Professional Doesn’t Mean Real.

Clarifying the optimal conditions for growth, work & life.

reposted from 2022 with updates…

Too often, we are complicit in settling for, designing, and defending suboptimal conditions that we legitimize by calling them professional.

We’re learning what’s more effective.

Professional doesn’t mean real. Not sick doesn’t mean well. Not toxic does not mean safe, and safe is not a static achievement. The leadership task is to create relatively safe, high-trust, high-challenge environments where self-regulation, co-regulation, developmental maturity, and real relationships expand our capacity to stay present with complexity and change rather than retreat into counterproductive conditioned patterns that only feel safe in the moment.

Real relationships are among the most powerful conditions for trust, learning, and transformation. Not magic, but close (it’s neuroscience). They are not accidental, they do not require extra budget, and they remain available to any leader willing to practice advanced person-to-person connection. Practiced consistently, they multiply the co-regulative energy that compounds collective intelligence and the cultural adaptive capacity.

Our vision: A world in which each person has the opportunity to love their work and life.

If someone asked you to think about one of the best managers or relationships you’ve ever had at work, who comes to mind? How would you describe that relationship?

“It transcended work, I’ll be friends with them for life. It was full of support and very challenging for me; I grew a lot because of them.” ~ Slalom Leader

Real relationships, of course, take work. But many work relationships aren’t necessarily real. They’re cooperative, coerced and transactional. Which is why so many don’t stand a chance.

If it’s not REAL, why do we pretend it is?

When a relationship isn’t real, we don’t feel safe to be ourselves, to be fully us in many ways. We’ve learned that we’re often not allowed to do so at work. Authenticity can be risky, so we publicly withhold. At work, we don’t take the boss up on their stated, open-door policy. We publicly pretend to understand all the veiled compliance and enjoy all the forced fun activities. We publicly settle for pretend relationships that publicly help us get whatever we can get from the company, while the company publicly extracts everything it can get from us. It’s a very public transaction, not a very real relationship.

We have been wildly complicit in the mutual pretending.

The global crisis of 2021 & re-evalutation has allowed us to get more real with ourselves and with each other. We have learned that enduring a less-than-genuine relationship isn’t necessary to belong or to get ahead. All of that settling for the old paradigm of assimilation and normalized madness seems like it’s no longer necessary. At least, that was the initial impression; despite the “realness” recalibration of 2021, pockets of corporate pretending are snapping right back into place.

The bigger the company, the bigger the madness.

Turns out, many bosses still seem inordinately attached to their illusion of control and their unconscious obedience to old norms to realize that things have changed. The recent events were merely a prep session compared to the dissatisfaction that’s coming. The best talent is merely biding their time, humoring the bosses while they sift through their plans for what’s next.

Sorry, no…our employee feedback survey data isn’t telling us the whole truth about what’s going on.

“The stuff you see on our resumes, the things our lips say during employee check-ins, the words our fingers type into self-evaluation surveys — it’s not exactly what we want. We probably won’t ever say what we really want, because we want to keep our jobs, sort of. For now. It’s just complicated, and we don’t really have an open, honest relationship.” (@jaylaxsun)

It’s that last insight about the quality of the relationship, that provides leaders with the secret for helping your company work through the real challenge in the most effective way. And it’s free.

The easiest, simplest solution (the “Hicks Hypothesis).

The situation is easier to remedy than you might think. But it only works once you have learned to embrace the new game/the long game of building real relationships.

The challenge is not simply finding more time to maintain more long-term relationships. The deeper challenge is bringing more reality to the relationships we are already in. I am not arguing with the limits of time, scale, or Dunbar’s number. I am challenging the assumption that REAL depends on duration. REAL may have less to do with shelf life and more to do with the quality of presence, attention, authenticity, and curiosity we bring to the moment we are in. A relationship does not need to last years to be real, and some long-standing relationships never quite become real at all. Long-term relationships can absolutely become richer, deeper, and more layered over time, but REAL is not the same thing as long-term. (I’m calling this the “Hick’s Hypothesis” inspired by my friend Mr.Hicks who helped me see things I could not see previously, just based on his generous quality of presence, in a very brief, async interaction.)

