My husband and I are complete opposites. I mean, really opposite. I am serious, he is funny. I am a planner, he is spontaneous. I am direct, assertive, and occasionally confrontational, he cracks jokes to avoid confrontation and is more of a people pleaser. It takes time and really getting to know me on a deeper level before one might possibly decide to like me. He can become someone’s best man in one conversation. Yet, somehow we got married and chose to run a business together. Ranching together can be really hard for married couples: young and old. Afterall, you are, in fact, co-workers. In most other businesses, regular professional development is done to help employees manage healthy co-worker relationships. I believe that if you are not intentionally and diligently working towards making your working relationship better, it is really easy to let your marriage fall into unhealthy habits over time without even realizing it. It takes a lot of patience, teamwork, and figuring out your roles. For us, it is a constant reminder that we are on the same team, even if we have different ideas on how to get to the end result (which we do, 98.7% of the time). Let me be transparent, this isn’t always pretty. It would be an extremely far stretch to say that we have it figured out. But here are some strategies we use to help us.
We have a mission and vision statement for our ranch that details the importance of relationships and outlines our overall goals. This gets read aloud at our weekly ranch meetings to remind us that we all have the same goals, and ultimately want the same things.
We have weekly meetings. Every Monday, our ranch team sits down for coffee and an informal meeting. We discuss any new business, prioritize projects that need done, go over our schedules, and make lists for each person for the week. On the first meeting of the month, we do some form of professional development. (Note: We are very grateful to our EL Board of Directors for encouraging us to implement these meetings.)
We know our roles. We have an organizational chart that details all of the responsibilities on the ranch. A person is assigned to each item. That person doesn’t necessarily have to be the one to complete the duty, but they are the one responsible for making sure it gets done.
We remind each other regularly that we are on the same team. Saying this out loud often helps deescalate a tense situation (something we are very familiar with, haha).
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