Couples Therapy for Coworkers

The best professional communication advice you'll ever get was written for people trying not to get divorced.

That sounds strange, but let me explain. A lot of the most rigorous research on how people actually talk to each other came out of studying couples in conflict — John Gottman could famously watch a couple argue for fifteen minutes and predict divorce with unsettling accuracy. And it works even better on your coworker, your boss, or the client you email twice a week than it does on your spouse. There's simply less goodwill at the office to absorb a clumsy sentence, so getting the words right matters more, not less.

And tech has a real problem with this. Bad communication habits spread like a virus — a founder models something dysfunctional, the early team catches it, carries it to the next company, and before long a whole industry has quietly agreed that blunt-force rudeness, vague feedback, and contempt dressed up as candor are just how things work. We call it being "direct," or "high-performance culture." Mostly it's people repeating the bad manners they picked up at their last job, because nobody ever stopped to ask whether the norm was actually normal or just common. I'm sick of it, and I'm not willing to keep passing it down.

I've run into it with coworkers, bosses, clients, and vendors — every direction there is. So what happened to professionalism? It used to mean something specific: you dressed up, you chose your words carefully, you treated people with genuine courtesy. These days most of us talk to colleagues in a way we'd never use anywhere else — not with a friend, not with family, not even with the barista we make small talk with every morning. And now that most of work happens through a screen — Slack, Zoom, email — the same thing that turns reasonable people into monsters in comment sections gets aimed at coworkers instead. The people we spend the most waking hours around somehow get the worst version of us.

One caveat before we start: this isn't a passive-aggressive memo about any one person or any one conversation, recent or otherwise. It all comes from patterns I've watched play out for years, across every kind of working relationship and pointed in every direction — mine very much included. If you catch yourself in an example, relax. So do I.

So let's steal from the marriage counselors. Nearly all of it comes back to a single habit.

Own your side

Most bad communication is the same mistake repeated over and over again. You take something happening inside you — a worry, a preference, a frustration, an assumption — and you hand it over as if it were a fact about the other person. Then you're surprised when they get defensive.

Owning your side just means keeping your stuff labeled as yours.

Instead of:

"You never review my PRs on time."

Try:

"When my PRs sit for a couple days, the whole feature stalls and I start context-switching — could you get to them sooner?"

The first is a charge they have to defend against. The second is just you reporting your own experience, and there's nothing there to argue with. This is the "I" statement — yes, the oldest cliché in couples therapy. It's also the whole game. Framing, feedback, curiosity, boundaries all come back to it: say what's yours as yours.

"It's just business, it's not personal"

There's one phrase that gives people permission to skip all of this, and it needs the boot first.

"It's not personal, it's just business" is one of the most abused sentences at work. People use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card — say something harsh or contemptuous, then hide behind the org chart when it lands badly.

But that phrase is answering a question nobody asked. There are two separate things happening in anything you say: the decision and the delivery. The decision can absolutely be impersonal — cutting a project, passing on a proposal, not renewing a contract, even firing someone, might have nothing to do with anyone as a human being. Fine. That's where "it's not personal" holds up.

The delivery is a different story. The second the words leave your mouth they land on a real person, and any contempt riding along in them is something you chose to add.

Instead of:

"We're passing on your proposal — honestly, it was pretty sloppy."

Try:

"We're passing on your proposal. It came in over budget and the timeline didn't work."

Same decision. One of them just chose to be a jerk on the way out. Respect lives entirely in the delivery — "it's just business" can explain the decision, never the cruelty you added to it.

If you've ever watched someone use "I was just being honest" the same way in their personal life, you already get it — honesty gets weaponized into a license to be cruel. Gottman has a name for what both phrases are protecting: contempt. It was the single biggest predictor of divorce in his research, and it rots a professional relationship just as fast.

There's a flip side, though, and it matters just as much. Respect doesn't mean going soft, and it definitely doesn't mean going vague. You can be completely blunt and completely respectful at once:

"I don't think this is ready to ship. Here's why, and I think it needs another pass before Thursday."

Blunt, and not a drop of contempt in it. Blunt is fine. Contemptuous is not — even when it sounds like plain talk. The tell: real bluntness goes after the work, contempt goes after the person.

That same line separates an observation from an interpretation.

Instead of:

"You missed the deadline — you obviously don't care about this project."

Try:

"You missed the deadline. What happened?"

