The Power of the Other: The startling effect other people have on you, from the boardroom to the bedroom and beyond-and what to do about it

by Henry Cloud

If you are a business leader, please make sure to take your teams and people to off-site learning experiences, leadership conferences, continuing education, and the like. Place them in cross-functional assignments, and lend them out to other bosses, departments, and companies. Keep the learning high, and you will keep the energy high as well.

But the energy advantage that a learning organization has over a stagnant one is huge. There are simple ways to do this. Just get a good leadership book every month, have the team read it, and take a little time once a week to discuss what you all are learning. Watch the energy go up.

The takeaway is a practical approach to emotional energy. In your personal life, what kind of energy are you surrounding yourself with? Positive or negative? Goal-oriented or stagnant? Healthy or unhealthy? Where are your Corner Four fueling stations? Whom do you catch the energy or growth from? In your professional life, ask yourself the same questions. Who brings fuel to you? Who brings the energy of new intelligence, support, and other provisions? We all need that kind of fueling, and it’s important to know where we’re going to get it.

So if you’re encountering some really negative energy, even if by necessity or on purpose, just make sure that you’ve taken precautions to avoid getting infected. We hear a lot about “managing your energy” these days. That’s important, but it’s not just about managing your workload and taking breaks; it’s just as important to manage the energy sources around you. This is intensely interpersonal. People give energy, and they take it away. Know the difference and plan accordingly.

Another source of energy and new information for leaders is what I call the listening tour. These are structured, intentional interactions or touchpoints with employees meant to identify the sources of negative energy that may be affecting an individual’s, a team’s, or the company’s performance. I encourage the leader to listen and work through topics that have become a drain to employees, especially in areas where the company itself and its leadership have enacted policies or strategies that have caused difficulty and distress. Don’t shy away from addressing the negative energy. That alone—listening—brings positive energy to the group and can begin to transform it.

Solitude can be incredibly fueling in and of itself, especially for introverts. The ability to be alone, comfortably and contentedly, is an important step toward emotional maturity and health. But solitude is not Corner One isolation. Isolation won’t give you a chance to refuel but merely offers a temporary escape. If you find yourself heading into Corner One as a way to avoid conflict and intimacy while wrongly calling it alone time, you’ll end up with loss of energy and drive. So watch out. A good test? If you go for solitude, do you still have real, connecting, honest, and vulnerable Corner Four time with others that addresses what you thought about while alone? If you are sharing it at some point, your solitude is probably in service of refueling and sorting things out in your quiet time alone. But if you are not, you might be in Corner One isolation and just calling it solitude or introversion. You can also spot the signs of trouble in Corner Two. When alarm bells in your head start ringing, “You’re not good enough,” when fear—of disapproval, of displeasing someone, or of falling short of some metric of goodness—starts driving your actions, you know you’re running out of fuel. The pull to seek something that makes you feel “good”—that’s Corner Three on the map—is another warning sign. If you find yourself itching for comfort in illicit relationships, addictive substances, or other compulsive behavior, you know you’re risking stalemate at best, and eventually a big crash.

Listen to the ownership, the total realization of who is in control of Jack and his performance: Jack. He doesn’t offer excuses, such as, “It was windy that day and a gust of wind carried the ball too far on seventeen.” Or, “Someone yelled in my backswing.” There’s no “the dog ate my homework.” Instead, we hear total ownership: “I just didn’t do it.” I have never seen great performers who felt themselves to be out of control of their own performance, emotions, direction, purpose, decisions, beliefs, choices, or any other human faculties. They don’t blame others or external factors. The greats are not like lesser performers, who try to explain away their failure as being somehow caused, forced, or controlled by someone else. Self-control is a big deal in human performance. Getting better depends upon it. You cannot get better if it’s not you who has to get better. You are the performer, period. You are the only thing you can control. In the psychological world, this idea and description of health is called by many names. “Self-efficacy,” “agency,” and “locus of control” are a few. It is the “perception that one is in control of oneself.”

Winners not only perceive themselves as being in control of themselves and their choices, but also they exercise this control every day, and we can see it. They have that incredible sense of ownership, but in part it was built and is sustained by relationship.

Question: Who do you have who is like that? Who is both giving you support and input, as well as protecting your freedom and control? It might be time to have a conversation with a boss, friend, family member, board member, or someone. After all, what is empowerment if not the freedom to exercise self-control and freedom of choice and performance? Too many times, however, leaders think of empowerment as happy talk, as the quickest path toward getting people to do what they want. They forget that empowerment requires not just freedom to choose, but support from the leader even when times get tough and disagreements crop up. Putting support, real freedom, delegation, and choices all together is a tough challenge for any leader and for most kinds of relationships.

