What might our economy look like if our professional relationships were based on norms such as assuming positive intent and appealing more to people’s oughts rather than their wants?
Some version of this thought floated around in my head throughout my corporate career, but especially over the few years that I was involved in intense negotiations in a sometimes complex web of clients, partners and suppliers on large infrastructure projects. I tweaked what I could within what I felt was my already overstretched sphere of influence. Surely, I thought, there must be a better way of doing this?
More recent explorations into the spectrum between personal and professional relationships led me to a field that looks like it may be a solid step in the right direction: relational contracts.
While we may sometimes dream of returning to a time when society was largely governed by implicit mutual obligations, most of us would acknowledge that this is hardly feasible to put into practice at scale with the complex interconnectedness and interdependency of our modern world. And yet the transactional nature of the majority of our professional relationships can often leave us, or me, at least, with a bad taste in my mouth. Just as in the case of the Israeli daycare centres, when moral and social norms are removed from our relationships, we can all too easily justify our behaviour as “nothing personal, it’s just business”.
Relational contracts aim to strike a middle ground between the two, by formally embedding those moral and social norms into the contract itself. Instead of seeing the contract as a weapon, it’s used as a tool to fulfil a shared vision between partners who are asking: “what’s in it for we?”.
Vested Way, hosted by the University of Tennessee in the US, offers a practical methodology to construct more relational contracts. They also provide several case studies across the private, public and nonprofit sectors (including a fascinating – for me – example in which the US Department of Energy successfully transformed, on time and within budget, a military plutonium site into a wildlife environmental refuge), demonstrating that making contracts more relational leads in many cases to increased impact and profitability.
They’ve selected six guiding principles to base their approach on: reciprocity, autonomy, honesty, loyalty, equity and integrity. If you’re thinking that these principles sound like a good basis for any relationship, you won’t be surprised to hear that there is academic literature out there drawing comparisons between relational contracts and friendships (but that is a subject for another day!).
What’s one contract in your life that might benefit both sides by becoming more relational?