Kim Scott’s radical candor management philosophy which talks about caring personally while challenging directly. 

Safety + Courage

Both safety + courage are needed for the empowered relationship. If there’s only safety, then the relationship is fantastic and feels good. But eventually it will stagnate from lack of growth. Neither partner gets to move forward. If there’s only courage & challenge without safety, the likelihood of success is lower. The relationship is less likely to be successful and growth-oriented. And with more failure, our self-critic and beat mercilessly on us for the mistake, leading to a vicious cycle with less courage. Dancing between safety + courage helps everyone grow in an empowered relationship. 

Thanks to Holly Kennedy for reading early drafts of this post. 

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