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out where one’s responsibility ends and another’s begins. But that is an important aspect of choosing your Corner Four relationships. The best ones engender a constructive dialogue about this very topic—where the line should be drawn—without the threat of withdrawing support if you disagree. Corner Four relationships figure these things out, without one person immediately grabbing the 1-iron out of your hand when things seem to get a little out of control.

THE BALANCE OF FUEL AND FREEDOM Supporting people and still letting them have control over themselves builds limitless potential. It is the recipe for greatness. Think about how such a balancing act might play out in various dimensions of your life: What would it mean to you as a leader if your board, your boss, your team, and your investors understood this balance? What if they were there to massively and insanely support you but also to make sure that you retain control in order to do your best job? What if they gave you that freedom and empowered you to take ownership of what you need to control? What if they didn’t change or withdraw their emotional tone or support when you make choices, which you think best and are responsible for, if they differ from choices they would have made? For that matter, what if they didn’t try to interfere or micromanage you at all? What if delegation really meant delegation, that you own it, and that the 1-iron is in your hand? What would it mean to you as a business if every company saw itself in a Corner Four relationship with the field and even with its customers? What if your company asked, “How can I be a fueling support and at the same time make sure that those closest to delivery of the business have all the control and autonomy that they need in order to perform?” That would be powerful.

What if they fueled you and supported you just as Jack’s dad did, offering help, advice, and resources when needed, rooting for you, and at the same time helping you learn to take more responsibility and ownership for your choices? What if they gave you honest feedback and opinions but let you make your own choices without emotional repercussions? Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? But keep in mind that Corner Four supporters don’t just give support willy-nilly. They support your choices but also hold you responsible for them. Obviously if you’re engaging in highly destructive or even illegal behavior, their boundaries may become narrower and stricter. Drug addicts give each other freedom, but without holding each other responsible for destruction. That is not Corner Four support. It won’t help you achieve a breakthrough in your life. Corner Four holds people accountable for their choices.

Not only do Corner Four relationships give us freedom, but also they require us to take it and own it through responsibility.

Without Corner Four feedback that directly, honestly, and in a caring fashion addressed performance failings, neither person would have benefited, and no learning or growth would have taken place. These kinds of workarounds—which don’t really work at all—are all too common. They happen at work, in families, and in friendships, and they end up leaving the relationship in worse condition, filled with unspoken resentments, misunderstandings, and, worst of all, no opportunity for the participants to get better or to realize their potential.

Corner Four accountability is a commitment to what is best at three levels: (1) both or all the individuals involved, (2) the relationship(s), and (3) the outcomes.

research in marriage success shows that couples who do well “check in” frequently, sometimes multiple times a day. They stay current.

feedback is often hard to give and hard to receive, especially if we’re living in Corners One, Two, or Three. In Corner One, there’s no feedback. In Corner Two, it makes you feel bad. In Corner Three, it’s dishonest, mostly flattery. Here are a few thoughts about feedback to help you get to Corner Four.

Corner Four demands all three: caring, honesty, and results—caring enough about someone to not be hurtful in how we say things, the honesty to say them directly, and a focus on behavior change and better results. Remember these three accountability aspects: the individuals, the relationship, and the outcomes. Business, marriage, friendships, teams, culture, health, and life likewise demand all three. We must be open and trained to receive the feedback, listen to it, and take it in so as to develop self-control that leads to great performance. You will never get to the next level if you can’t embrace feedback about your performance at the current level. Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith puts it aptly in the title of one of his books: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Getting to the next level happens only when you are open to feedback and know how to use it. Moreover, it happens only when you’re actually getting feedback, when someone is telling you the truth. We can’t change what we do not know we need to change. Corner One is getting no feedback at all. Corner Two is getting it without caring and probably without accuracy, as the other person always has a standard that is somehow unhelpful or unreachable. In Corner Three, anything but feel-good backslapping or flattery is off-limits. Only Corner Four provides both caring and reality in the form of usable, actionable information. When we get that, it helps build self-control and the realization that we can do better....

Whenever we’re in fight-or-flight mode, we can’t absorb feedback and improve our self-control and learning.

Research has shown that the brain responds best to a ratio of five positive feedback messages for every negative message. In business research, the best ratio is actually six to one.

Research into brain circuitry shows that new capacities grow when we have to grapple with a problem ourselves instead of hearing someone tell us how to fix it or watching someone fix it for us. We remember about 10 to 20 percent of what we read or hear or see, but 80 percent of what we experience in such a learning process. When someone provides feedback that leaves us in shape to grapple with the problem ourselves, we learn. Research has also shown that we are able to retain more focus, have better concentration, think more clearly, and process information better when we aren’t experiencing negative emotions. They just get in the way. The higher-performing parts of the brain get sidelined when we’re experiencing negative emotions, and the lower, more reactive parts kick in.

one of the greatest motivators I can think of for getting feedback: myelination. Myelination is the process by which your brain increases its ability and speed to send signals down the circuitry by growing myelin, a specialized fatty tissue, around the nerve fibers. It speeds up the processor. The more you have, the better the wiring can conduct signals. Put simply, the more we practice, the more we repeat something, the more myelination happens, and the wiring for that behavior gets stronger. Practice makes perfect. Or as Malcolm Gladwell states in his book Outliers (Little, Brown, 2008), ten thousand hours of deliberate practice is the key to mastery.

