Coach Train Learn

Workplace Relationships – Who Is Responsible For Them?

There are poor workplace relationships. There are good workplace relationships.

Sometimes they are even great. But where does the responsibility lie for creating the best environment for the best work to be done.

There is no doubt that there are times when managers have to depend on the best relationships to get the results they want. As a consequence, there is a real need for a manager to take the lead in the way they interact with their people.

Managers who have any sense at all, will know the onus is on them to drive their own actions to set up relationships that work best – for everyone. The desire here must be such that a bonded team forms, generating creative solutions with the energy that trust and mutual co-operation and focus leads to.

By taking control of their own behaviors, good managers set the ball rolling to ensure that they generate the best relationships possible, to create fruitful opportunities for business, organization and team productivity.

If they don’t know how, they have the means in terms of resources and time to go find out what they need to know, to make sure they have the best of relationships with their people.

So that seems to be that then!

Not quite. You see the responsibilities of employees are vital too, because it takes two to make a great one-to-one relationship. Whilst the manager might well be making the effort, members of their team have a responsibility too.

Because there is value in it for them as well, by having great interactions with their boss, to get a workplace where they feel valued, are excited and interested by opportunities and where learning by doing – and taking risks – is encouraged.

Employees have the opportunity to meet – at least half way – any manager or supervisor who creates the environment to get the relationship off to a great start, by mirroring the behaviors they themselves experience. The supervisor or managers leads the way, which the pro-active employee heeds – and responds to accordingly.

Great relationships come from that mutuality of trust, respect, caring, support, encouragement, coaching and more. The shared resources that two sides use to form lasting and valuable relationships, to ensure success has a better than evens chance as the outcome.

The lead may come from the manager or team leader or supervisor and when developing valuable working relationships with an employee, their support and equal responsibility to take full part, is of critical importance too.

Let’s face it, managers need help too, so working with them as they strive to do invest in the right behaviors for their team, will only enhance the returns that everyone receives in the long-term.

Doing Way Too Much On Your First Day

The new manager started with a flourish.

He was personable, interested in the people in the team and good fun to get on with.

He showed his capabilities by immediately resolving some short-term resource issues with senior management that had been frustrating the team for weeks.

On the first day, he decided to fix a few of the external contractors rates downwards, causing friction and a lot of work to pacify them during his first week.

Then, following no earlier communication, he decided to adjust working patterns for the whole team, starting immediately.

Next up was reorganizing the way the filing system – that everyone in the team used.

Change always causes concern. Change is, of course, important and most times is progressive.

The point he missed was the need to build relationships first and foremost as the key act in the vital first week.

Those relationships will then enable much more to be achieved with full support.

As well as allowing the manager much more toleration for those occasions when things don’t quite go to plan and where tricky changes need easy implementation.

Dealing With Difficult People – General Principles

Difficult people can be found anywhere. As managers or supervisors, you are likely to have at least one you can name.

It’s as common as that.

There is a general principle to use as a first step.

Most managers come across difficult people at some stage in their careers or other. They are common and challenging sometimes by their behaviors, which can be very demanding, as well as time-consuming for us all.

What is fascinating, is how many managers come across a lot, yet others seem ‘lucky’ and come across far fewer.

It’s not luck.

You see, some managers are better at dealing with difficult people than others, even though they might not always be too sure about exactly how they do it.

There is often something that triggers their character and just as often, that will provide you with detailed clues about what you can do about it.

When considering why this is, there is one simple tactic that rises above others. The managers who are best at handling difficult people, are almost always good at building relationships, which they do without much effort.

They spend time using their listening skills to pay full attention to everyone – difficult or otherwise – they come across, thereby showing them that they are interested in them. This is the first part of the simple solution to dealing with difficult people and, as such, is the key to all workplace relationships too.

After listening to the issues raised by a difficult person, these managers are also very good at asking relevant questions to show they are listening and also to help the individual find new perspectives on the situation they are being difficult about.

Once they have created this level of rapport, managers who handle difficult people well are also very good at drawing a line under proceedings and moving the difficult person right along.

It’s only by using all of these tactics, that a manager will have the best results with difficult people, and minimize the frustrations.

Indeed, some managers have been so damaged by just one difficult person in a team that they give up themselves.

All they needed was a full awareness of what is happening and the steps to take to make the problem resolved

And it’s worth bearing in mind in the organizations we work in, that there are usually two different circumstances that we come across that need slightly different twists on the simple approach above.

They are people you are with regularly – people in your life outside work even – and those you aren’t. These are people who are strangers in your business and life who you might only come across once, for example.

Both can be resolved using the tactics above quite easily, so it’s always worth taking the time to ensure that they are fully utilized.

Workplace Relationship Building – Hopes and Fears

Managers and supervisors are human. Let’s take that as a given. We don’t always feel we can share this with our people too much, but it’s true. We have feelings as well.

How we share that with our people is another matter.

One of the biggest challenges facing managers is their approachability. Despite the world moving onto a more ‘team’ approach in many workplaces, there is still a certain reverence for any manager with his people.

The irony here is that managers are just as vulnerable to the range of emotions as every member of their team, as was once said, ‘They pull their pants on just like you and I do everyday’! So, recognizing that we are all the same, allows us to understand there might be differences in some things, but deep down, we live with ourselves every day.

