The Keys to Improving Business Relationships: The greatest key in reducing turnover in your business & improving the quality of yiour own life.

By Brian Klemmer, Klemmer & Associates

Improving Relationships:  The greatest key in reducing turnover in your business (as well as significantly improving the quality of your own life).

Once upon a time a small boy and girl were building a sand castle on the beach.  They spent hours building towers, walls, and a moat.  As they were building the castle, the tide slowly kept creeping in closer and closer.  Finally after working on this castle for most of the morning a big wave came in and wiped it all away.  An adult who was watching all of this was at first feeling sorry for the children because of all the work they had put into building the castle.  The adult then saw the children hold hands and run together laughing down the beach.  It was then that the adult realized that although it is fun building empires, the lasting fun is having friends with whom you can continue to laugh and be with after all that you have spent your life building has washed away.

The Poison in All Relationships

Not only are relationships the key to building your business, they are a key to a fulfilling life.  The Three R’s-resentment, resistance, and revenge-is a very self-destructive thought process or paradigm that gets in the way of relationships.  It is covered in more depth in the third chapter of If  How To’s Were Enough, We Would All be Skinny, Rich and Happy. It affects all your relationships both professionally and personally.  By destructive, I mean it is the biggest reason for turnover, absenteeism and employee theft.  It costs you a lot of money whether you are aware of it or not.  It ruins communication and teamwork.  It is the root behind all divorce.  It costs businesses millions of dollars, no exaggeration.  It causes loneliness and will even create physical illness in the body of the person who thinks this way.  It is like drinking poison and yet the odds are you do it everyday.  Reducing this thought process in your life and in your business will pay you big dividends.

RESENTMENT – RESISTANCE – REVENGE

RESENTMENT:      Any emotional reaction we view as negative to what we think was said or done

RESISTANCE:         Cutting off communication or pulling up a wall

REVENGE:               The attempt to get even

What are some emotions that would fit the definition of resentment:  anger, frustration, sadness, jealousy, hate?  Your spouse squeezes the toothpaste tube in the middle and you get irritated.  You put your all into training an employee to develop them and then they quit. The examples are countless. Resentment is a natural part of life.  Life is full of situations where we experience resentment.  I say this because some people believe or are programmed to believe that resentment is inherently bad. Resentment is not bad.  It is a fact of life.  There is no business you can be a part of and not experience resentment.   If you think it is bad you suppress it and then get mad because you are mad!  You are then in an endless cycle- a computer do loop.  Since resentment is inevitable, the real question is “How are you going to handle resentment?”  There are ways that work for you and ways that work against you.  Ways that  could create the day that turns your life around to the positive or it could be the day that destroys you by moving into the 2nd R – RESISTANCE.

There are many ways we resist.  An associate doesn’t return a call or support us the way we feel they should and we get angry (1st R) and we stop talking to them.   Not talking is resistance because communication has been cut off.  Prices are being paid.  Not talking however is not the only way to resist.  When a person is in procrastination or confusion they are in resistance.  When we commit to being right about our viewpoint and refuse to listen – the lack of openness is resistance.  Make a list of the ways you resist.  What are you resisting about your business?  Who are you resisting?  In affect you are resisting in order to be in control.

Here begins a fundamental problem in our belief systems or how you see reality.  In live semirs I have one participant sit in a chair and I say put your hands up.  I push on their hands.  Almost always they push back and almost fall over backwards.  Take note of TWO very important things.  Number one – they pushed back.  Why?  Because they are not in control.  In this case, most people have a program, a voice in their head that says, “If someone pushes on you, you must push back to survive.” The person sitting on the chair instantly pushes back “to survive.” The problem is they don’t survive.  They fall backward and one of our people catches them.