Find Corner Four feedback that can set you up for long-term growth and success. Once you know what is helpful and good, you can pay attention to that behavior even more. That attunement creates new brain wiring as well. Feedback causes a lot of good things to happen, besides saving us from forming poor performance patterns in the first place. Better yet, it can guide us to repeat what’s helpful over and over again until it becomes part of who we are.

Where I want to be versus where I am. Here is the bottom line: high performers resolve that tension in very, very different ways than the people they consistently outperform. In what way? Basically this: they are fueled by the possibility of better instead of defeated by it. When confronted with failure, they are inspired to keep trying; they don’t judge themselves for missing the mark. Their desire and drive are not minimized or crushed by failing. That is the difference in their performance. Again, though, it’s not just a matter of individual willpower. Research confirms that it is “otherpower,” if you will, that helps us to experience failure as a means for improvement, as an opportunity for better.

The fangs of the beast are in you, and you’re more concerned with your relational safety than with solving the problem. When your brain detects that an important function in creativity and performance could be better, you want it thinking about how to get better, not how to avoid being rejected, feeling like a failure, or getting yelled at.

creative cultures must “overcome the unseen forces that stand in the way.”

there are a few things we can do to help this process along. Central to this effort is the intentional and proactive creation of two things: 1. Standards for how we communicate that we want something to be better. 2. Monitoring how well that communication is being done.

so-called process checks are helpful in other meetings of teams. They can also be helpful with couples or in family meetings. It’s useful to take a moment and ask questions such as: How are we doing in trying to help each other get better? How is our feedback going? Are we giving enough? How could I make my feedback even more useful to you? How could I receive this feedback in a more open manner?

there are two ingredients essential for breaking out of the cycle of decline: new sources of energy and intelligence. In business, we have a term for this kind of person: the turnaround artist.

you have to be willing to open yourself—your team, your business, your family—to receiving this influx of energy and intelligence.

CONSIDER THE SOURCE Let’s say that you accept my premise that you’re going to need something from outside yourself to get where you want to go. You’ve defeated the crippling bite of failure, but you realize that not feeling bad is not the same as accomplishing your goals. Corner Four relationships possess specific ingredients that help people move uphill, so you need to surround yourself with Corner Four people. What should you look for in a Corner Four relationship that will help you surpass current, known limits? I should make perfectly clear that I’m not suggesting that you jettison all of your dysfunctional or non-growth-producing friends, family members, or coworkers. Goodness knows, our lives are made interesting, fun, and sometimes slightly wacky by all types of people. We are blessed to have them in the mix. But you do have to realize one thing: they’re not all likely to provide you with new energy or intelligence. Headaches, belly laughs, and unforgettable experiences, yes; juice, maybe not. So you have to make sure that you are sourcing energy through multiple channels and looking, in particular, for the kinds of relationships that add energy to the system. What do those look like?

That’s what the right kind of Corner Four relationship does: it spots a hidden asset you possess and shows you how to access it. The best kinds of others balance a couple of factors in setting stretch targets: 1. They will push you to go farther than you’ve gone in the past, encouraging you to develop new skills in order to reach the goal. 2. However, they will not stretch you to a point that will overwhelm you or take you backward. The best leaders, coaches, and friends do both of those things. They push you past where you have been or thought you could go, but not so far that you can’t recover. They stretch but don’t injure.

if you are not challenged enough, you risk falling into what Csikszentmihalyi calls the boredom quadrant. I call it disengagement. It awaits someone used to running 2 miles who is asked to run 2 or even only 2.2. It is not enough of a challenge. Great Corner Four relationships push us upward at all times.

I encourage you to ask yourself a series of questions about whether you have access to the right kinds of connections to help you get to the next level: Am I being appropriately pushed to be better, to be more? What specifically am I being challenged to do better? What specifically am I being challenged to do that is more than I’m doing now? Am I being pushed past my comfort zone? When I resist or struggle, how are these feelings addressed? Do others remain firm in my need to grow?

Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting” (Larry Page, University of Michigan Commencement Address, May 2009).

Give the brain a specific, but BIG problem to solve, and it will surprise you. Give people a chance and the tools to grow, and they will shine. But only if the problem is big enough. And then only if the process is fueled, monitored, and sustained by the other.

