When Relationships Get Stuck: An Interview with Diana McLain Smith
by Vicky Schubert

from Leverage Points Issue 98

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Diana McLain Smith is the author of the new book Divide Or Conquer: How Great Teams Turn Conflict into Strength (Portfolio/Penguin Group, June 2008). She is a partner at the Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm, where she teaches, consults, and conducts research, as well as a founding partner of Action Design. She recently spoke with Leverage Points editor Vicky Schubert, about her work.


It was somewhat of a Goldilocks moment that nudged Diana McLain Smith in the direction of organizational relationships. After studying political science as an undergraduate, she began her professional life as a community organizer, but she soon determined that political systems were just too big to get her arms around.

She shifted her focus to kids and their families, working with an adolescent mental health clinic and then the Cambridge Family Institute where she started thinking about families from a systemic perspective. But she soon began to feel that family systems were too small to keep her engaged. "When I trundled off to Harvard to get a masters degree in consulting psychology," she explains, "I met Chris Argyris and Don Schön and encountered organizations for the first time. That felt 'just right' for me, because organizations combined the impact and dynamics you find in large systems with the more intimate aspects of interpersonal relationships."

Diana recognized significant differences between understanding relationships in a family context and understanding them in business, where the interplay between formal roles and informal affinities is so complex. She decided to focus not just on helping individuals develop insight and interpersonal skills but on trying to determine how relationships really work in a business context, particularly in teams.

The Waiting Game
Early on, Smith started bumping up against what she calls "the waiting game," a debilitating dynamic in which each person on a team is waiting for someone else to change before changing themselves. A dramatic run-in with the waiting game got her hooked on relationships for good. She had been working with the top team at a well-known, highly regarded manufacturing firm for eighteen months, using all the organizational learning and team design skills she had in her arsenal. But no intervention could get this group to move seriously in the direction of improved performance. Their abysmal progress forced the board to fire the CEO and half the team—and of course Diana and her partner went out with them.

Frustrated, Diana went back and read over thousands of pages of transcripts from team conversations, trying to figure out what had happened. She began to see clearly that three sets of relationships had doomed the team. The first difficult relationship was between the heads of two competing business units who were stuck in a point-counterpoint debate over their different definitions of a particular problem and how to solve it. Also unhealthy was the set of relationships between those two and the folks more peripheral to the debate, who would sit on the sidelines and say nothing. And finally, the set of relationships between the CEO and the team members was problematic. The team felt ambivalent about him; on the one hand, they didn't want him to exercise too much control, but on the other hand, they thought he wasn't exercising enough. And he would go back and forth between doing very little and doing too much.

"When I realized what a powerful effect these relationships had had on the performance of the firm," Diana recalls, "I shifted my attention away from individuals and teams to focus on relationships as a unit of analysis. I asked myself, 'How do relationships work? How do they develop? How do they change? How do they impact the business?'" In pursuing the answers to these questions, she has learned a lot about improving team performance by building stronger relationships.

Contracting for Growth and Change
In an article entitled "Too Hot to Handle" that Diana wrote with Amy Edmondson for the California Management Review, she shared the story of a divisional CEO whom she called Naughton and a head of research whom she called Bedford. In a conversation about how to move forward with R&D, Naughton says to Bedford, "What's your strategy? Surely we can't keep throwing money at R&D. We've got to know what you're going to focus on." And Bedford says, "I'm glad you brought up that up because I've got a basic question about the strategy for our division. It seems to me that corporate is being myopic about what they need to invest in R&D in order to keep pace with our competitors. They're not giving us enough money." Naughton—who interfaces with both corporate and the division—says to Bedford, "Well, you don't have a focused strategy. Why should they give you any money?" And Bedford says, "Well, we can't really figure out what we're going to do if we don’t have enough money." They were in a classic waiting game—a game that nobody wins.

