The TRIPS toolkit for Handling Relationship Challenges and Promoting Rapport - book commentary

Synopsis

The book is published in 2024 by Castledown. The authors are Helen Spencer-Oatey and Domna Lazidou.

Essentially the book is about self awareness, contextual awareness, handling challenges and building strong relations. TRIPS is an acronym which stands for Triggers Reactions Interactions People and Settings. The authors created a theoretical framework to build and maintain rapport in (intercultural) work environments based on decades of experience. The book contains a lot of case studies and self reflection questions. Overall the book is very practical and the authors warn that in the end, the quality of the relationship depends on both sides.

Contents

• Synopsis
• Motivation
  • Arrogance
• Reactions
• Interactions
  • Rapport
• People
• Settings

Triggers are the low and high thresholds of motivation

I was struggling to accomodate the GAAFFЕ triggrers to the communication framework on which Besѣda® is based so I researched earlier work form Spencer-Oatey. A paper from 2002 - “Managing rapport in talk: using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations” was more clear to me - I shifted thinking about the range of insufficient-extreme to thinking of motivation.

Motivations in the context of social relationships can be grouped in the following way:

• face
  • quality == GAAFFE Goals
  • identity
    • role == GAAFFE Face
    • social == GAAFFE Ethicality
• sociality rights
  • equity
    • autonomy == GAAFFE Autonomy
    • fairness == GAAFFE Fairness
  • association == GAAFFE Attention
    • affective
    • interactional

You can see that the motivations are more precise than the triggers: for example autonomy means autonomous equity rights, the enitilement which a person expects in terms of being able to make important decisions and carry out tasks without supervision.

The precision is especially visible for the Attention trigger which I interpret to mean the association rights. A person needs interactions with others - to feel included. Furthermore, the interaction needs to have geniune affection because no relationship can be build with superficial exchanges. This distinction is also great as it integrates the pragmatic concepts of distance and power respectively.

One more benefit to perceiving the underlaying motivations - there are theories which explain the driving force of motivations and the effects on behaviour. For example - equity rights can be explained with cost-benefit analysis. Fairness itself is an exercise in cost-benefit analysis with additional moral/philosophical reasoning.

Arrogance

Personally, I would break down the quality face into two further components: potential and achieved. Potential is the promise of how a person might improve in the future whereas achieved is what the person has completed. This is an important distinction to make because it affords an explanation of a common root cause of workplace conflicts which I have encountered - arrogance.

Arrogance is extreme optimism for the potential quality face. It can be claimed with a high degree of confidence that arrogance is a conscious behaviour - it is not possible to repeatedly overestimate one’s own capabilities and to repeatedly ignore one’s own mistakes subconsciously.

Arrogant employees who don’t have achievements compensate by making bold promises, claiming the merit for all the work, publicly pointing out mistakes made by their colleagues, etc.

Arrogant employees who have achievements put minimal effort into the work because they feel entitled to continue recieving rewards for their past actions (fairness equity rights). The phrase “resting on their laurels” depicts this behaviour. What is interesting is that the achievements may not even have been made within the current organisation particularly when there is a colleague from the previous organisation who is a manager in the current organisation.

It is a paradox because even though arrogant employees with achievements are extremenly optimistic about their potential growth, such people are stagnating at work. I like to say that they are too comfortable in the workplace: either i) they put too much time (and effort) into tasks in order to have an impeccable performance or ii) they focus on coaching others to skip work.

Arrogant employees are often not accountable enough for their actions because they already have a positive image of themselves (or to put it another way - they don’t think they need feedback).

How leaders treat such arrogant behaviour is critical for the overall motivation of the group. On the one hand the treatment displays what bad behaviour is tolerated (and therefore afforable by anyone to carry out) as well as (intentionally or not) who is a favorite (who has close affective association rights).

The treatement of bad behaviour says more about the culture of an organisation than any beautiful vision/mission statements or values.

Reactions

I appreciate that the authors examine both emotional as well as cognitive reactions. The emtional reaction is immediate and instinctive - it happens on a subconsious level. The cogniotive reaction is the reaction to the reaction - the awareness that makes a decision how to interact (systems thinking type 2).

It is this conscious transofrmation of the instinctive reaction into an interaction which is key to dealing with challenges. And it would be very valuable if a conversastion tool can possibly assist the communicator in that internal process. Certainly such a design has its ethical dilemmas - how accurate could the software application determine the internal reactions from the interactions of the communicator with the application? How much should the application try to understand? For what purposes? Those are questions I ask myself while developing Besѣda®.

Interactions

Rapport

Rapport is the central theme. The explanation provided in the beginning of the book left me wondering - is there a specific definition of rapport? It sounds like the dynamics of a relationship. How is it different from a relationship? How is it different from cohesion?

There is rapport even between strangers who have no relationship.

Rapport is shorter term than cohesion - it can be built and ruined in one conversation, rebuild in the next conversation, etc.

To borrow a concept from management - a project has a start date and an end date. Rapport is similar to a project - you prepare for a meeting, participate in the meeting and reflect on the meeting after it has ended. A relationship is similar to a program - there is no planned end. The program includes many projects.

Rapport is subjective - what the sender intends is different from what the receiver understands be that because of cognitive biases, cultural norms, etc.

My definition of rapport is - “the degree of integration within the current conversation event, how much the participants behave as one unit”. Sometimes rapport is easier because people are naturally compatible and complementing. Some people have more difficulty cooperating with each other and require more intention and effort. Usually people follow the path of least resistance and befriend, work with people with whom they have a natural compatibility.

Managing the rapport means being inclusive (“psychological safety”), polite (minimising negative emotions and enhancing positive emotions) and respectful (“facework”).

People

The authors have done a tremendous job of explaining clearly the types of association and power as well as their dynamics. Understanding the individual characteristics (strengths and weaknesses) allows managers to build teams whose members complement each other and become something more than the sum of its members.

The psychological framework by French & Raven is a great foundation for understanding leadership. There are five sources of power:

• reward
• coercive
• expert
• legitimate
• referant

Legitimate power is the most basic power the manager has - the power to assign tasks with the expectation that the employees are going to complete them. However if the manager relies only on that power the team is going to have poor performance.

It was recently that I realised that the leader who “micro” manages is necessary only when the attitude of the people towards the work is poor. For example if it is physically unpleasant, emotionally draining, physically dangerous etc. For white collar work it is my impression that people who micro manage usually are not competent with handling people on a higher level than managing their time.

Settings

The descriptions reminded me of the popular organisational value - “work/life balance” which is merely wishful thinking because most companies praise and often reward “long hours” (extra work). I’ve heard the difficulty some managers have in expressing themselves as a result of the internal conflicts they experience from this. Perhaps an appropriate approach is to: compensate financially the extra work OR reward with additional rest/holiday, and do not praise the behaviour in front of the rest of the colleagues. Furhtermore that approach gives the impression that the organisation works as a well greased machine and not that there were some individual heroics which saved the day.

Another common wishful thinking I have personally encountered is about the attitude to time - managers expect the employees to be focused on tasks as well as work within strict deadlines. How is it possible that managers fail to understand that these two attitudes are incompatible? You either have little tasks which are performed well or you multi task and complete more but with less quality.

Conclusion

The book is a treasure of information, illustrated with case studies and enhanced with practical tools. I recommend it for workplace mediation and in general.

The tools in the book are mostly mental models. If you need real time support while communicating - try out Besѣda® whose design is broadly similar and more specific in critical areas.