Is it just me?

I love my work. I never know the next question that’s going to come my way. But, whatever the enquiry, it is rarely my job to offer an immediate answer. The task is to help the client find it for themselves.

But then there’s this pearl: “is it me?”

It’s pretty much the Platonic ideal of a rhetorical question. Clients tend to spit it out at times of heightened stress or defensiveness. And it seeks only one socially acceptable response – one that starts with “no, no, it’s not you” before proceeding to catalogue an array of disappointing behaviour by an absent but guilty Other.

Unfortunately, socially acceptable responses tend not to get clients that far. As an old mentor of mine used to say: don’t ask a question unless you can stomach the answer.

Error terror

Last year I was working with a CEO. During the course of our engagement one of his Board members made an unexpected administrative mistake that was now going to cause a significant problem in a client relationship.

The CEO rang me, on the ceiling with fury.

“I told him to double check the detail,” he bellowed. “I thought we’d agreed that he wouldn’t do anything without sign-off. I’m going to kill him. He’ll be shaking like a sh***ing dog by the time I’m done. He’s saying that the mistake wasn’t that big. And people seem to think I’m being unreasonable, blaming him. But I’m so angry.”

A beat. Then the question:

“Is it me?”

My response stopped him in his tracks.

“Well, one thing to consider is that it might be.”

“…What? Why?”

All human problems are relationship problems

To answer this question, we need to go back to first principles.

Adlerian psychology posits that all human problems are relationship problems. That is to say, every difficult experience that we have in our lives is connected to our relationship with – and experience of – other people.

That line of thought illuminates two truths.

The first truth is that, in an important sense, there is no such thing as a “you” problem or a “me” problem. There is only a “we” problem. 

I explain this to my clients as follows.

“All relationships are co-created. Take our working relationship. There’s you. And there’s me. And then there’s this thing that we’re building together, called ‘the relationship’.

“Into this thing called ’the relationship’ we each bring a vast range of stuff: our individual neurology, our way of looking at the world, our value systems, our lived experience, our historic experience of one another, and so on. And over time what we each bring into the relationship affects how the relationship functions, and how healthy it is. The relationship is something that we create together, for better or worse.”

Incidentally, the fact that relationships are co-created doesn’t divorce us from individual accountability for how we each conduct ourselves in relationships with others – quite the opposite, in fact.

And this points us to the second truth: you don’t get to place the blame for the problems that you are experiencing solely on other people.

The Board game

Back on the call with my irate client, we unpacked the backstory to his relationship with his Board member.

The conversation revealed that the CEO had been harbouring concerns about this individual’s performance for some time. But he had chosen to do nothing about them in the hope that things would improve. This lack of action extended to not addressing another consequential mistake when it had occurred. (“There never seemed to be a good time to talk about it,” he said – a sign that he might have been avoiding a difficult but necessary conversation.)

What’s more, on top of a potential aversion to uncomfortable conversations, the leader had been on good social terms with the Board member. This had made tackling performance issues feel even more difficult for him.

Finally, it turned out that the management process in question had been ambiguous in definition. This meant that the Board member could have misinterpreted the fact that secondary sign-off had been necessary.

If all this sounds obvious when written down here, please bear in mind that, for the CEO, these problems had been festering out of sight. Conflict aversion tends to be unconscious. We can all be good at rationalising a blurring of boundaries beyond good judgement. Defining foolproof processes can be difficult, for the simple reason that few of us are natural systems thinkers.

I offered all this up to my client.

“I hear you,” he sighed. “But it is me, isn’t it?”

Quit othering

To be human is to be good at the unconscious shirking of responsibility. It’s uncomfortable for us to face our shortcomings, our mistakes, and our negative emotions. In simple terms, it’s helpful for us – comforting, even – to attribute all this to others. We are all walking projectors.

We should show one another (and ourselves) some compassion here, as well as accountability. Life is complicated, and none of us has everything we need to navigate through it without difficulty. We need coping mechanisms.

‘Othering’ is one such mechanism. It is when we project the responsibility and accountability for a situation that we have co-created entirely on to another person or a group. We blame them for a problem or set of circumstances that we ourselves have had a hand in bringing about. It’s startlingly common in business (as well as life).

But, for the health of our relationships, and our own development, we need to recognise othering for what it is. Then do our best to stop it.

Othering is just one human problem that Boards run into. It’s a warning sign that predicts deeper relationship issues. If it’s not dealt with, it can and will cause real business problems. And it’s far from the only potential problem of its type.

If you’re experiencing issues with one or more of your Board members, remember that human problems don’t get better with age. It’s time to act. (If you want to get in touch and kick off our call with an exasperated “is it me?”, that’s okay. It’s as good a place as any to start.)

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