Publisher's Synopsis
You are not alone if you struggle with relationships. The old adage, "you can't live with 'em and you can't live without 'em" seems all too fitting. The quality and stability of our relationships reach into every corner of our lives from marriage and family to business and career to social and community involvement. Starting thirty years ago my spouse and business partner and I began our work with multi-generational family businesses. Building on our backgrounds in psychology and business management we drew on a variety of sources including organization development, business management, family systems theory, developmental and social psychology, change management and even human motivation to develop the tools we needed to help our clients. It was always interesting to me that we consistently worked with people who, as individuals, were intelligent, competent and genuinely good people. It was apparent, however, that these individual traits did not always translate into equally successful, productive and enjoyable relationships between them. It was obvious that something else was going on, or something else was missing or needed, in order for a group of otherwise capable individuals to create and maintain successful relationships. Relationship success could not be adequately explained from the existing perspectives of individual intelligence (IQ) or emotional intelligence (EQ). From this realization and the strong desire to bridge this apparent gap in knowledge and perspective, we introduced a new way of understanding and working with relationships which we named Relationship Intelligence or RQ. It became the subject of our book, Getting Along In Family Business: The Relationship Intelligence Handbook, published in 1999. RQ quickly became a popular subject for seminars and workshops which we offered to business, trade and professional groups. A common comment by people who participated in these seminars and workshops was that the principles of Relationship Intelligence apply to all relationships. Participants would say things like "I can see how this applies to my marriage" or "this explains why we have such conflict in our partnership" and even "I'm going to talk about this with the board I sit on." They encouraged me to write another book that would help everybody, not just families in business, deal with all the significant relationships in their lives. Fifteen years later Getting Along: Making Significant Relationships Work has been born from that encouragement.
