Imagine you see a problem or opportunity on the team—you've discovered your chance to take initiative and shine! When you share your proposal, instead of encountering support, you get shut down. “You didn't think about this particular case,” a senior engineering leader tells you. Rather than hiding and giving up, you share the negative impact that her feedback had on you and your motivation. It turns out that's not the impact she wanted at all, and she sees much more clearly how her suggestions for improvement could have been interpreted negatively. She had not made her goals and her intentions clear and actually just wanted to help. You leave the conversation feeling supported and re-energized for your initiative.

 
Or imagine you're working with a product manager who regularly leaves you out of project discussions. She tells you what engineering work needs to be done and sometimes even micromanages your work. You don't feel like a real partner on the project. Instead of resenting her behavior, you have a conversation to explicitly redesign your working relationship. You share what's important to you—playing a more active role in project decisions—and ask what's important to her. It turns she would actually really love your input and involvement. She had assumed incorrectly that you weren't interested in the meetings and had been working to shield your valuable engineering time. Together you identify what discussions you'd like to be part of and which ones you'd rather leave her to handle—and you both feel more excited about working together. Clearing the assumptions turns a wobbly relationship into a powerful alliance.

Or imagine there's another leader you work with whose behavior doesn't serve the team. Maybe he gives condescending explanations, or junior teammates feel intimidated by him, or he always focuses on what's going wrong. Everyone but him knows it, but no one ever explicitly talks about it because they're trying to be “nice.” Rather than continue ignoring it, you sit down to give him feedback. You explicitly share your intention of helping him succeed, and then share the impact of his actions on the team and what he can change. He's both surprised and grateful that you pointed it out to him, and he leaves feeling more excited that someone like you is watching out for him. You realize that being real does him and the rest of the team more of a service than being nice.

To design software and build products effectively, we explicitly define our goals, focus on what's important, and share our assumptions and our feedback. When we don't, our software solves the wrong problems or ends up being fragile.

The same holds true for our relationships at work. When we explicitly define our goals, identify what's important, and clear our assumptions, we design and build high-trust relationships that make everything else easier.

 
And as a leader, building high-trust relationships through powerful conversations is the most effective way to create meaningful work, achieve your mission, and produce exceptional work.

Earlier in our careers, we used to believe that just being great at our technical skills was good enough. We thought managers were people we just checked in with periodically and that it'd be nice if we could get some feedback from time to time. We thought that tech leads could just focus on the technical issues and that someone else would take care of the people-related issues—or better yet, maybe they'd just go away on their own!

But we've each been fortunate enough to have opportunities to work with exceptional leaders we fully trusted. And we've had people tell us that they would follow us wherever we went.

That trust was built, and when there's trust, hard things become easy.

You can give direct, candid feedback—even when it's negative—that actually leaves the other person feeling more supported and more excited to work with you.

You can stop wasting all your mental and emotional energy second guessing each other's motivations—and instead feel empowered to clear up any assumptions that you might have about them.

 
You can ask for 100% of what you want and need—and know that the other person will do the same—and then work creatively from that shared understanding to open up new possibilities.

 
You can empower people to close the gaps that you see—rather than feeling like you have to micro-manage and close them on your own.

 
With that level of trust, exceptional results become possible.

 
On some level, of course, we all know that trust is important. But we're all held back by one limiting belief.

And so we might hold weekly, hour-long one-on-one conversations—and yet still walk out of each one not feeling that the level of trust has increased. Building trust feels slow. Or we may even avoid having the conversations in the first place because it feels like too much work—there are features to build and products to ship.

In reality, trust comes from making implicit things explicit—and huge levels of trust can be built over even a 30-minute conversation.

 
Trust comes from asking powerful questions that get at what's actually important to the other person. It comes from clearing the stories and assumptions we make up that add friction and hold us back from what's actually true. It comes from delivering real and honest feedback that demonstrates you truly care about the other person's success.

 
This might seem like a mystical art—we used to think so too.

But in the past year, we've trained with the Coaches Training Institute to be leadership coaches, and we've coached people ranging from tech leads and managers to directors, VPs, and CTOs.

And we've discovered something important:

The keys to building strong relationships are both teachable and learnable.

Those keys have completely transformed how we and those we work with build teams and build products. And we want to share them with you.

We've designed this experiential leadership workshop to be taken in pairs, so you'll need to sign up with a friend or co-worker. It can be with anyone you have some shared context with—for example, a peer, a tech lead, an engineer, a product manager, a designer, a manager, or anyone else you work with.

You'll each learn tools for how to have powerful conversations that deepen and build trust—whether it's with teammates, direct reports, or managers. Through a series of demos, exercises, and discussions, you'll leave feeling confident and empowered to turn any source of tension into an opportunity for deeper trust.

 
You'll also participate in paired exercises where you'll use your shared context as material to learn and practice deeper types of conversations. As a side effect, you and your friend or co-worker will also take away an increased level of trust in the relationship. And you'll be able to leverage that trust to create more powerful results in any future projects that you do together.

You'll learn:

     • How to ask powerful questions,
     • How to listen for someone else's values,
     • How to coach other engineers,
     • How to explicitly design your relationships as alliances,
     • How to give real feedback that simultaneously grows trust and increases performance,
     • How to clear up assumptions to reduce friction and resolve tension,
     • And more.

Limited spots are available.