One is a fact we can put on the table and sort out together. The other is a story I've invented about your character, and now we're fighting about the story instead of fixing the problem. Stay on what you can actually see and let people keep their own motives. The moment you start narrating someone's intentions back to them, you've stopped describing and started prosecuting.

When your "question" is actually an accusation

Someone once hit me with a version of this: "Did you realize X, which is Y?"

I felt attacked, and it took me a second to work out why, because on the surface it's just a question. But look at everything smuggled inside it: that X is the case, that it's obviously Y, and that I was too oblivious to notice. All three turned out to be wrong — and the framing didn't leave any room for them to be wrong. That question mark is doing a lot of pretending. Underneath, it's a verdict.

Instead of:

"Did you realize X, which is Y?"

Try:

"I've got a concern that X might be Y, because of Z. Am I seeing this right, or am I missing something?"

The first half keeps the concern labeled as mine and shows my reasoning, so you can poke holes in it instead of just swallowing it. But that last clause is the whole point — am I seeing this right, or am I missing something? It reopens every assumption I just made and hands you back the benefit of the doubt. But only if you mean it — a fake "am I missing something?" fools nobody.

Feedback they can actually use

Someone once gave me feedback on my work that went something like: "This is bad, I don't like it."

There's nothing in that I can use. It tells me they're unhappy without handing over a single piece of information. I can't make the work better and I can't figure out what they actually want, because all I know is that they don't like it.

Bumping it up to respectful helps a little:

"I'm worried this isn't matching what I had in mind, and I want to sort it out before we keep going."

Kinder, no contempt — but let's be honest, it's still useless. It tells me the mood changed. It doesn't tell me what's wrong or what "good" would even look like. Respect gets you out of jerk territory. Specifics are what actually let me fix something.

Instead of:

"This is bad, I don't like it."

Try:

"This misses the mark for me because the tone reads too formal and the layout feels cluttered — here's the direction I'd rather go."

Now I can do something with it.

Being this specific can feel almost petty, like you're spelling out the obvious. You're not. Look at how much of everyday back-and-forth quietly hands the work to the other person to guess at:

• "I like that one." — which one? Name it.
• "That wasn't right." — what wasn't right? Name it.
• "Do you want this or that?" — "Yes." — ...which one??

Every one of those makes the listener guess, and half the time they guess wrong — and now you're annoyed at them for a gap you created. Being vague is just skipping your half of the work and billing them for the miss.

It runs both directions, though. Be specific enough that people don't have to guess, and make it completely normal for someone to say "wait, which one?" when you slip. The real test is whether someone can admit they didn't follow — or tell you that you weren't clear — without bracing for how you'll take it. When asking feels risky, people go quiet and let the confusion compound, which costs everyone a lot more than a clarifying question ever would.

Get curious before you decide

It really turns on one question you carry into the room: are you trying to win, or trying to understand? Arguing to win, you listen for openings — really you're just waiting for your turn to fire back. Curious, you listen to actually hear it. The giveaway is what you do with a point you disagree with.

Instead of:

"That won't work, because—"

Try:

"Huh — what makes you say that?"

One shuts the door, the other opens it. And it only works if the curiosity is real: "am I missing something?" lands when you actually want the answer, and reading a clumsy message generously holds up only when you truly believe there's a fair point buried in it somewhere.

But don't take it too far. Stretched to infinity, curiosity becomes its own problem — endless "help me understand your perspective" that never lands anywhere is just conflict-dodging in a nicer outfit. Sometimes you're right and the other person isn't, and the honest thing is to say so. Get curious first, understand why a reasonable person sees it differently, and then you're still completely allowed to make the call.

Play it back — but only after they've spoken

The most famous piece of marriage advice is probably active listening: hear someone out, then say it back to show you actually caught it. "So what I'm hearing is…" "If I've got this right, you're saying…" "Based on what you said, it seems like the real issue is…" At the right moment, it's disarming. The person feels understood, which is usually what they wanted even more than they wanted you to agree.

But it all rides on one word: after. You play it back after they've said their piece. Flip the order — lead with it, before they've actually told you anything — and the very same sentence turns into an accusation.

