5 Business Skills That Can Improve Your Relationship

“I can’t stand my boyfriend anymore,” said Elizabeth,* a professional woman in her early 30s who has been living with Eric* for the past three years. “Being together 24/7 is just not good for our relationship.”

“My wife and I can barely be civil to each other these days,” said Mathew*, who has been married for 15 years. “We’ve always been good partners and I think we’re good parents, but everything is falling apart in our relationship.”

Therapists have been hearing statements like this more and more in recent months. The pandemic has obviously made some bad relationships worse, but it has also created difficulties in relationships that were good, even excellent, before we all began sheltering in place. As Abby Lee Hood put it in an article in AARP Magazine this past October:

While COVID-19 has created new conflicts for married couples, it has also exacerbated existing problems ... A relationship site surveyed its audience and found 31 percent of those couples said the pandemic was damaging their relationships.

One of the problems is that there are no buffers in our relationships right now. In The Prophet, poet Kahlil Gibran tells us that there needs to be space in our closeness. Too much togetherness can inhibit growth in both partners. Normal spacers, such as contact with friends and colleagues, self-care like working out, getting a massage, or simply taking a walk or driving to pick up a hot coffee, don’t exist in the pandemic world. Hopefully this will change before too much longer, as more and more of us get our COVID vaccines. But for the moment, what can you do if you and your honey are getting on each other’s last nerve?

Surprisingly, one solution comes from the world of business. Now, we don’t usually think about business techniques in tandem with relationship problems, but there are five specific skills that experienced business people use, often without even thinking about it, that can not only help you and your significant other manage during these difficult times—but that can also even improve your relationship.

1. Use a feedback sandwich. You are probably familiar with this technique, which has received some bad press because it is often not used correctly. Basically, the tool involves making a sandwich of any criticism—saying something positive before and after you give the negative feedback. Alisa Cohn writes in Forbes that this technique is meant to “soften the blow of what you’re about to say; make it easier to hear the difficult stuff; protect someone’s feelings; help them see that you still approve of them.” But, she says, “The formula is so obvious that after you use it once or twice” people see it coming and start to expect that every compliment or kind word is going to be followed by a criticism.

Cohn recommends an approach tailored specifically to each individual’s needs. If you need some suggestions, the book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen offers a number of different ways of listening, thinking, and talking about problems.

But in a relationship where criticism and negativity are far more prevalent than positive feedback, tossing in some positive comments before and after any criticism can begin to ease the atmosphere—as long as the compliments are genuine and not couched as a hidden part of the criticism.

2. Make more positive than negative comments. One of the reasons that a feedback sandwich can be useful is that it increases the number of positive things you say to another person. It's still not enough, though. In his research with couples, popular author Dr. John Gottman found that there is what he calls the magic ratio of 5:1, which means that a healthy relationship often has five positive interactions for every negative one. That magic number can be hard to achieve when you and your significant other grate on each other all the time. How can you increase the positive interactions when you have forgotten why you got together and can’t find anything at all that you like about one another?

3. Treat your relationship like a startup company. Esther Perel, who writes brilliantly about many of the problems besetting couples, has been an important voice about how couples can get through the pandemic. But long before we had even heard of COVID-19, Perel told Carrie Weber in an interview for Quartz that “once we are in a relationship, much like a steady job, the temptation is to stop thinking about why we do what we do.

Perel says that "the kinds of modern company structures which make work a knife-edge of possible gain or loss, held together by belief, effort, and creative thinking, are a better model for our love lives than the staid careers of an earlier moment in history.”

So treat your relationship like a startup company, even if you’ve been together for a long time. What are your goals? And how can you get there together? Brainstorm with your partner to see if the two of you can figure out some creative strategies for overcoming the difficulties in your life—many of which have been created by the pandemic rather than your dislike for one another.

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4. Borrow conflict resolution techniques from business. For example, techniques from the Thomas-Kilmann Model introduce five different forms of conflict resolution, and then suggest that managers determine which forms they and their employees utilize. To translate this into your relationship, look at the list and think about what techniques you and your partner generally choose. Then, try to apply work from a different kind of conflict resolution than the one you are both used to. For example, maybe your partner tends to avoid conflict and you tend to try to guess what they want and try to do it. As a change, you might try saying that you would like to figure out a solution together, but that you need to have a conversation about what it is that they want. Once you've carefully listened to what they say, you can ask if they're willing to let you say what you would like— not in order to make them accommodate to your needs, but to open up the possibility that together you can figure out a better solution. Often simply shifting gears can lead to better problem-solving—and particularly if you’ve already agreed to think of your relationship as a startup and to begin working together toward your goals.

5. Apply motivational interviewing techniques. Motivational interviewing (MI) is a technique originally developed to help people with problems with substance abuse, developed by psychologists William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick. The basic idea is to help someone begin to recognize their own desire to make changes. As Psychology Today puts it, this is done by encouraging a person to talk about their need for change and their own reasons for wanting to change.”

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Motivational interviewing doesn’t work if you try to force your opinion on the other person, or if you try to convince him or her of something. The hope is that by asking open-ended questions, you will help them hear their own wishes to do something differently. Then they can participate in the problem-solving process with you. As Adam Grant writes in a NY Times article on MI, it isn’t always a sure-fire technique for solving problems. But it can change an endless and fruitless argument about the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, for instance, into a more open-ended search for a reasonable solution.

Surprisingly enough, some of these skills are also useful with your children, your parents, and even your friends. But in the end, these techniques can help the two of you negotiate so that you can stay together or, if even if they don’t repair your relationship, make it possible for you to separate without unnecessary injury to one another.

*Names and identifying information changed for privacy.