The Relational Perspective

How taking a relational perspective can make all the difference in times like ours

Dear Friends, While taking an extended break, I thought I would post a revised piece I wrote years ago that applies more than ever today. Stay tuned for my next installment on how we can rebuild our democracy on ground not so easily washed away by extremists. As you can imagine, it takes a bit of time to work that one out.

At the beginning of World War II, when Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt first came together to form an alliance against Hitler, they were a study in contrasts: Roosevelt, secretive; Churchill, transparent. Roosevelt, calculated and at times manipulative; Churchill, expressive and at times impulsive. Roosevelt, intent on keeping the United States out of the war; Churchill, equally intent on bringing the United States into the war. Roosevelt, a constant critic of colonialism; Churchill, a steadfast defender of the British colonial empire. Roosevelt, convinced that a leader ought to keep his ear to the ground of popular opinion; Churchill, equally convinced that a leader ought to get out in front and shape popular opinion.

The two couldn’t have been more different in personality, interests, or beliefs. And yet, over the course of the war, as Jon Meacham recounts in Franklin and Winston, they were able to forge an alliance based on a common purpose and what Meacham calls an “epic friendship.”

Of the many things they did to build that friendship, one thing Meacham mentions stands out: “They always kept the mission—and their relationship—in mind, understanding that statecraft is an intrinsically imperfect and often frustrating endeavor.”

When it came to their mission, Roosevelt and Churchill cared about very different things, triggering disagreements over a wide range of topics. How they handled these disagreements is striking. Instead of discounting each other’s views or assuming the other just didn’t get it, they engaged in hours of debate, seeking to persuade and to understand. If their interests or beliefs clashed, they didn’t denigrate the other’s interests or beliefs; they took them into account and sought to address them whenever they could. And if either of them did things to make matters worse, more often than not they looked to the other’s circumstances, not his character, to understand why, and they repeatedly offered a helping hand.

This way of handling their differences became apparent early on, when Churchill repeatedly petitioned Roosevelt to enter the war and Roosevelt just as repeatedly refused. With 90 percent of Americans opposed to the war, Roosevelt sought every way possible to support Britain short of sending troops. It wasn’t enough. France quickly fell, Britain alone was left fighting the Nazis, and Roosevelt came under attack in the British Parliament for refusing to enter the war. The one person who came to his defense was Churchill.

“[America has] promised fullest aid in materials, munitions,” Churchill began at a closed session of Parliament on June 20, 1940. Calling the aid a “tribute to Roosevelt,” he then alluded to America’s upcoming presidential election, saying, “All depends upon our resolute bearing until Election issues are settled there. If we can do so, I cannot doubt a whole English-speaking world will be in line together.”

That Churchill defended Roosevelt at all is interesting enough. But how he did so is especially instructive. Given Churchill’s political pressures and beliefs, it would have been easy for him to join in Britain’s outrage or to accuse Roosevelt of being a slave to public opinion. But he didn’t. Instead he pointed to the circumstances that impinged on Roosevelt’s choices, and instead of pressing Roosevelt to deliver something he couldn’t practically do, he made it easier for Roosevelt, believing that this would be more likely to bring them in line after the election.

Roosevelt took a similar approach after the fall of Singapore, the jewel of the British empire. It was a devastating blow, and in an effort to soften it, Churchill gave a radio address in which, among other things, he referred to American sea power as having been “dashed to the ground” at Pearl Harbor. Washington’s inner circles were aghast, and a number of them went running to Roosevelt to complain that Churchill had just blamed the U.S. Navy for the fall of Singapore.

Roosevelt, who waved away their complaints with a curt, “Winston had to say something,”responded by picking up a pen and writing Churchill a note. “I realize how the fall of Singapore has affected you and the British people,” he began. “It gives the well-known backseat drivers a field day. . . . I hope you will be of good heart in these trying weeks because I am very sure that you have the great confidence of the masses of the British people. I want you to know that I think of you often and I know you will not hesitate to ask me if there is anything you think I can do.”

When it came to their relationship, neither Roosevelt nor Churchill expected they would always get along—nor did they. But because they understood that their relationship would have a decisive impact on the success or failure of their mission, they gave it the same strategic attention they gave every other aspect of the war. All told, they met nine times between 1941 and 1945 in a range of different locales from Canada to Casablanca to Iran. In between, they exchanged countless wires, letters, and phone calls on everything from their families’ well-being to their flagging spirits to matters of war.