In a get-better mind-set, we’re always trying to improve, asking ourselves, OK, what could I do a little better? What can I learn for next time? This mind-set should not be limited to post-failure moments, either, but maintained in the midst of difficulties, as well. People who are committed to mastery don’t freak out (as much) when they hit an obstacle. They reassess and then get going again, thinking they can get better. That’s why you want someone in your Corner Four who possesses a similar mentality.

I like to think of the process and the dynamics of Corner Four relationships as a healthy, well-rounded diet that contains the essential ingredients we’ve discussed: Connection that fuels Connection that builds self-control Connection that builds ownership and responsibility Connection that makes learning and failure safe Connection that stretches to big visions and goals Connection that names and empowers small, get-better steps

Early in life, we don’t get to choose what kinds of relationships we’re exposed to or which of those voices start replaying in our heads. But as we mature and recognize that we might be hitting a limit, we have the opportunity to choose what kinds of relationships we want to participate in, what kinds of voices to internalize in order to stretch further and reach higher. Fortunately, neuroscience research shows that we can rewire our brains—literally. Just because you had voices that diminished you doesn’t mean you can’t get new ones. Your brain is available for downloads and updates to its software, but just like your cell phone, it has to be plugged into a good network, with unlimited data and no viruses.

Thus, whenever you embark on the goal of surpassing limits, you need to consider several factors: 1. What is the ability we are trying to form? 2. What are the ingredients we’ll need? 3. What process will we use to form the new structure?

structure allows us to invest in the things that are important to us but don’t exist inside of us yet. There are plenty of other existing tasks, challenges, and crises that threaten to derail us, but for the things we want to build—for those getting-better goals we want to achieve—we have to create a space and a routine for bringing them into existence. That means replacing old patterns and habits with new ones. Structure helps us do that.

If you’re trying to grow something new in your head, in a business, or in a relationship, existing patterns in your internal wiring will continue to dominate until there are new ones. And external structure to build them in time and space and defined activities is the only thing that’ll give you new ones.

Triangulation sets up something called the victim-persecutor-rescuer (VPR) triad, which I’m calling the Bermuda Triangle of relationships. It works like this. I’m A, you’re B, and someone else is C. Let’s say I’m bugged with you or disagree with you or don’t like the way you recently confronted me. I feel like the victim of something you did to me, and that makes you the persecutor. Therefore, instead of talking directly to you about what’s bothering me, I take my hurt feelings to a sympathetic third person, who becomes my “rescuer.” I gripe about you, how mean, wrong, abusive, or attacking you were to do what you did or say what you said. I’m not talking to the rescuer for legitimate feedback about our conflict and for help resolving it. That would be a good motivation, but instead, I’m talking to the rescuer just to get validation that I’m right and you’re wrong. I want C’s support for my side of the argument. It makes me feel better, bleeds off the pain, and helps me avoid talking directly to you.

Talking to a trusted other can often be helpful, but in the VPR scenario, I’m not looking for truth or growth in my conversation with the third party, C. I’m instead looking for that person to rescue me from this mean person (you) and your mean comments, or at least validate my view over yours. I am looking to feel good.

Divisiveness is one of the most destructive forces in teams, companies, families, marriages, friendships, and any other relational systems. It not only prevents resolution, growth, and forward movement, but it also makes problems worse by pitting one person against another and creating further splits throughout the team, family, or organization. This is how boards, teams, companies, couples, circles of friends, extended families, and other relational systems get sideways with each other and often split or divide forever. The victim and the rescuer, feeling morally superior, decide to leave to form another company, church, or organization.

more cells. Persons who use rescuers for validation seldom look at themselves and change. As a result, they repeat the same pattern over and over, destroying relationships, teams, and organizations.

First, name the problem. Start by talking about the disease of triangulation with the people that it might be affecting. Sometimes people’s intent isn’t nefarious, but they’ve found in previous relationships that talking to someone directly hasn’t worked. Now they fear it for some reason. Sometimes A and C will talk to each other about B, because where they have come from, speaking directly could have been dangerous. So tell them you’ve noticed that sometimes there’s a meeting after the meeting. At times that can be OK, if it’s to do something that is constructive.

That’s not gossip, nor is it divisive if it’s done in the spirit of trying to heal or find resolution. It all depends on the motive and the effect. If the conversation is in the service of making things better, that is often good.

Second, establish a rule or a covenant with each other to help eliminate triangulation from your relationships. Don’t do it yourself, and don’t participate when someone else offers you the part of the rescuer. Get everyone’s agreement to not talk to others about anyone if you wouldn’t say or haven’t said the same things to that person directly. If you do have an issue with someone, tell him or her directly. Agree that you won’t listen to someone gripe about another person either, unless there is some way you can help or encourage them to go to that person directly.

Third, here’s where the rubber really meets the road. You and all the other people in your relationship should agree that, if someone does begin to gossip to you about someone else, you will decline to join in.