Diana helped them see that both of them could be right. Corporate may not have been investing sufficiently in R&D. Maybe it was also true that they were hesitant to do so because Bedford hadn't put together a coherent strategy. When the two began to see how blaming and waiting were getting in the way, they were able to say, "Okay, what kind of strategy would be compelling to corporate?"

Diana has found that the key to defeating the waiting game is to get each person to see how they're contributing to results that neither likes—and to recognize that they will go farther faster if they start helping each other make the improvements they need for the team to function well. But she doesn't try to get individuals to change in a vacuum. She enlists two, three, or four people willing to contract with each other to turn their relationship into a context for growth and change. Within the bounds of this contract, when they get frustrated with each other, rather than seeing it as the other guy's fault, they recognize the situation as a learning opportunity.

Making It Safe
In her role as an interventionist, one of the things Diana sees as most critical to success is the ability to create a context of psychological safety in which people feel comfortable taking the risks required for learning and growth. She points to a number of principles as essential to creating that context, including having a sense of humor. And the focus has to stay on business results: "Any work that I do with executives on their relationships is in the context of making good decisions and choices, and getting the work done. It’s not just sitting around talking about how they feel about each other."

Perhaps most important, Smith suggests that every intervention should have a staged theory of change with identifiable metrics, so that the players can stay motivated over time as they see the progress they’re making. She explains, "You've got to help people set goals that are highly ambitious, but also realistic. They're going to turn around their relationship, grow personally, and create a team that can produce stellar results. But they’re not going to do it overnight."

Diana dismisses the concern that shared responsibility for team results makes it harder to hold individuals accountable. "It's paradoxical," she says. "The more you focus on individual responsibility and accountability alone, the less responsibility and accountability people take. Each will point to what others have done to get in the way of them accomplishing their task, and each will be partly right." But she acknowledges how challenging it can be for individuals to accept their portion of the load in a shared responsibility model. "That's why I work with people in the room together. The safety level goes up when you start exploring what it would look like to watch out for the other person's interests at the same time you’re watching out for your own."

Entering the System
Organizations tend to invite Diana to help them with one of two scenarios. One is when a team is not performing, and the competition's getting stiffer. They've got talented individuals but rather than bringing out the best in each other, they're bringing out the worst—or they’re just mediocre. Another situation is when a thoughtful team that's performing well and growing fast anticipates that their success might lead to added pressures. They’re interested in knowing whether the relationships within the team are healthy enough to support increasing demands.

In either case, Diana's first step is to identify the strategically critical relationships, the ones that exist along organizational fault lines, where coordination is as essential as it is difficult. "You'll often see mixed-motive relationships there," she says. "The players have a requirement to cooperate, but they're also competing for limited resources. It's essential that these relationships succeed, so I determine what they actually need to accomplish together and assess whether their relationship is up to the task."

After observing the team members at work and interviewing them, Diana starts mapping the patterns of their relationships and makes predictions about the places where they will get into trouble. That is usually quite compelling to them. She hears things like, "Have you been reading my mail? That's exactly where we get into trouble!" When she helps them uncover the places where they're each hedging their bets or protecting their turf, they start to see how the strategies they're using are actually getting in their way. And that's when a healthy conversation can begin.

As much as she appreciates those teams who are self-aware enough to proactively explore their relationships, Diana doesn't tire of the thornier assignments. "I've always had a perverse attraction to the toughest cases because they have more to teach us about the human side of the enterprise. I also really like characters. If they've got a lot of character and they're in an interesting business, I don’t care how tough the dynamics are, I'll be intrigued. I like a good challenge."

Suggestions for further reading:

Divide Or Conquer: How Great Teams Turn Conflict into Strength, by Diana McLain Smith
(Portfolio/Penguin Group, June 2008)

"Too Hot To Handle? How to Manage Relationship Conflict," by Amy C. Edmondson and Diana McLain Smith, California Management Review, Vol. 49, No.1, Fall 2006, pp.6-31.