Our species superpower is our prosocial, relational learning agility. Simply put:

The quality of our relationship determines the perceived quality of our jobs, leadership, performance, culture and company.

If we think about it in terms of a spectrum of wellness, the optimal performance standard isn’t “not sick.”

And in corporations, the optimal environment for growth isn’t “not toxic.”

The idea that “neutral/work’s not bad” environments are seen as the normalized standard for work…is suboptimal.

Similarly, a reliable standard to use when categorizing relationships is this levels description from the late Ed Schein, Professor Emeritus from the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. I’ve added some layers of distinctions to his 4 levels to show that a “professional relationship” is a wildly outdated and ineffective standard. At Slalom we aspire to and pursue a standard that is more authentic, trusting, and healthy. We work on real relationships that allow us to be more human = fiercely human perhaps.

Intimacy is the foundation for connection, trust, safety, co-creation, and mutual learning. The quality of the container (enclosure of engagement) holds/creates the intimacy. Intimacy, connection, and love are the emergent properties of transformation. Our social learning capabilities are the evolutionary source of our species’ success.

At Slalom we know that advancing in this new landscape requires us to be fiercely human, even at work. For most of us, high-quality relationships will precede talent acquisition, talent retention, revenue generation, key performance standards, and all the business outcomes we want.

Leadership standards must multiply to create the unconditionally constructive, courageous culture platform necessary for this adaptation. Leadership’s responsibility is to shape the environment where these courageously authentic relationship standards are the norm, at scale. And that means that they need to be seen as acts of congruence and acts of love…NOT acts of valor.

The quality of our relationships defines the space that matters most, not the physical or virtual characteristics of where our relationships happen.

Just like self-care is unavoidably relational…learning & transformation happen in community. So the quality of our relationships is what defines the quality of our learning environment.

We do not have safe spaces…we have relatively safe spaces.

Psychological safety is not a permanent condition we arrive at. We create relatively safe spaces through ongoing co-regulation. How safe we can feel is shaped by the environment around us, the fear & history already alive within us (our conditioning), and the stage of development w/related capacities we have built for staying present with complexity, change, and stress without reactively defaulting to habits of defending or shutting down. Presence and curiosity can help settle stress, but stress can also spread stress, which makes safety a living relational process, not a static achievement. It is an emergent, co-regulative process (practice) in a toxic way and/or in a healthy/optimal way. In healthy communities, regulation becomes part of the culture, allowing people to stay connected to the challenge and to each other while still having choice in the challenge. When that capacity weakens, both people and systems tend to fall back into older conditioned patterns. Adapted from Thomas Hübl’s teaching on co-regulation, collective trauma, and relational safety.

No more pretend relationships.

Real leaders will build real relationships. Real leaders will choose to treat their team like a community of people first and a business second.

They will take responsibility for the intimacy. They will determine the standard of connection in all of their relationships. They will define and noticeably demonstrate their commitment to, adoration of, and appreciation for others.

They will commit to initiating the cycle of reciprocity because victory is the sum of people, interconnectedness and clarity of purpose.

They will take responsibility for how they take care of themselves, for how they take care of you, and for how we take care of each other as we learn to lead the AI revolution together. Real leaders will not do any of it perfectly, but they will always listen and learn to do it better.

The adaptability/learning magic, is without question, dependent on the quality of our relationships at scale. At Slalom we have all of the right intentions and foundation to make this even more possible…imagine what we can do together.

Living life with focus, purpose and intentionality isn’t easy…even when life is good. It does get easier and better when we’re learning to be in real relationships more often.

So where does that leave you? Business leaders, you won’t have to become therapists, sociologists, or cultural intelligence research experts. But you WILL need to be present and curious enough to care about understanding your role in connecting the dots between learning agility, change agility, thinking, relating, behaving, and results at scale. You’ll need a baseline-level of fluency in the socio-technical paradigm shifts at play in the world of multi-national, big business today. You’ll need a reliable culture competency shorthand, not a short cut.

Start by embracing how much you have to learn and recognizing that you have the power to implement a more holistic, more humanistic approach to business. Then you are bound to see that you, too, have so much more untapped potential. Tapping into that potential will be required to more effectively surf the tsunami of change that is happening today, and the many waves that are coming.