Create chemistry – throw someone off a balcony

“What do you say to a man widely blamed for beating you, stealing your job, and trying to have you thrown out of a 10^th-floor window?”

How would you approach the prospect of forming a working relationship with someone you did not like? What if the reason you were nervous was that you suspected they might – or had tried already – to have you killed? Unless you work in a particularly toxic organisation, that’s unlikely. Not so for Morgan Tsvangari, leader of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).The above quote appeared in an article in The Guardian, in which Tsvangari describes establishing a working relationship with Robert Mugabe.

I noticed, as I read on, a number of assumptions I was making, for example, about what kind of man Robert Mugabe ‘must be’, what it ‘must be’ like to work with, how hard it ‘must be’ to achieve anything given his apparent desire to hold on to power at any cost etc. What beliefs underpin those assumptions I am not going to go into, although I acknowledge them. Yet I have no personal experience of Mugabe, or Tsvangari for that matter, so how do I know what it would be like to work with either of them? As Tvangari himself says:

“This is a perpetual suspicion of Mugabe. It’s a template. People can’t believe that Mugabe has any capacity to change.”

Aside from the value of critical thinking – look no further than the knee-jerk reaction to Obama’s plans for reforming healthcare in the US for what happens when it is absent – the article touches on one of my other interests:

“Over a long period of time you start to develop some chemistry…. That’s where you can’t just go in and talk about business, you actually have to talk about personal issues. Sometimes it’s helpful to unlock the barriers that may exist between people.”

What is ‘chemistry’ in the context of human relations? Why is it important? How do you develop it? Is there such a thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ chemistry? The Random House Dictionary offers three definitions of human ‘chemistry’:

• the interaction of one personality with another: “The chemistry between him and his boss was all wrong.”
• sympathetic understanding; rapport: “the astonishing chemistry between the actors.”
• any or all of the elements that make up something: “the chemistry of love.”

In other words, it’s tricky to define, pin down, identify, even for dictionary editors.

‘Chemistry’ also emerged as one of the dominant metaphors for interpersonal ‘fit’ in research I did for my Masters dissertation, and it was clearly something that was difficult for the research participants to define.

Tsvangari appears to come to his relationship with an intention to make it work, and for him that means developing ‘chemistry’. How he proposes to do this is interesting:

“There are certainly many areas where we differ, but we agree to differ. We communicate, we talk, we discuss…I’m very free. I’ve decided that I will not keep anything to myself.”

A culture of straight feedback – which I define as an intention to raise awareness and cultivate learning rather than simply the right to criticize – is the hallmark of high performing teams. I would be curious to know if that resonates with others. And I am equally curious as to whether Tsvangari and Mugabe succeed on in the longterm.