Now comes critical point number two.  That belief is false!  Incorrect!  To survive and to ensure that you won’t be taken advantage of, you think it’s necessary to push back But what happened in the chair demonstration?  The person pushing back LOST CONTROL!  They will fall over backward if they keep resisting. When you resist, you lose control. Why do our children get us mad?  Because they get control!  That’s why they do it!  And when you have an argument with a small child, how are they five minutes later?  Fine.  How are you five hours later?  Steam’s still coming out your ears?  Why?  Because you are resisting reality.  A little voice inside you is saying, “It shouldn’t be this way.” But it is, that’s reality.

What you resist – persists.  Let me say that again. What you resist – persists. It prolongs what you don’t want. So, what are you resisting about your business? Perhaps it is doing follow-up or dealing with difficult people? Maybe it involves technological advances that you do not understand?  Who are you resisting? What prices are you and others paying for your resistance?  No one changes until they see that the price they and others are paying is higher than what they want to pay.  The difficulty is that sometimes the prices we pay for our resistance are difficult to easily see.  What we might not see is that we are in fact paying a price. Maybe it is the time energy, creativity that is lost, or maybe our children see how we are handling it and they grow up to be the same way.  That would be an incredible price as a parent to pay.  What prices are you paying for the top two things or people that you are resisting?

Make a list.

Non-resistance is not being a doormat or letting yourself be taken advantage of.  That doesn’t work.  How can you not resist and not let yourself be taken advantage of.  One of the best analogies to explain what non-resistance looks like is Martial Arts – in particular AIKIDO.  In most Martial Arts what they teach is not to resist.  Let the attacking force go by you and in fact use that force to lay them on the ground. Resist objections in your business and you become a non- performer.  How can you protect yourself without resisting?

That brings us to the final R – Revenge-the attempt to get even.  The key word in this definition is attempt.  You can not get even, it’s an impossibility.  It violates God’s given laws of this world.  But first, how do people attempt to get even at work?   In the business world, to get even they slow down, take a longer lunch break then authorized, call in sick when they are not, employee theft, engage in negative gossip – all in an attempt to get even.   How is it being done in your business?   Perhaps we say negative things about others or the “competition”. How is revenge demonstrated in personal relationships?  The silent treatment, denial of sex, running up the credit card, not doing our chores, etc., are all examples of revenge.  It is repeated a thousand ways.

The key to remember is that the 3R’s are self-destructive.  When you resist or revenge it hurts you because what you put out, you get back.  What you sow is what you reap.  The way I heard the law on the street was – what goes around comes around.  We have all heard it one way or another.  How many children do you know who get mad at a parent who is asserting control and try to get even by getting bad grades?  They pay an incredible price for years.  Thousands of ex-husbands and wives have done our workshops and start seeing how they have been using their own kids to get even with the one another and they have paid a horrific price.  The key to remember is that the price you pay does not necessarily come back from the same source.  Imagine someone is mad at the government for taking what they feel is too much in taxes.  That’s the first R-resentment.  Then they procrastinate in filing-that’s the second R-resistance.  Then they attempt to get even by cheating on their income tax-that’s the 3^rd R-revenge.  I’m not talking about using legal loop-holes.  I am talking cheating by changing the numbers or padding an expense report.  They live to be 100 years of age and are never caught.  It looks like they got even.  But then we find out they have been working their business really hard and never got the financial success they deserve. They simply were paid back from another source.  They took from the government and got paid back in their business.

Solutions for the 3R’s

What are some solutions when you find yourself in the 3R’s?  Here are two key solutions:  1) GIVING , and 2) OPEN HONEST RESPONSIBLE  COMMUNICATION (For more, check out my book, If How To’s Were Enough, We Would All be Skinny, Rich and Happy).  Maybe these are not solutions you feel like doing, but why live your life by what you feel like doing in the moment?  Let what really matters to you make your choices.  The solutions are not comfortable if you are in the 3R’s because you want to get even.

