Get Better

Do you ever feel that relationships at work—and even in life—are harder than they should be? In Get Better: 15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work, Todd Davis argues that almost every success or failure we experience stems from the quality of our relationships. Drawing on decades as FranklinCovey’s Chief People Officer, Davis contends that personal and professional growth begin when we stop trying to change others and instead focus on improving ourselves. When we do, both our influence and fulfillment expand dramatically.

This is not another leadership book filled only with principles and slogans. Davis builds the case that relationships—between colleagues, customers, teams, and leaders—form the foundation for culture, productivity, and happiness. At the heart of his thinking is the idea that “all meaningful change comes from the inside out.” You get better when you deliberately change how you see, think, and act in connection with others. As Davis uses Jean-Paul Sartre’s metaphor from the play No Exit, most of us live in rooms with people we can’t escape—coworkers, family, or friends—and when those relationships sour, life can feel like hell. Yet, the solution is rarely to flee the room; it’s to transform how we relate inside it.

Why Relationships Are the True Competitive Advantage

Every organization claims that people are its greatest asset, but Davis pushes further. He shows that it’s not just people—it’s the nature of the relationships between those people that determine whether a team thrives or implodes. Research from FranklinCovey and Harvard confirms that the best-performing business units are those with high-quality employee and customer relationships. When these relationships are rich with trust, everything moves faster; when they break down, productivity collapses, engagement plummets, and internal battles erupt. Whether you’re a leader, engineer, or parent, your outcomes depend on how well you understand, trust, and invest in the people around you.

From Sartre’s Hell to Relational Heaven

So much of human frustration at work stems from how we view others. Davis uses Sartre’s image—a room with no exit—to show that our misery often arises not from circumstances but from poor relationships. At first, when conflict arises, we point fingers and blame: our boss, our peers, our spouse. Then we seek escape—a new job, a new company, even a new marriage—convinced that a fresh setting will solve everything. But soon we discover the same patterns waiting for us in the next room. The real answer, Davis insists, is to “wear new glasses,” to shift our paradigm so we see others and ourselves more completely and compassionately.

Fifteen Practices That Rebuild Trust and Connection

The book revolves around fifteen practices that act as behavioral bridges between self-improvement and relationship growth. They range from personal habits (“Carry Your Own Weather,” “Avoid the Pinball Syndrome”) to interpersonal skills (“Talk Less, Listen More,” “Make It Safe to Tell the Truth”) and character-based disciplines (“Examine Your Real Motives,” “Start With Humility”). Each practice begins with a vivid story—often of an employee, manager, or parent facing a relational crisis—and ends with concrete steps for turning the insight into action. This structure makes the book practical, not theoretical. You don’t just learn ideas—you apply them in real conversations and daily routines.

Why This Matters Beyond Work

Although the subtitle emphasizes workplace relationships, the lessons reach far beyond the office. Davis’s practices—such as “Play Your Roles Well” and “Take Stock of Your Emotional Bank Accounts”—apply equally to friendships, families, and communities. The human need for connection, trust, and meaning transcends professions. In effect, Get Better is about cultivating emotional intelligence and personal leadership in every sphere of life. What starts as self-awareness blossoms into empathy; empathy ripples outward into influence; and influence creates collective success.

The Inside-Out Framework of Getting Better

Davis builds on Dr. Stephen R. Covey’s “inside-out” philosophy from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Instead of chasing quick fixes or external validation, you begin by mastering your paradigms—your lenses of perception. How you see determines how you think, which determines how you feel, which guides what you do, and those behaviors ultimately produce your results. Changing your behavior without changing your paradigm yields only minor improvements; changing your paradigm yields radical breakthroughs. In relationships, that shift translates into patience, trust, and authentic influence.

The Ultimate Promise of “Get Better”

Davis’s message is uplifting: by practicing self-awareness, humility, and trust, you can turn any room—any relationship—from a form of hell into a space of cooperation and growth. His stories—from marathon training with his daughter to coaching leaders who rediscover balance—remind you that every transformation begins with one choice: to get better yourself. Through that choice, you become the kind of person others want to work with, follow, and love. In the end, Get Better teaches that success and happiness depend not only on what you achieve but on how you connect. The better you get, the better everyone around you becomes.

Todd Davis begins his first practice with a deceptively simple idea: how we see the world determines how we behave. If your perceptions are flawed, even good intentions will lead you astray. He compares our paradigms—the mental frameworks guiding our understanding—to the prescription lenses in eyeglasses. When our lenses distort reality, we act on incomplete information, create false judgments, and sabotage results. To get better, we must change the glasses we wear.

