1 Way To Be A Better Partner
“… and she has excellent taste in men.”
In honour of Valentine’s Day, I’ve written about what may be the most important thing for you to get right in your relationship. That’s a bold claim, and I think this lives up to it.
In How Will You Measure Your Life, Clayton Christensen (a business prof at Harvard Business School) applies business theories to personal lives. He talks about how companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, rather than what those customers really need.
Why should you care? Because you as a partner need to be focusing on what your partner needs, not what you want your partner to need.
The “Job To Be Done” Theory
The theory says: “what causes us to buy a product or service is that we actually hire products to do jobs for us.”
A big fast-food restaurant was trying to ramp up the sales of their milkshakes. They questioned customers who fit the profile of milkshake purchasers and asked them how to improve the milkshake so that the customers would buy more of them. The company followed the suggestions they were given, but sales stayed flat.
So Christensen’s colleagues stood in a store all day and took careful notes. What time did people buy these milkshakes? Who were they with? What else did they buy? Etc.
It turns out that there were two broad categories of customers:
About half of the milkshakes were sold in the early morning. They went to people who were almost always alone, bought just the milkshake, and drove off with it immediately. They were commuters looking for something to do while driving to keep the commute interesting. And they wanted to stay full until lunch.
The other milkshakes were sold to fathers. Fathers who were tired of saying no to their kids and just wanted something easy to say yes to, so they could feel good about being a dad. But the milkshake took forever for the kids to eat. The “dads didn’t hire the milkshake to keep their son entertained for a long time; they hired it to be nice.” Eventually they lost patience and the milkshakes would get thrown away half finished.
So how do you improve the milkshake?
For the commuter, you could add chunks of fruit - “but not to make it healthy, because that’s not the reason it’s being hired. It’s being hired … to keep their commute interesting. The unexpected fruit would do just that.”
For the dad, you could have a half-size shake, or make it thinner so it could be finished more quickly, so the dads wouldn’t feel like bad fathers (which they did when they threw out unfinished shakes or felt impatient waiting for their sons to finish).
It’s clear I hope - the milkshake is being hired for two very different jobs. If you tried to improve that milkshake in a one size fits all way, you’d just make something that didn’t work particularly well for either group.
How Does This Work In Your Relationship?
Christensen gives an example of a friend, who came home after a crazy day at work to find his wife had an even crazier day. The kids were off the walls, the dishes were piled up, and there was no dinner. So without a word he rolled up his sleeves and got to work washing the breakfast dishes and making dinner, feeling proud that he was being a great husband.
And then he went upstairs and found his wife crying. She was upset - at him. The day had been crazy not because of the chores, but because of spending hours and hours with small demanding children (as the father of a toddler, I get this). What she needed most was a real conversation with an adult who cared about her.
The husband was being selfless, and he was giving his wife exactly what he thought she needed. But it wasn’t what she actually needed. His effort was misplaced - he was making the milkshake thicker when it should have been thinner.
It’s not uncommon for these problems to happen in relationships with selfless people. Each person gives to the other and feels that their giving is not being appreciated, and they don’t realize that what they’re giving is not what the other person needs.
Of course, it’s complicated by the fact that we don’t always know what our partner needs - what they’ve “hired us to do”. So how do you know whether your partner wants a thicker milkshake or fruitier milkshake? Start with being curious and listening.
What does this mean for you?
What job has your partner hired you to do? Two interesting ways to think about it:
Why did they hire you as a partner? What job were they looking to do by hiring a partner and getting into a relationship?
Why did they hire you as a partner? Why did they think you would do well at it?
Be curious about it. Maybe ask them. And then make sure you focus your efforts on what really matters to your partner.
Focus on what they need, not what you want them to need.