How to Build Incredible Collaborative Relationships at Work with Deb Mashek

·1 hr 31 min·2 clips

7 in 10 people have had horrendous workplace collaborations

Deb Mashek talks with Clint about making collaboration less painful and more productive. She introduces herself as a social psychologist, close relationships researcher, and former professor, and the conversation traces how she moved from teaching and research into business advising and nonprofit work. Her book, Collaborate, is the anchor. The episode uses it to make workplace cooperation feel less abstract and more like a set of habits people can actually try. Clint begins with a straightforward question about her background, and Deb explains how her academic work on close relationships, collaboration, and community building shaped the way she thinks about teams. She also talks about leaving a tenured professorship at Harvey Mudd College after the 2016 election and the campus turmoil that followed, which helps explain why she shifted her work. From there, the episode turns to what makes collaboration feel hard. Deb argues that a lot of friction comes from people treating every interaction like an exchange ledger. She contrasts that with communal norms, where people do useful things for each other without immediately expecting a direct return. The difference sounds small, but she treats it as a major shift in how people experience one another at work. To make the idea concrete, she leans on everyday examples instead of jargon. She talks about doing the dishes, bringing donuts, fixing a squeaky chair with WD-40, and grabbing a coworker a coffee. Those examples turn the theory into something a listener can easily picture in an office or shared household. The conversation keeps circling back to relationship quality. Deb's point is that small acts of care can lower the temperature of a working relationship and make cooperation easier over time. She does not frame collaboration as magic. Instead, she presents it as a practice that gets easier when people stop obsessing over perfectly even trade-offs. The interview stays measured and practical, with Clint guiding the discussion back to the listener whenever the ideas get more technical. By the end, the episode has turned a social-psychology framework into a plain-language guide for making shared work less brittle. It leaves collaboration looking less like a buzzword and more like a daily choice.

As heard by us

A practical look at collaboration that shows how small helpful acts shape work relationships.

Deb Mashek treats collaboration as a habit, not a slogan. She sets transactional exchange against communal norms, where people do small helpful things without tallying favors, and the office examples make the point easy to picture: dishes, coffee, a squeaky chair.

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Why you'd press play

If collaboration feels awkward, this episode gives it a clearer language.

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