Seeing Shapes Thinking, Feeling, and Doing

Davis recounts his own experience needing glasses in second grade. Before he wore them, he didn’t realize he was missing the leaves on distant trees. Once he put them on, the world sharpened. In relationships and leadership, perceptual clarity works the same way. How you see others shapes what you think about them; what you think shapes how you feel; and feelings drive behavior—and finally, results. When we assume others are lazy, selfish, or incompetent, we treat them as such, reinforcing the very behaviors we dislike. But with a paradigm shift, we can reframe those perceptions and create a virtuous cycle of respect and improvement.

Changing Lenses in Relationships

The story of Jon and Isabel demonstrates this idea. Jon saw himself as “not a people person,” which limited his ability to connect and collaborate. He also saw his colleague, Isabel, as a roadblock—a negative assumption that led him to avoid her. Davis encourages Jon to challenge these paradigms by asking: What if you actually are capable of being a people person? What if Isabel cares just as much about the deadline as you do? When Jon changed his perspective, his behavior followed—he spoke with Isabel directly, built understanding, and discovered shared goals. The result wasn’t only teamwork—it was mutual respect born of a new lens.

The Power of Paradigm Shifts

Davis connects this practice to the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn, who argued that breakthroughs come from “breaking with old ways of thinking.” In leadership contexts, those breakthroughs transform not only strategies but relationships. When Davis encouraged his daughter, Sydney, to train for a marathon, he at first saw her as fragile because of her hearing loss. Twice she quit, reinforcing his limiting view. Only when he changed lenses—seeing her resilience instead of her weakness—did he realize she could finish a marathon. Together they crossed the finish line, proving that seeing people’s potential, not their shortcomings, unlocks growth. (Stephen Covey expands this idea in his teaching that “leadership is communicating worth and potential so clearly that people come to see it in themselves.”)

From Fixed Views to Empowering Paradigms

Common limiting paradigms sound familiar: “I’ll never be good enough,” “People can’t be trusted,” or “My colleague doesn’t know what she’s doing.” Davis invites you to replace them with empowering ones: “I can learn,” “People mean well,” “My colleague is capable.” Like switching from cloudy to clear lenses, these shifts change how you feel and act. The ultimate takeaway is simple but profound: every improvement in your relationships begins with seeing differently. You don’t need new people—you need new glasses. When you adjust your vision, you don’t just change your world; you change theirs.

Have you ever felt trapped by someone else’s behavior? Davis’s second practice reminds us of our ultimate freedom—the power to choose our attitude. Inspired by Viktor Frankl’s insight that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing…the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude,” Davis encourages us to stop letting others’ emotions and external storms dictate our weather. When we carry our own weather, we remain centered in our values rather than tossed around by circumstances.

The Stimulus–Response Gap

Every day presents triggers: criticism, deadlines, misunderstandings. Between each stimulus and response exists a brief space—our chance to pause and act intentionally. Davis shares how his colleague Aaron exemplifies this principle, calmly responding when a hiring manager rejects a candidate Aaron spent months recruiting. Instead of reacting in anger, Aaron pauses, reframes the situation, and chooses patience. Later, when Aaron faces a brain tumor, his ability to “carry his own weather” becomes life-saving: he approaches surgery with gratitude rather than fear. This mindset doesn’t change events—it changes how we experience them.

Avoiding the Victim Mindset

Davis contrasts Aaron with another leader who rapidly fired a well-liked employee after discovering a side job. The decision, made in anger, damaged his reputation and trust with the team. When Davis later asks him what legacy he wants to leave, the leader realizes his emotional reaction betrayed his deeper value of mentorship. Through reflection, he understands that reactivity replaced intentional leadership. The lesson: when we blame, accuse, or indulge in self-pity, we become victims of others’ weather systems. True leaders choose calm over chaos.

Proactivity in Action

Carrying your own weather means acting from principle, not impulse. You create internal sunshine by aligning feelings with your purpose—whether at work or home. Davis’s example of his father’s advice illustrates this shift. When Todd complained about unfair pay, his father asked, “Have you thought about what you could do to qualify for more instead of blaming others?” That question redirected him from resentment to proactive growth. (This echoes Stephen Covey’s first habit: Be Proactive.)