It all began with a letter—sent eight days after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, nine months before Churchill became prime minister, and two years before the United States entered the war. Knowing that Churchill had just been appointed first lord of the Admiralty, Roosevelt wrote,

My dear Churchill,

It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty. Your problems are, I realize, complicated by new factors but the essential is not very different. What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about.

Roosevelt ended the letter in keeping with remarks about “the importance of personal relationships among allied nations” that he’d made at a dinner during World War I where he’d first met Churchill: “I am glad you did the Marlboro volumes before this thing started—and I much enjoyed reading them.”

Once Churchill became prime minister, the two men went to great lengths to meet face-to-face. In August 1941, four months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and six weeks after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, they traveled by ship in secret and at great risk to Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. There, aboard their two vessels, through days of talking, drinking, and smoking together, they forged a common bond and a common purpose. Roosevelt’s speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, wrote of their meeting:

They were two men in the same line of business—politico-military leadership on a global scale—and theirs was a very limited field and the few who achieve it seldom have opportunities for getting together with fellow craftsmen in the same trade to compare notes and talk shop. They appraised each other through the practiced eyes of professionals and from this appraisal resulted a degree of admiration and sympathetic understanding of each other’s professional problems that lesser craftsmen could not have achieved . . . they had a wonderful capacity to stimulate and refresh each other.

Churchill left their initial encounter believing that Roosevelt’s “heart seemed to respond to many of the impulses that stirred my own,” while Roosevelt’s son, Elliot, observed, “My experience of [my father] in the past had been that he had dominated every gathering he was part of; not because he insisted on it so much as that it always seemed his natural due. Tonight, Father listened.” Naval aide-de-camp Commander C. R. “Tommy” Thompson said the same of Roosevelt: “I had never met a person of the President’s distinction who showed such apparently real interest in one’s own replies to his question.

During the religious services held upon the Prince of Wales—which Roosevelt called the “keynote” of their meeting—Churchill could see their common purpose in evidence: “When I look upon the densely-packed congregation of fighting men of the same language, the same faith, of the same fundamental laws and the same ideals, and now to a large extent of the same interests, and certainly in different degrees facing the same dangers, it swept across me that here was the only hope, but also the sure hope, of saving the world from measureless degradation.”

Churchill’s hope notwithstanding, it was during this first visit that basic differences also emerged. “The two disagreed,” Meacham recounts, “and would for the rest of the war, about colonialism . . . setting the stage for a long-running source of tension between the two men.” And this was not their only source of tension—or their most difficult one.

As the war neared its end, Roosevelt and Churchill disagreed vehemently over how to handle Premier Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union. In their first three-way meeting, Roosevelt sought to charm and placate the premier in hopes of securing his support for a United Nations, while Churchill took a tougher stand, fearing that if they did not, they would face Soviet aggression after the war. Though Churchill would eventually prove prescient, at that meeting, it was Churchill, not Stalin, who played the odd man out.

Unsurprisingly, during this time of constant tension, their relationship grew more contentious. In a steady stream of cable traffic, the two fought over how best to end the war and structure the peace. With Churchill intent on protecting Britain’s post-war place, and Roosevelt just as intent on advancing America’s post-war interests, the two men argued fiercely. In their last fight, this one over whether they should try to beat the Soviets to Berlin, the two failed to reach agreement. In the end, Churchill conceded. Afterward he wrote Roosevelt a note to reassure him that there were no hard feelings: “I regard the matter as closed,” he wrote, “and to prove my sincerity I will use one of my very few Latin quotations, ‘Amantium irae amoris integratio est.’” Translation: “Lovers’ quarrels always go with true love.” A week later, their friendship came to an end with Roosevelt’s death.

Of that friendship, Meacham writes, “For all the tensions, and there were many . . . there was a personal bond at work that, though often tested, held them together.” I would argue that the strength of that bond was a product of the way they saw and handled their most fundamental differences. When disagreements broke out and pressures mounted, they sought to understand how the other thought and ticked. And while neither man hesitated to advance his own views or interests, they were equally quick to ask about the other’s and to listen with genuine interest. As a result, no matter how frustrated they became, they never reduced each other to a caricature. Instead they built an ever more nuanced and subtle understanding of—and appreciation for—each other as people and for each other’s views and beliefs.

