Someone wins; someone loses. One party’s gain is exactly taken from the other person’s loss.
Doesn’t sound very appealing, does it? And yet that teaching is consistent with how most of us were raised, and how we raised our own children. Win or lose. Heaven or hell. Smart makes you rich, dumb breeds poverty. The things that stoke our competitive juices create an oversimplified, and very mistaken, view of winners and losers.
When Covey published 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I was just getting started in business. I still study and practice every one of the habits, but my favorite has always been “Win/Win” — what he called the law of abundance versus the law of scarcity. The concept seemed foreign to me at first, loving competition as I do. But the more I studied it, the more it made sense in life.
Win/Win is a difficult strategy to execute, but it’s never failed me in business. Said simply, I had to learn to avoid clients, vendors, and employees who believed their gain was more important than mine. You know the type. I once had a client tell me his job was to pay me exactly one dollar more than what would cause me to walk away. I had a vendor use what he learned working on my business to land a much larger client, then call me, smugly, to say “we don’t need your business anymore.” Both relationships were zero-sum from the start. I just hadn’t named it yet.
So, I built a filter that rarely fails, setting expectations for us both. When hiring a new consultant recently, I told him, “My job now is to become your best client.” I then added, “Think about it, Jim — if I strive to be your best client, it’s more likely you’ll strive to be your best.”
But business is one thing. Life is another. We can choose our employees, vendors, and clients. We cannot choose our relatives, and often our friends aren’t entirely our own choosing either.
I found that out again recently. My siblings gathered to celebrate a birthday, and two of them drifted toward a real argument. I did what I’ve always done — I stepped in as peacemaker. It backfired, the way it so often does. I went home feeling bad for everyone involved, and I still feel it, six months later, having not spoken to one of my siblings since.
Here’s what stays with me: if I’d been thinking the way business taught me to think, I would have simply shut my mouth and walked away at the first sign of a confrontation that was never mine to referee. Instead, I inserted myself into a zero-sum argument that wasn’t my argument, and I turned it into a zero-sum outcome for everyone. We all lost.
I used to fight for fairness in relationships like these — rightly or wrongly, trying to referee, trying to be heard. I can think of just as many times I was thoughtless toward someone I love as times they were thoughtless toward me. So now I want to try something quieter. Just notice the frequency and depth of confrontation with a person. How often do we seem to misunderstand each other? If experience tells me I’m likely to leave that person’s company feeling worse — guilt, resentment, hurt — I will find something else to do.
Avoidance? Maybe. I prefer to think of it as choice. I wouldn’t sit down to a card game if I suspected the other player might cheat, or that I might be tempted to cheat back just to win.
Are you spending time on relationships that appear to be zero-sum? Keep in mind, whoever “wins” doesn’t win anything so, when possible, your time is better spent elsewhere.
I’m still learning.
Peace,
Tim McCarthy
