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Relationships at work matter. They can make your life easy or they can make it really, really hard. When you get this right, work flows and your team flows because you’ve got good connections and trust with those around you. When you get this wrong, turning up, it feels like you’re going into a battlefield. I’m going to share with you three principles to change the nature of the relationships around you so that you can turn up every day feeling like you can get work done and it flows.
The Challenge
I was sitting in a group coaching programme a few weeks ago now. One of the people in the group had a difficult or frosty relationship with someone in their team and wasn’t going to do anything about it. I challenged them on it. In the conversation that ensued, we came up with three principles that matter as a leader when you want to change the nature of relationships around you.
The Three Principles
1. Mindset
It is really important is that you need to recognise that as a leader, if a relationship’s not going well, it’s your responsibility to make the first move, and if you don’t, nothing will ever change. For you, think about that right now. With the relationship that you’ve got, are you being the bigger person and taking responsibility for it being better?
2. Common Ground
Second key thing is too often we haven’t found that common ground with that person. The common ground is not what you think is important, but what they think is important and what they care about. So what my guidance around finding the common ground is to say, “Let’s increase your repertoire of things that you talk to them about normally, to find that thing that you guys connect on.” It’s funny that with most of the people that we get along with at work, we’ve got something that we talk about regularly, something that we connect on. Could be sport, could be theatre, could be your family, whatever that thing is, increase your repertoire and find out what’s important to them.
3. Adjusting Your Approach
So once we’ve got the mindset of you responsible for changing this, we found a common ground that didn’t exist before and then we now need to think about how do we communicate them? Where is that jarring? Where is that working? Where is it not working? Think about how we could adjust your approach. Three things to think about here are:
Do you think this person is more left brain? They love to hear information and engage logically or analytically? Or are they more right brain? They love story and relationships. Are they an extrovert? So they do, they want to talk for a long time. Or are they introvert? Do they need spaces in the conversation? An example of that is a CEO that I coached. Halfway through the session, we kind of have a 10 minute break. It’s a bit weird. But it works for him, allows him to re-energise.
Then the third thing is what are their preferences for how they communicate and run relationships? Are you running it through your schedule or are you compromising it a little bit so it run through theirs?
Summary
Relationships at work determine whether you enjoy it and things flow or whether things are frosty and hard. If you want things to flow, three ideas:
- You need to make the first move.
- Aim to find a common ground with those people around you and
- Adjust your approach where needed to meet their preferences.
Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch
If you do this, you’ll find you’ll have an easier time at work. If you are having a difficult time with any of your stakeholders and you need coaching and there’s other people around you that need that too, down below, right in an email. There’s a point where you can get in touch and chat about what you need. I hope this has been useful. Talk to you next time on The Reason & The Road.
