Relationships are all about give and take.

What are you giving your customers and employees? And what do you need from them?

In business, we often focus on transactions, and this description of relationships might sound a little transactional. But there’s a softer side of this give and take. It’s human, humble, and vulnerable. And when we understand it, we can unlock new depth in our working relationships.

During a very tough 2020, many of us have discovered that our relationships are a) extremely important, b) complex and even a tad mysterious and c) need some work.

If you want to improve relationships with your customers, partners, prospects, and team — or even if you just need a creative way to drive business growth — you might want to consider a new approach to your working relationships. We call it mutual empathy.

Mutual empathy is a new way to approach ANY relationship. We’ve used it successfully in:

• Sales.

• Partnership.

• Negotiation.

• And management.

Mutual empathy is a core agreement between two people, or two groups of people. They each say:

• I have worked hard to understand and acknowledge what you want and need.

• Please understand and acknowledge what I want and need.

• With this mutual empathy, we are both invested, we can hold each other accountable, and together we can achieve a better (and usually more creative) outcome.

Working from a place of mutual empathy will make your relationships fuller and more three-dimensional, and take away the transactional, winner-takes-all, “salesy” feeling of traditional corporate dynamics.

Example: How Mutual Empathy Transformed an Important Business Relationship

Here’s an example of how mutual empathy has played out — and paid off — for us.

Many years ago, I was running a large organization of a Fortune 100 company. The company had a multi-billion dollar relationship with a large IT distributor. The relationship had been strained for some time, with lots of non-productive posturing and gamesmanship on both sides. I knew that the CEO of the distributor was unhappy and highly critical of the relationship.

The crux of the problem was that we didn’t fully understand each other’s challenges and needs. The distributor was pounding me for additional margins and expense off-sets that would challenge my own P&L and put me in a bad position with our CFO. Inside my company, distributors were already viewed in a pejorative way as the "middleman". But I was keenly aware that we need distribution to be successful. I was stuck in the middle.

Despite lots of digging to find out the root cause issue, nothing seemed to get better. My decision was to meet with the CEO in a relaxed setting and see if I could figure out why the relationship was so sticky. I was able to arrange a one-on-one dinner. Free from his handlers, staff and negatively-biased briefing documents, we were able to get to know each other a bit better and to importantly get to know what makes each other tick.

After a glass of wine or two and some spirited banter, it was revealed that this CEO was operating on a bad assumption. His assumption was that a particular high volume product group was operating with high-teen operating margins. High margins that he wanted more of to improve his results that were under market pressure.

Also at this dinner, he learned that I had started my career in Finance and had a reasonably deep understanding of financial statements and their impact on publicly traded companies. This established my credibility for an open-book financial conversation, where I explained that our margins were single digits and also under enormous pressure.

What resulted was an agreement to look for mutual margin optimization and mutual cost-cutting. As an example, we agreed to work on reducing reverse logistics, which was a huge expense on my side of the equation. My company agreed to create a functional discount that shared the savings in this area with the distributor. Win-win.

Through getting to a state of mutual empathy, the relationship changed permanently. While we still bumped heads on a number of issues, we continued to make progress with mutually positive outcomes.

How to Approach Your Work from a Place of Mutual Empathy

So, as you consider your relationships and plan your strategy for the year, how could you shift your approach to one of mutual empathy?

1. Start by sharing your own experiences openly and authentically.

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that no one has any patience for BS. Working remotely and living through a pandemic have stripped away a lot of our protections and stories we tell the world. People are less buttoned-up and more open to accepting your real experiences, your struggles, and the lessons you have learned. We think that the future of business relationships will be more open, real, and relaxed. To build mutually empathetic relationships, start by sharing more fully of yourself. Focus on building connection, not just closing the next sale.

2. Keep an open mind. Accept your own limitations and knowledge gaps. Don’t be so certain about everything.

One important element of mutual empathy is humble self-reflection. Before a meeting, ask yourself: 

• What do I know? 

• What do I not know? 

• And what do I want to learn from this conversation? 

• What are the gaps I’m hoping to fill? 

• What questions do I want to ask? 

If you think more about what you want to learn than what you want to tell the other person, you’ll be better at having conversations, creating partnership, and offering helpful solutions. 

If you enter the meeting as the boss, or as the most important person, and you’re fixated on your position of power, you’ll miss the opportunity to learn and build connections.

3. Commit to listening.

“Listening” is a big buzzword in business books right now, and there’s a reason for that. 

Most of us are pretty bad listeners, especially at work. In your next work conversation, try to listen more than you talk. When you ask a question, open yourself to truly hear and  consider the response, even if it runs counter to what you think you know or changes the solution you’d planned to offer. When we’re able to truly listen to our counterparts, we’re ready to build better relationships.

4. Dig up the problem spots in your relationships.

Sometimes getting to a state of mutual empathy requires hard work. You have to be ready to hunt, probe, do research, and challenge your assumptions. It takes this hard work to find the problem areas where you’re not communicating or understanding other people well enough. What are your opportunities to build new levels of trust? How can you uncover those areas for growth? 

Mutual empathy helps us open up. We reach a higher level of trust and respect, and our brains unlock new, more creative paths. As we consider ways to connect, thrive, and grow in the year to come, mutual empathy is a good place to start.