The Legacy of Inner Control

By learning to pause before reacting, you move from living life as a weather vane to becoming the author of your own climate. Whether facing criticism, unforeseen crises, or loss, this practice builds resilience and influence. You can’t stop the rain, but you can decide how to walk through it. In Davis’s words, “The heart of carrying your own weather is always a choice.” That choice not only transforms difficult days—it transforms people who watch you handle them.

Have you ever reached the end of a frantic day and wondered what you actually accomplished? Davis calls this exhaustion the “Pinball Syndrome”—the feeling of being bounced among endless urgencies that mimic progress but produce little value. The metaphor, drawn from vintage pinball machines, describes how we lunge at flashing lights, emails, and meetings, mistaking rapid activity for effectiveness. To get better, we must learn to differentiate the urgent from the truly important.

The Pinball Trap

Melissa, a talented leader, embodies this syndrome. Though passionate about her work, she constantly cancels meetings with her team because “things are too busy.” Her to-do list defines her worth, but her relationships suffer. When Davis confronts her, he helps her see that urgent tasks—emails, last-minute requests—crowd out what matters: mentoring and trust. Like Eastern Airlines Flight 401, whose crew fixated on a burned-out light and crashed because they stopped flying the plane, Melissa’s focus on small urgencies blinds her to larger priorities like people and culture.

The Cost and Cure

To avoid the syndrome, Davis proposes simple but powerful disciplines. First, set goals that matter: define a destination based on values, not tasks. Ask yourself which actions strengthen relationships or create lasting impact. Second, schedule your priorities: if your calendar is full of urgent things, the important ones will always fall off. Davis’s own “permanent whiteboard” story—where his team’s important cultural initiatives literally dried into permanence after years of neglect—illustrates how we ignore the meaningful for the loud.

Resisting the Game’s Allure

Urgency feels rewarding because it activates quick feedback—a dopamine hit from completing tasks. But those tiny wins, like pinball scoring lights, keep us playing endlessly. Davis differentiates tasks we react to (emails, crises) from goals we act upon (relationships, growth, prevention). Important things rarely clamor for attention; they wait for intentional effort. He encourages “blocking time for what’s timeless”—relationship building, reflection, strategic planning, even parenting.

Stepping Away From the Machine

Avoiding the Pinball Syndrome means pausing between rounds—choosing when to play and when to step back. When Melissa finally blocks time for her team and builds “immovable walls around the important,” both morale and performance rebound. Davis’s closing image of two funerals—a man defined by endless urgencies and a woman defined by endless kindness—reminds us what truly matters. The game eventually ends; what remains are the relationships we nurtured while playing.

We all believe we act for noble reasons, but Davis challenges that assumption. In his ninth practice, “Examine Your Real Motives,” he reveals that our behavior often runs on autopilot—driven by fear, ego, or insecurity instead of genuine purpose. Examining motives is about aligning your intentions with your core values so they uplift rather than diminish yourself and others.

Healthy vs. Unhealthy Motives

Borrowing from Martin Luther King Jr. and St. Thomas Aquinas, Davis defines healthy motives as those that uplift the human condition; unhealthy motives are those that degrade it. Leaders often start with healthy intentions—to develop people, build culture—but slip into unhealthy ones: fear of failure, desire for control, hunger for recognition. Kevin’s story about his boss Sam illustrates this drift. Sam uses Kevin’s technology plan at work but takes implicit credit. When confronted, he realizes that vanity—not collaboration—drove his choice. This self-awareness becomes his turning point.

The 5 Whys of Introspection

To uncover hidden motives, Davis adapts Toyota’s “5 Whys” technique: keep asking yourself “why” until you reach root intent. When John delays firing decisions claiming concern for process, his fifth “why” reveals he actually fears conflict. Only then can he act consciously rather than react habitually. This process, though simple, demands humility and courage. (In The Speed of Trust, Stephen M. R. Covey echoes this principle—trust grows when motives are transparent and positive.)

Choosing Abundance Over Scarcity

Unhealthy motives thrive in scarcity thinking—the belief that success is limited, so others’ gain is our loss. Davis contrasts this with abundance thinking, where success multiplies through generosity. He shares a story of a hotel general manager who shifted his legacy goal from personal awards to helping his team earn their own. Abundance transforms relationships because it redirects energy from self-promotion to shared elevation.

Declaring Your Intent

Finally, Davis teaches that pure motives must be declared. When you clearly state your intent—to help, to learn, to support—you remove suspicion and invite trust. In one story, a performance conversation softens when Davis begins by saying, “Our only intent is to help you succeed.” Similarly, even in uncomfortable situations—like confronting an employee about misconduct—he disarms defensiveness by claiming his intent to preserve the person’s job, not punish. Transparency turns hard conversations into opportunities for respect.