In fact, because of the isolated nature of a managers elevated role, there are times when they are in a worse position that those in their team’s, because they have to maintain discipline and cannot therefore be simple ‘one of the boys’ (or ‘girls’).

This is an opportunity when building workplace relationships with employees. They don’t often have the chance to relate to managers in quite the same way as their colleagues, such is the still elevated ‘position’ that a manager holds.

The opportunity comes because relationship building offers the potential to get closer to your people by showing them that you are just like them. You really do have the same emotions as anyone else and, although most often it’s easy to put on a mask of competence, sometimes you too have bad days.

Days where you feel like you need someone around to talk to. Someone to share the fears you have about how things are going and, whilst it would be wrong to splay open your self-doubt too widely, there is nothing wrong with airing some of your self-concerns, once you have the right level of relationship.

Similarly, whilst you are keen to hear from others their aspirations and hopes, sharing yours with your people will do you no harm either.

Indeed, being a little more open with your hopes, fears and concerns will draw your people in, especially when you do it in a controlled way that emphasizes the relationship that you have with each others.

The hopes and fears you have in the role you hold are pretty normal. We all wonder about how we can cope, survive and be successful.

As long as you do this in the right way, you will be valued for the way you show that far from being different, you are pretty much just like most of your people.

Workplace Collaborations – The Power of More Than One

Managers can be notoriously isolated.

The role of manager is usually someplace between the team they lead and the powers that be in the organizational hierarchy.

This makes managers pretty self-sufficient, yet there’s power in the workplace relationships they build.

As we progress to management, we are able to develop skills that enable us to take on the role.

Through experiences and training; through coaching and mentoring; through the networks of colleagues and experts we encourage and build, we are able to generate the skills and know-how to do the job of management.

Once in the role, it is easy for others to see us as an incredible resource, which builds our own confidence in ourselves, such that we find answers to the questions that many answer and problem-solve for our people.

This makes us feel good! It’s natural and when we’re good at it, we enjoy this part of our role, because we feel fulfilled with our abilities.

As we progress, the teams we lead are bigger and have a bigger job to do, so our input can be stretched ever more, with each promotion we take on. It is easy in this growth of role to mean there are expectations of many more people to focus on us.

This is not sustainable, because you cannot do it alone.

When you are good with people, you foster great relationships with your employees as you progress. Your first management offers you great opportunities to work intimately with those who are in your team.

In such situations, you can build your abilities in communication, intuition, performance management and many more of the management skills that will be so vital for you in the years to come.

When you’re smart, it’s here that you start to understand, when you are open to it, how you can leverage the interaction with others, sometimes with your team as a whole. More often, by utilizing the great relationships you have built with each individual employee, to get their input too.

Imagine a conversation when you have a tricky decision that you need to make.

When you’ve invested a bit of time with your people to help them feel comfortable contributing openly when they work with you – their manager – the richness of the debate will be stronger and much more valuable.

Ideas will flow from them as well as you, synergizing thinking to create the outstanding solutions.

Once you can have this quality of debate with individuals, you can extract even more with whole-team debates too, magnifying the value of the wonderful workplace relationships you’ve already got in place.

There is much more power in ‘more than one’, particularly when you’ve done your groundwork and prepared your interactions with others, one-by-one, by creating business relationships that are ripe for reaping the reward.

Employee Relationship Building – Getting Out Of Your Own Way

Effective relationships with team members is vital for managers to deliver the very best results. Yet one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is quite close to home.

As managers need their people to be fully productive, it is vital that they nurture the strongest of working relationships with them. Every individual has particular skills to offer and to make the most of this, their full commitment to the cause is vital.

This can be challenging for some managers to work through, with them believing that as manager, their role is superior to their people and they will lead the way – and deliver it – at all times, even when it’s almost impossible to carry the workload output required.

Good managers overcome the challenge that their own high level of self-importance can present. By being able to see the bigger picture of the needs of the team to create results, the best managers recognize that rather than them being the most important in the team, the contrary is true. Their people are where the vital energy and competence needs to lie.

Appreciation of their role as a facilitator, managers who get the best results simply know that they will only deliver strongly when they get the best from every individual they have as a colleague. So they will focus on working much harder at building motivation and collaboration with their people than by trying to show their higher level of authority.

Managers who cannot get past their own ego, pride and ‘position’, will always find the going tough, because their role is never to be the ‘doers’, whatever their personal drive is.

The best managers see their role purely as leveraging the great skills of their people. Indeed really good managers recruit people who are even more capable than they are, without any concerns about doing so.

They have been able to get over their own self-doubt and moved past that, knowing that the better they are at being a humble partner in their team, the more likelihood there is of success. Employees relate to the manager who is on a par with them and are more productive in that situation.

So many managers struggle to get beyond their own self-importance to take the time to create the valuable working relationships where they are as equal partners as possible, yet this is precisely the requirement of the role.

By investing some time building relationships with individuals in a carefully structured way, the more successful managers set their stall out to be doing everything possible to squeeze the best performance from the capable people they have.

This only comes from intimate working relationships that create trust and a following that is hard to pin down, yet is so very powerful and ultimately fruitful.

And the biggest challenge to overcome is so often the manager themselves.