Most important and most unusual, despite the many competing demands on their time and the geographic distance between them, they took great pains throughout the war to invest in their relationship. More than anything else, this investment—and their mutual willingness to make it—allowed them to find common ground in the face of basic differences and to withstand the vast uncertainties and pressures of war.

Throughout, the two leaders illustrate a perspective built on a set of assumptions many leaders espouse but few enact (see Table below). This perspective, which I call the relational perspective, is based on a core belief best expressed by Karl Popper: “While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.” This basic belief leads people to assume that we all see things others miss, that disagreements are inevitable and valuable, that those disagreements will at times cause frustration, and that people will be better off if they help each other build relationships that can handle those differences well, especially under pressure.

Table 3.2. The Relational Perspective.

The Power of Relationships

Whether aware of it or not—usually not—all of us tend to ascribe behavior we don’t like to people’s dispositions, and we assume those dispositions are impervious to change.

We’re wrong, it turns out, on both counts.

All of us are exquisitely sensitive to experience and to circumstance. For decades now, one psychology experiment after another has shown that situations have far greater sway over people’s behavior than we think. Yet the belief that behavior is determined by disposition is so pervasive that psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error.

Even more intriguing is recent research conducted by genetic and family researchers. A number of them are discovering that our relationships have the power to either amplify or modify even genetically based predispositions. Take, for example, a twelve-year study of 720 adolescents led by family psychiatrist David Reiss. It found that relationships within a family affect whether and how strongly genes underlying complex behavior get expressed.

“Many genetic factors, powerful as they may be,” says Reiss, “exert their influence only through the good offices of the family.” Some parental responses to genetic proclivities—say, toward shyness or antisocial behavior—exaggerate traits, while others mute them.

“Our proposal,” says Reiss, “is not simply that the environment has a general and non-specific facilitative or preparatory role in the behavioral expression of genetic influences, but rather that specific family processes may have distinctive and necessary roles in the actual mechanisms of genetic expression.”

In other words, to have any effect, genes must be turned on, and relationships are the finger that flips the switch.

To illustrate how, Newsweek writer Sharon Begley asks us to consider how rats behave. (Actual rats, that is—not the people with whom we wish we didn’t work.) Citing McGill University professor Michael Meaney’s study, Begley explains how the interaction between genes and environment accounts for much of the variance among the responses of baby rats to stress:

As soon as their wriggly little pups are born, rat mothers lick and groom them, but like mothers of other species they vary in how obsessive they are about getting every one of their offspring’s hairs in place. Pups whose mothers treat them like living lollipops grow up different from pups of less devoted mothers: particular genes in the pups’ brains are turned on “high.” These brain genes play a pivotal role in behavior. With the genes turned up full blast, the rats churn out fewer stress hormones and, as adults, are more resistant to stress. . . .These rats don’t startle as easily, are less fearful in the face of novel situations and braver when they have to explore an open field.

Behavioral geneticist Kenneth Kendler of the Medical College of Virginia has found the same thing among humans.

Family is like a catapult. Kids with a difficult temperament can be managed and set on a good course, or their innate tendencies can be magnified by the family and catapulted into a conduct disorder. . . . A child with a difficult temperament—irritability, aggressiveness—brings on parents’ harsh discipline, verbal abuse, anger, hostility and relentless criticism. That seems to exacerbate the child’s innate bad side, which only makes parents even more negative, on and on in a vicious cycle until the adolescent loses all sense of responsibility and academic focus.

What’s more, the power of relationships to shape behavior doesn’t stop in childhood. If we’re wired to do anything, it seems, we’re wired to learn. “Learning is not the antithesis of innateness,” says Gary Marcus in The Birth of the Mind. “The reason animals can learn is that they can alter their nervous systems based on external experience. And the reason they can do that is that experience itself can modify the expression of genes.”

Reams of research suggest that the brain continues to change in response to experience. Even adult brains are proving more mutable than most people think. Indeed, it’s looking more and more that our genes are continually working together with our environments—and most important, our relationships—to define and redefine who we are by structuring and restructuring our brains.

All this research adds up to one important conclusion: our assumptions about individuals are quite simply wrong. Even so-called “difficult” people aren’t innately or irrevocably mad or bad. The relationships we build with others have the power to bring out the best or the worst in all of us. It’s the relationship we should be focusing on, not on individuals alone and in isolation.

Excerpted from D.M. Smith, The Elephant in the Room (2011) pages 55 to 64.