Examining motives means rewiring autopilot with awareness. Each “why” digs deeper until your behavior mirrors your values. When motives uplift others, credibility and peace follow. Getting better, Davis concludes, begins not with doing more but with wanting better—for yourself and for everyone involved.

One of the most courageous acts in relationships is inviting honest feedback—and accepting it. Davis’s thirteenth practice, “Make It Safe to Tell the Truth,” explores how to reduce defensiveness and build trust through openness. Without safety, truth stays buried, blind spots multiply, and leaders stagnate. Creating this safety transforms misunderstandings into shared improvement.

Why Feedback Feels Like Hell

Most people fear feedback because it exposes vulnerability. Carsten, a senior manager, exemplifies this fear. Convinced leaders should give feedback but never receive it, he alienates his multilingual workforce and ignores rising defect rates. Only when performance collapses does he finally listen—and discovers that employees hold the solution. His openness not only saves the company but reshapes its culture: every meeting thereafter includes honest dialogue.

Four Practices That Make Feedback Safe

• Assume good intent: Behind every critique is vulnerability. Believe people want you to succeed rather than attack you.
• Ask for feedback: Like surveys after hotel stays, deliberate requests normalize improvement. Leaders who ask are rated far higher in overall effectiveness.
• Evaluate feedback wisely: Not all input is created equal. Use discernment to focus on feedback aligned with your values and purpose.
• Act on it: Safety becomes real only when people see you change.

Learning Through Vulnerability

Davis’s examples range from humorous moments—like alerting a friend that his pants split—to profound ones, such as a consultant named Dana who transforms her career by relentlessly inviting critiques. Dana’s humility makes feedback contagious; her reputation soars because she keeps improving. The takeaway: when others know you value their perspective, they’ll risk being honest. Gratitude replaces ego; growth replaces fear.

The Feedback Loop of Trust

Feedback isn’t just performance data—it’s relational nourishment. Stephen Covey famously called it “the breakfast of champions.” Davis extends the metaphor: it’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner for those who build effective relationships. Inviting truth and responding with gratitude create self-awareness and shared progress. In the end, safety isn’t about comfort—it’s about courage expressed through listening. When truth becomes safe, relationships become strong.

Davis closes his book with the most transformative of all virtues: humility. He admits that his original plan to write a book about leadership failed—because the title Lead with Humility already belonged to Pope Francis. Instead, Davis discovered that humility was not merely a topic for leaders; it was the foundation for getting better in every relationship.

Humility Is Strength, Not Weakness

Drawing on David Bobb’s definition, Davis portrays humility as “strength, not weakness.” True humility comes from security, not insecurity—it frees us from ego and grants energy to serve others. The humble person doesn’t deny their talents; they simply recognize those talents are gifts to share. When you practice humility, you replace the need to be right with the desire to do what is right.

Behavior Born of Humility

Humility fuels all fourteen previous practices. It enables listening, feedback, empathy, trust, and even failure. Davis lists everyday expressions: saying “I’m sorry,” celebrating others’ successes, asking for help, forgiving, and being patient. He recounts stories of quiet, humble professionals—like Paige, a leader who redirects team praise to others and balances courage with consideration. Her humility makes her both competent and respected, while an arrogant colleague’s self-promotion isolates him. Jim Collins’s research in Good to Great confirms this pattern: great companies are led by humble leaders with fierce professional will.

Humility’s Broader Impact

Scientific studies back Davis’s claim. People in humble states of mind exhibit stronger self-control, persistence, and social bonds. Humility increases resilience and willingness to learn. In workplaces, it fosters innovation because humble people aren’t paralyzed by fear of failure—they value learning over ego. Davis’s story of a sales leader who gifts his bonus to teammates highlights humility in action: placing others’ success above personal gain.

Begin Everything With Humility

Davis integrates humility into his final application: before implementing any practice—from “Wear Glasses That Work” to “Extend Trust”—start with humility. Approach others with curiosity, gratitude, and genuine regard. Reflect weekly on relationships that need care, applying humility first to understand what’s missing. This mindset transforms Sartre’s concept of hell—rooms full of ego and conflict—into environments of empathy and peace.

Ultimately, humility is the gateway to continuous improvement. It makes every room you inhabit—a team, a marriage, a community—feel less like confinement and more like paradise. When you start with humility, you don’t just get better; you help everyone else get better too.