Is there a sense of disconnection in some of your working relationships? Do you find it hard to feel that you really belong to a community that you should feel part of? Do you sometimes find yourself wondering what, or who, this relationship is for?
One of the reasons for this might be the lack of a sense of ‘common good’.
The Relational Proximity model (see below) tells us that what we have in common is one of the things which binds a relationship or a community together. We can share a contract, perhaps. But Jonathan Sachs, in Dignity of Difference, uses the word ‘covenant’ to describe relationships that go beyond a contract of interest or advantage and are characterised by trust, loyalty and a sense of shared-ness. He says that “covenants are made when two or more people come together to create a ‘we'” (p151). Is there a ‘we’ in your relationship? Is it ‘me’ and ‘them’ in your community or organisation, or ‘us’?
A ‘common good’ is created when there is recognition that something can only happen or be created when both or all of us participate: we come together in order to share in this common good. And we are not just talking about the relationship having some purpose – for the purpose to be a common good, it must be held in common, and only achievable in common. This is strongest when the decision to work together is not just pragmatic – because many hands make light work – but when we are each needed to play a different part in the whole. A good example of this is an orchestra or a football team.
So coming back to your relationship. Can you identify a common good? What can only happen or be created by the coming together of this relationship, or this community? Is this sense of a common good shared with the other people in the relationship? If you can see it, and share it, it will draw you together. And it will give your relationship a greater sense of rootedness and of the covenant bond that enables you to say (and mean) “We’re in this together.”
(The Relational Proximity model, developed by Relationships Foundation, proposes that there are five preconditions for healthy working relationships – directness, continuity, multiplexity, parity and commonality. Both Sandhams and Relationships Foundation use the model in consultancy practice.)