Instead of:

"It sounds like you've written off the whole plan." (they never said that)

Try:

"So if I've got this right, it's the timeline you're worried about — not the plan itself?" (after they've explained)

Open with "it sounds like you're saying X" and you're not reflecting anything — you're putting words in someone's mouth and making them clean it up. Now they have to stop and correct you, which puts them on the defensive, which puts you on the defensive right back — and now you're arguing, when neither of you wanted to. It's the same gentle, understanding-sounding language either way. The effect flips entirely on whether it comes before or after the other person has actually spoken.

Here's how you know which one you're doing: a real recap can be checked against something they actually said. If there's nothing to check it against yet, you're not listening. You're guessing out loud and calling it listening.

And even in the right order, this should be a scalpel, not a Swiss Army knife. Save it for the moments where there's a genuine misunderstanding to clear up — not every third sentence. Nothing turns "so what I'm hearing is…" back into an obvious technique faster than using the same line five times in one conversation. If you're going to play something back, mean it, and say it fresh.

Catch what's going right

So far this has all been about friction. But the thing people get wrong most often isn't a hard conversation handled badly — it's saying nothing at all when things are going fine.

If the only time you open your mouth is when something's wrong, you've turned yourself into a smoke alarm: useful, but nobody's glad to hear from you. Gottman even put a number on it — in relationships that last, the good interactions outnumber the critical ones by about five to one. Anyone who only ever flags problems — a boss, a peer, a client — is running the relationship like a marriage headed for divorce.

And good praise follows the same rule as good criticism: get specific.

Instead of:

"Good job!"

Try:

"The way you traced that bug back to the caching layer instead of just patching the symptom — that's exactly the instinct I want more of."

"Good job" is just "this is bad" with the sign flipped: a feeling, no information. Specific praise tells someone what to do more of. Vague praise tells them you're in a decent mood and nothing else.

And this isn't buttering someone up before the next criticism. You're keeping an honest record. If you're going to be precise about what's broken, be precise about what's working too, or your read of someone's work is just a running tab of complaints.

Where the benefit of the doubt runs out

One last thing, because I'm not preaching that you should become a doormat.

Assume the best. Read the clumsy message in the most generous light. Translate the badly-worded concern into the reasonable one that's probably underneath it. All of that is the right response to someone who's simply bad at communicating — vague, unclear, leaving you to guess what they meant. Someone fumbling the words is worth your patience, because the problem is a lack of skill, not a lack of respect.

There's an upside to being the one who practices all this when the other person doesn't: you're quietly teaching them. People rarely change how they communicate because they were told to. They change because they felt how much better it goes when someone does it well — your calm "am I understanding you right?" lands better than their sharp "did you realize," and they file that away. Model it consistently and the whole exchange rises to meet you, no lesson required.

But grace is reserved. Keep extending it to someone who's genuinely contemptuous, or who steps over a line you've already drawn, and you're just teaching them it works on you.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Behavior you keep tolerating is behavior you're encouraging. So here's my rule of thumb: I let it slide the first time — everyone has an off day, and sometimes people genuinely don't realize. If it happens again, I draw the line. Exceptions exist, but that's the default.

And you can hold a hard line without making it a threat — say where you stand, and leave it there.

Instead of:

"Watch yourself, or there'll be consequences."

Try:

"I'm not going to keep going in a conversation where I'm talked to like that."

Same boundary. One is a threat, the other just you naming your limit — and only one of them keeps your own hands clean.

AI already taught you this

Working with AI has hammered home one lesson: output quality is directly proportional to input quality. Feed a model a vague, context-free prompt and you get vague, generic garbage back. Tell it exactly what you want, give it the background, spell out what "good" looks like, and it delivers.

Good prompting is, at its core, good communication. Same rules: be specific, supply the context, state the goal, don't make the thing on the other end guess what you meant. Anyone who's gotten good at prompting has been unknowingly practicing the exact habits that make a person easy to work with.

You'd never feed a model three lazy words and then blame it for missing your point. You'd go fix the prompt. Yet we do exactly that to each other all day — toss someone a half-formed ask, then get annoyed when they guess wrong. Assume the agent already has your context, and you'll be disappointed every single time.

Assumptions are premeditated disappointments — with a model, and with a person. The difference is that a model has no feelings to bruise while you sort out what you actually meant. Your coworker does, which makes the care you'd put into a good prompt the least you owe them. So give the people you work with the same thing you'd give a good prompt — say what you actually mean, ask what they actually meant, and extend the benefit of the doubt when they miss.