Archive for the ‘relationships’ Category

We live in a world where we get to choose – everyday, and in almost everything we do. Yet we often believe we don’t have a choice.

If developing relationships is a priority, then what will you give up? How will you give it up?

Poof. Time is now available. Spend it creating, developing and sustaining the relationships that will help you to be the best leader you can.

When I end a coaching engagement with a client, I make a point of following up a few months later to find out:

• what they’ve learned sice we stopped working together. Retrospect is such a great thing, and I am generally amazed at the new things that unfold for these amazing leaders once we’re done working together.
• if the changes they made while we worked together are “sustainable”; do they continue to do the things they committed to?
• what I can learn. Selfishly, the time period between our last meeting and this “check up” can bring my former clients new insights that are good for me to pass along to other clients in similar situations.

Last year, I had begun working with a highly successful scientist and director of a medical laboratory in a large health care organization. He had a big job ahead of him: in a lab with long-service technicians, he was charged with modernizing the lab with new, and more efficient, equipment. He was faced with a huge change management challenge.

Interviews with his manager and those around him indicated that he was not connecting with the people in the lab, and they were resisting the changes that needed to be made. It became obvious that he was working much too hard to implement the changes. So we set about to create a plan to make it easier.

Some of the strategies outlined in his action plan seemed to be very simple. He made a plan to set aside time to regularly walk through the labs, while stopping and talking to people, asking open-ended questions, and listening deeply. Indeed, this man found what he called “small talk” to be a powerful tool in getting to know others and allowing them to get to know him. As an introvert, small talk was not his strength, yet he was courageously willing to try it in service to the large and highly visible project his organization needed to implement.

He also engaged the staff in implementation solutions, regularly asking for (and adopting) their opinions. He set up project teams to work on the major parts of the implementation.

Success! Several months after our work together is completed, I heard him tell that the changes went relatively smoothly thanks to his reaching out and improving the relationships he had with the individuals in the labs. When asked what he would do differently next time when there is a project in his area of this magnitude, he said “I will make it a priority to develop great relationships with the people who do the work”.

I have no doubt that he will be successful with that next, even more significant project, whatever it may be.

What are you doing to intentionally improve your work relationships?

My colleague and friend Paul Knudstrup of Midwest Consulting Group, has provided the following post that is a nice “follow-on” to my own March 1 post on relationships. As our guest blogger, he provides a different twist on the topic, below:

What do you “expect” of your key relationships – those employees, co-workers, boss, spouse, family in your life? Do you expect those relationships to be relatively positive most of the time? Do you expect your employees to perform well on a consistent basis? And do they perform well? Do you expect your boss to keep you in the loop, communicate well and thoughtfully, and give you opportunities to grow, and help you in your career? Does that happen? If you can honestly say that you have these kind of high expectations and these key people actuallly do meet those expectations, then please comment on this blog. We all want to know how to have that happen.

Or do you expect your employees to be lazy, unengaged in their work, and generally perform poorly? And they do. Do you expect your boss to be a jerk . . . and he or she is a jerk? If so, then why do you think that has happened?

I submit that in both cases, you are getting the result you expect. It is the expectation – a belief held that has not yet become reality – that at least partially causes the expectation to become reality. Think about the expectations you have for the people around you. Are your expectations positive, results-oriented, with a positive focus? Then the odds improve that the successful outcome will become true.

Most of us know the basic story of professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady.” The play and two movies (1938 Pygmalion and 1964`s My Fair Lady) illustrate how expectations can become reality. Rooted in mythology, the relevance and basic truth of the self-fulfilling prophecy has been proven again and again.

Here`s what happens: An expectation that is not necessarily tue becomes true when people act upon that expectation. So, our expectations, either positive or negative, influence the outcome. For instance, the Great Depression of the 1930`s saw bank “runs” as depositors demanded their money in cash until all the onhand cash was gone and the bank forced to close. People believed that if they didn`t take out their money now, they might not be able to later. And they were right. Their negative expectation created the reality they feared.

Hundreds of experiments conducted in the last 40 years prove the reality of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Students who are expected to succeed do better than those who are viewed as average. Employees who are identified as having “high potential” will perform better than those who are viewed as being average performers.

What do you think?

“Relationship” in the context of how we get along with others at work, is a word that is shunned in the leadership-world. Perhaps it carries an emotional tone that we’d rather avoid in organizations.

Yet, leadership is fundamentally about relationships. Sure, it isn’t practical for a leader spend time “relating” without attention to getting to the strategy – especially for those really big, awesome goals. But achieving a goal just doesn’t happen without relationships with those who are responsible for completing it. Who wants to follow someone who is treating them like a line item on the financial statement? And what is a leader without followers?

It’s interesting that some leaders are surprised by this analysis. Its not that they aren’t good leaders. More often, their surprise comes from:

- A natural ability to create good relationships with their staff, their peers, and others who are important to getting the work done. This ability comes so easily to them that they don’t stop to think about it;

- A belief that strategy and “getting the work done” are the most important traits to have;

- They’ve just never thought about the importance of relationships to “getting the work done”.

Both strategy and relationship building are important. You can’t have one without the other and be an effective leader.

Tom Rath, author of Strengths Based Leadership puts it this way:

“There’s a conventional wisdom that says that strategic thinking is much more important than relationship building, which doesn’t seem to be nearly as highly valued as it should be, based on what some of the leaders that I’ve spoken with have said to me. But relationship building and strategic thinking are very important in bringing a team together to achieve a big goal. If you only have strategic thinking, you’ll head in the right direction with no one behind you. If you have relationship building without strategic thinking, you have a really happy team that might not be headed toward a result.”

I find it more common for leaders to be stronger in strategic thinking, and for strategic thinking to be more valued than relationships (at least in the organizations I work in). So I challenge leaders who may resist, or feel uncomfortable with relationship building to consider: what if building strong, healthy relationships is a strategy? More on this later.

One of the most amazing things to watch is when a leader actually changes his thinking (or better yet, his beliefs) about a situation. When he sees the role he plays in the situation, and can understand and grasp what he needs to change in himself and how that change is connected to the big picture of his organization or community is a wonderful thing to observe.

When a leader gets caught up in blaming and criticizing others for a problem, its not a bad thing for them to vent their frustration briefly to their coach. However, my clients who’ve done this know that I will ask “What role do you play in the issue?” and “What role can I play to turn it around?” Often, they find that they have more at stake than they thought, as well as some ideas for turning the situation around.

It’s freeing to consider that there is something the leader can do. Just the thought of taking action can light them up.

The next time you feel as if a situation is out of your control and you are a victim, ask yourself:

• What role do I play in this issue?
• What role can I play to turn the situation around?

My March 13, 2008 Business Review Opinion Column can be found here.