Stay on Your Side of the Net: Carole Robin's Stanford Playbook for Exceptional Relationships

Carole Robin says her life's purpose is to help people learn that robust, meaningful relationships can be built. She describes relationships as a continuum, running from "contact and no connection", such as thousands of Facebook friends, up to what she and co-author David Bradford call exceptional. Not every relationship needs to be exceptional, but the skills for getting to at least functional and robust matter for teams, schools and communities.

The course sat inside Stanford's business school because people do business with people, not products or strategies. Robin says she has received countless notes from former students crediting the class for CEO jobs and funding rounds. She adds that the ones she values most are those saying it saved a marriage or reconciled a brother who had voted differently.

At a basic level the class teaches students how to show up so that others trust them and want to follow them. She asks learners to answer a hard question: why should anyone follow you? A vision or a lucrative product can work for a while, but a sustainable legacy comes from being a "referent figure", someone others want to emulate, which brings influence and willingness to work harder.

Robin says you don't learn to connect by reading about it, which is why the book took four years to write and ends every chapter with activities. In the class, lectures are scaffolding while most learning happens in T groups, where the T stands for training, not therapy. Each group has 12 participants and two facilitators and receives tasks with little instruction.

In one exercise she pairs students for ten minutes and says only "allow the other person to get to know you". Afterward she points out the choices they made without noticing, such as whether to share first or begin with a safe question. She then adds a mini-lecture on how disclosure builds relationships and sends them back for a second conversation, which students describe as more uncomfortable but leaving them feeling far more known.

Robin also explains Leaders in Tech, the nonprofit she and two co-founders started in January 2018. It offers a ten-month fellows program for current or former founders that starts with a four-day retreat, plus a four-day version for tech managers. Her advice for book buyers is to buy a second copy for someone you want to grow closer to and work through the activities together.

Robin explains that disclosure and vulnerability tend to be reciprocal: if you hold your cards close, the other person holds theirs closer. She describes three concentric circles, a comfort zone, a learning zone and a danger zone. Students asked how to know when they had strayed from learning into danger, so she created the 15% rule: step a little outside your comfort zone, see how the other person responds, then settle into a slightly larger shared comfort zone.

She stresses that disclosure must be appropriate. A marketing VP who tells the troops she has lost share for three months, feels awful and isn't sure she should be VP is being vulnerable but not appropriately. Pretending nothing is wrong destroys credibility too. The better version admits the problem, says she doesn't know the answer, and adds that she needs the team more than ever.

For decades, she notes, business leaders were told to leave feelings in the parking lot. But feelings are what inspire and motivate people, and a leader who seems like a robot may be followed only until a better option appears. She also says the answer to "what should I do when X happens" is always contextual, depending on the person, the relationship and who else is in the room.

Robin calls this her contrarian view and illustrates it with a story from 1975, when she became the first woman in a non-clerical job at a large industrial automation company. She learned to leave feelings in the parking lot and became very good at it. Ten years later, running a $50 million region, she grew excited about an idea at an off-site and met silence from her team.

One of her direct reports noticed her tearing up and asked, "Are you human after all?" She burst into tears, tore up the agenda and spent two days with the team talking about who they were and how they could help each other. She says that was the day she became a leader, and she knows any of them would follow her anywhere.

For people who want to start building this muscle, she suggests admitting mistakes, especially ones everyone knows about, and sharing feelings a little more often. She emphasizes the "feely" in Touchy Feely and says the program provides a vocabulary of feelings because accessing them is hard. Telling someone you went ziplining reveals little, but saying you were terrified and went because you felt pressured reveals much more, since feelings give meaning to facts.

Robin tells of a Leaders in Tech fellow whose team missed a major release deadline on a Friday. He spent the weekend furious and wanting to fire people, until he remembered that anger is often a secondary emotion. On Sunday he realized he was scared that nobody else was as worried as he was.

On Monday he told his team he was deeply worried that he might be the only one as concerned about the missed deadline and what it meant for customers. He told Robin he had never seen his troops rally to fix something faster. She contrasts anger, which distances people, with connecting emotions such as hurt, fear, sadness, loneliness and joy.

Asked by Lenny Rachitsky to expand, Robin says we are socialized not to be vulnerable, especially at work, so naming fear or hurt feels risky while anger feels acceptable. She calls it a disservice to professional learning not to teach this difference. Naming the underlying emotion, she suggests, brings people closer and builds trust.

One of the biggest gifts of the course, Robin says, is learning that we hold beliefs formed early in our careers, such as "leave your feelings in the parking lot". Hers served her well at first, then over-served her and cost her because she never had a reason to update it. A leader who isn't willing to update their own mental models, she argues, won't inspire others to do so.

Common examples include the beliefs that if I tell you more about me you will take advantage of me, and that giving feedback will ruin the relationship. She says the latter comes from seeing feedback done badly, not from feedback itself. Maturity is being discretionary about whom you open up to, and her colleague's phrase is to treat these as "dials, not switches" moved at a 15% rate.

