Some of the most rewarding conversations I had as an engineering leader happened with product managers, even though I often hear of tension between product and engineering being a big contributor to office stress.
As I look back on the positive relationships from my history, I recall a recurring behavior on both sides of the conversation. I found it easy because I worked with really smart, committed product teams who were open to collaboration. But if you find yourself in a more challenging environment, there’s a phrase I picked up from Shirzad Chamine in a training course on Positive Intelligence that distills what made our work relationships so productive.
In our conversations, we often found ourselves building on top of each other’s ideas, rather than trying to replace them. Our statements often looked like, “Oh, and if we change things that way it would also let us do this other thing or solve this other problem.”
The Positive Intelligence phrase goes like this: “What I love about that is…” It’s a concrete form of the “Yes … and …” approach.
This isn’t about flattery or false support. You don’t have to say you love the idea itself, especially if you disagree with it. But you can almost certainly find 10% of the idea – some kind of component or predicted side effect – that you do like. Then, frame your alternative in terms of how it either capitalizes on or increases the aspect of their idea that you do like.
And besides the impact on your real-time conversations, the practice of finding the 10% will begin to train your own observation skills to learn to empathize with others and strengthen those working relationships.
If you’d like to explore your specific situation further, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.