Giving when in resentment seems like an abnormal response, but is will not only serve the other person it will serve you as well.  When you give something nice does that mean the other person is going to turn around and be nice back?  Not necessarily.  This is not a manipulative move you are doing to try and change the other person.  You don’t control them.  So why are you giving? You are giving in order to handle your own 3 R’s.  You don’t want yourself or anyone you care for to pay any prices for being in resentment.  Suppose you resent someone for not giving you the recognition you feel you deserve.  If you stay in resentment you may pay prices such as not being as good in coaching others, or your family might pay a price for you being in a poor mood.  The average person gives less when they are in resentment. You don’t want an average income do you?  Then  learn to be a giving maniac.  Give when it is comfortable and when it is uncomfortable.  Give when it looks like you will get back and give when it looks like you won’t get back from them.  Give when you know the recipient and give to the unknown.  Be a giving maniac, not to be noble-all nobility is suspect-but give because there is a universal law that says what you put out you will get back.

Imagine being in a sleeping bag in a log cabin up in the mountains where it is snowing.  Have you ever been so cold all you had out of the sleeping bag was your nose? Then you realize why it is so cold – there is no fire in the wood stove in the cabin.  All the wood is outside where it is snowing.   You make a deal with the stove.  You tell the stove to warm you up and then you will gladly go outside and get the stove some wood.  Ridiculous you say?  But how often do we live our life that way?  You spend more time with me (stove warm me up) and I will be more loving or romantic with you. The other person is thinking, you be more loving or romantic and I will spend more time with you. In the average corporate world you here managers saying, “You work harder, I will pay you more.”  The employee is saying, “You pay me more and I will work harder.” They both have it backwards.  In our rush to not be taken advantage of, each is waiting for the stove to give first.  Be a giving maniac.  Can you find 100 ways you can give to different people today?

Solution number two is open honest responsible communication. Suppose someone is a half hour late for an appointment and you are upset.  You decide to apply this second solution.  It might sound like this, “I feel upset.  I feel like you don’t respect me when you don’t keep your agreements.  I am angry.”  Notice that all the communication is from ownership of your feelings.  In saying, “I am” you are owning or being responsible for your feelings. If you were to say, “You are making me angry” that would be non-responsible.  That would be the viewpoint that something outside of you is at cause. Very simply, you openly shared your feelings without assigning the cause to someone else.  This is difficult because you may be afraid of their response.  When you do choose open, honest, responsible communication, it is not to change their behavior so that they are timely.  That would be nice, but many times the other person will not change.  You are doing it so that you don’t hold onto your resentment because you don’t want to pay the prices involved in your being resentful.

When I was a child there were stamps you collected when you shopped at certain places.  They were called S&H green stamps.  As you collected them you placed them in a book and could trade in the books for certain awards.  It was similar to today’s frequent flyer programs.  Many people treat their resentments like S&H green stamps.  They don’t say anything at the time of the resentment.  They don’t want to be rude or they are simply afraid.  But they do put it in the book. Eventually the book is full and they cash it in.  That is when they blow up and there are serious consequences.  Release the pressure valve along the way by communicating your feelings, but do it in a responsible way with no blame or shame.

The Challenge

The way you truly know something is by experiencing it.  There is a huge difference between knowing about something and having an experience of it. To know this topic, actually experience what we are saying through this challenge.  Here is the challenge.  Write down the names of two people you have the most resentment towards.  Have one of them be someone who is connected to your business.  Now write down how you will give to the first person within a week and how you will openly, honestly, and responsibly communicate with the second person.  If you are uncomfortable right now you are in the right place.  Do it anyway.  Do not go by your opinion of what is right or what will work instead go by results.  Results are the fairest way to gage anything. Results are often harsh, but always fair.  You will feel better and you will do more business. Now find someone in your family and give to them.  Some of them will FAINT!  If you do not know what to give them, ask them what they would like.  Become a giving maniac.

Brian Klemmer, is an author, keynote speaker and president of an international consulting firm Klemmer & Associates Inc.  His book “If How To’s Were Enough, We Would All Be Skinny, Rich and Happy” is available for $14.95 in paperback.