She also warns against ignoring "pinches", the small irritating things people do. If you don't say anything, you will probably get more irritated, not less, so raise it while it is small before it becomes a crunch. When tempted to say it isn't worth it, she suggests substituting the pronoun: "I'm not worth it", "you're not worth it" or "we're not worth it", and asking again.

Robin introduces the two antennae we all carry, one tracking what is going on inside us and one picking up signals from others, and says honing them makes us more interpersonally competent. Feedback rests on three realities: my intent and background, my behavior, and your experience of its impact. We only know our own reality and our behavior, while the other person's reality is hidden from us.

She calls the line between realities one and two the "net" and tells people to stay on their side of it. She illustrates with a story of coming home to her husband after a hard day: when he answered with a flat "great", she said "you're not listening" and "how can you be so insensitive?" Those are attributions and imputed motives, she says, not feelings, and they make the other person defensive.

The alternative formula is: when you do (specific behavior), I feel (an actual feeling), and I'm telling you because (the outcome I hope for). In her example, she told him she felt unheard and distanced, and he asked for some time to unwind. They settled on 15 minutes. The aim of constructive feedback is not to change the person but to move to a problem-solving conversation, and Rachitsky notes the structure resembles nonviolent communication.

Robin says we don't know our impact on someone until they tell us, and we have to be willing to ask. In class, pairs share what the other did that made disclosure easier or harder, and people learn things such as looking away or glancing at a watch. She recalls a student who told her he felt disrespected when she glanced at her watch while he answered, and she hugged him, after first asking permission.

She never calls feedback negative, only constructive or complimentary, and uses the same formula for both. A specific compliment, such as appreciating that someone turned in a report early and went above and beyond, beats a bare "nice job". For her, all feedback is data and more data is better than less.

In a workplace example, a team leader says he wants to hear from everyone but repeatedly cuts someone off or ignores her suggestions. She later tells him, specifically, what happened, how it made her feel shut down, and that he may not have achieved his stated goal. Robin stresses she means interpersonal feedback rather than task feedback, because unresolved interpersonal issues contaminate everything else, and the person who says something because they care is building the relationship.

Robin says inquiry comes from "quest", meaning to search without knowing what you will find. Most questions are really hypotheses in disguise, such as "don't you think you're just trying to discredit John?" To inquire, you must suspend judgment, avoid yes or no questions, and avoid "why", which makes people defensive. She recommends questions beginning with what, when, where and how.

On whether people can change, she cites Carol Dweck's *Mindset* and adding the word "yet". She says we cannot change our personalities but can change our behavior: as an extrovert she had to learn to "zip it" so others could speak. When someone says they can't do something, she accepts "I don't want to" but not "I can't", because it is a choice.

She says these skills shift the probability of success but guarantee nothing, so you also need to know how to repair. Her key repair move is to ask "what did you hear me say?", since nine times out of ten it differs from what you said. Calling someone "rude" or "self-involved" is a label that invites defensiveness, whereas "I was interrupted three times" is behavioral and much less likely to.

Robin says leaders often hold the mental model that they must have all the answers, which puts huge pressure on them and can suppress better ideas from others. She believes a leader's job is to ensure the best answer is found, wherever it comes from. Advice also widens power gaps, making the recipient feel lower in power instead of a thought partner.

She suggests asking yourself who the advice is for: yourself, to puff up what you know, or the other person. Rachitsky brings up the "monkeys on your back" idea from Harvard Business Review, and Robin agrees that handing over answers enables powerlessness. Her line to a team member who asks for the answer is that her job is to turn them into someone who will eventually just know the right one.

The same applies to friendships. She wouldn't give advice unless asked, and even then she would first explore what the person has tried and where they are stuck, because nine times out of ten the advice would address something they weren't worried about. If you do hold ideas, she says, say so transparently and add that you would rather explore together. You can always come back to advice later.

Robin's approach to failure is an acronym, AFOG, short for "another F-ing opportunity for growth". Her first question after something goes wrong is "what did you learn?", because there is always a lesson, and the acronym gives perspective since most failures are recoverable. Some take longer than others, particularly if you haven't unpacked what there was to learn.

She lists six characteristics of exceptional relationships: I am better known by you, I know you better, we trust our disclosures won't be used against us, we can be honest with each other, we resolve conflict productively, and we are committed to each other's learning and growth. The more of these are present, the further down the continuum a relationship is. She adds that every relationship is a work in progress because both people are, so what worked two years ago may not work now.

Robin also discusses living with long COVID for about 20 months, which led her to hand over responsibilities and move toward an advisory role. She says it let her live what she teaches about not making an organization dependent on you, and about acceptance not being resignation. Her closing argument for self-disclosure is that "in the absence of data, people make shit up", so telling people about yourself gives you more control over how you are seen.