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“What do your people say motivates them?”

Find out by asking them and when you know, build on it, big time!

Why Workplace Relationships Are So Valuable

Management is the art of getting the very best from your people.

It is essentially a people skill that many managers have, yet struggle to make the best of. The workplace relationships you form are most likely the major critical factor in your success.

The purpose of creating effective relationships with each and every one of your employees has many aspects. And every single one of them adds value to your proposition as a manager.

That’s why building relationships adds much more value than having a buddy or two in the team.

Here are a few reasons that give purpose to relationship building – reminding us that every minute we spend getting to know our people well, is a great minute’s work!

• Power of More than One – When we synergize our efforts, using the great interactions we have with our people, it is incredibly productive
• Openness – workplace relationships worked well, offer the opportunity to share more; explain more; create more, in an environment where trust is strong
• Hopes and Fears – as trust builds, each and every partner will feel able to expand their thinking – their personal thinking sometimes – and share with others, who will help
• Better Understanding – avoiding miscommunication, because the relationship is strong enough to ask if not sure, means we become more effective & efficient
• Feel Good – good relationships foster a general feeling of goodwill around the place, limiting politics and gossip, because ‘we just don’t do that round here’
• Unexpected Positives – the best relationships add fun into the mix, where we can share laughter and enjoy each other’s company
• Intuition – as our relationships build with our people, we are able to sense more, giving us the benefit of an ‘early warning system’ to catch problems early
• Getting Support – where we support and help our people, they realize that we have needs too and offer help where you might need it
• Hidden Talents and Skills – knowing our people well from the close interactions we have with them, means we get to know them well, uncovering the possibilities
• Problem Shared – is a problem halved – at least! When we trust and others trust us, we have a reservoir of talent to supplement our own. Sometimes, others really do have better solutions
• Bottom Line – the ultimate goal, providing focus and purpose to the work we do. Adding value to the results we seek is far, far easier when we have good working relationships with others in our teams

So, the purpose of building relationships in the workplace is many fold for anyone managing others.

From the purely business focused results to the emotional personal sense of success and belonging that it can create.

The time investment is minimal, because relationship building is best done in the moment, informally, so there are no excuses.

What are you waiting for – there’s no time like the present to make this your immediate goal.

Customer Complaints – Who Will Gather The Intelligence?

Complaints are a valuable asset to any organization, once you can ensure that your people are willing to play. And to get them with you, they need to know that it’s not personal.

There is no greater value than that to be gleaned from your customers and clients who are prepared to take the time to give you feedback – which is a much more constructive way to describe a complaint.

These gold nuggets are literally worth their weight, when you are able to capture, dissect and respond positively to what you find out. Yet many organizations revel in low complaint rates!

The key to this is your people – all of them. It’s about turning them from being fearful of when a complaint comes in, to positively gleeful, because of the enormous opportunity it presents.

By ensuring that every one of them is geared up to sense when things aren’t going well, you will create an army of willing volunteers who are ready for action. Their job is to seek out and get to the bottom of any dissatisfaction they perceive.

This has to happen in the moment, all the time, or it will have passed and the opportunity will have disappeared into the anonymity of an ended phone call; a person now back out on the street; or the lost data storage of an online interaction that never sees the light of day.

It needs to be pro-actively sought, not passively responded to – or worse, swept under the carpet with the hope it will go away.

By encouraging your people to engage and interact with their clients, in any way at all, they will be able to get under the tough skin of a dissatisfied customer ‘not wanting to make a fuss’. They have to smell it out or it will slink away, unspoken, which is of no use at all to you.

They will probably capture more customer dissatisfaction, than you expect, especially to start with.

And when they do, it’s to be applauded. It’s to be celebrated.

Working as a team to find out critical information from those who have it, is a tactic any manager can adopt to ensure that customer service progresses, whilst also building the team togetherness ethic in a constructive, value-creating way.

By encouraging each and every one of them to engage their clients in any way they can, will make the conversation much more open and relaxed – and valuable.

Because, with this in place, many of your customers can easily be asked what they would love changed if they had the choice in the experience they have most recently had.

And that gives you – and your team – the vital intelligence to make your offer even better than it already is.

(c) 2010 Martin Haworth. This is a short excerpt from one of 52 lessons in management development at Super Successful Manager!, an easy to use, step-by-step weekly development program for managers of EVERY skill level. Find out more at http://www.SuperSuccessfulManager.com.

Delegation – 5 Simple Actions You Can Take Today

Try these five tactics, today!

• Become more aware of others who share their important work with you – watch how well they do it – note the benefits; to them; to you! See – it works!
• Note those things you do in your work, that someone else could and create a plan to give them all away within one week. Take time to plan it and show people what you want. Then plan to delegate more next week & on.
• Can’t decide? What would you do if you only had half the time (note:- do not think tactical or fire-fighting here – someone else has (or should have) that job).
• Ask your people what they would like to take on that you do now – where do you get in their way? Let them have it!
• Encourage this down the line – who can your people share key tasks with? Be the model – help them do this too.
• Figure out what you can do with all that lovely time. Scared? Don’t be – look for growth opportunities – people; marketing; future things (See ‘Q2 time’ – Begin with the End in Mind Chapter – Covey’s Seven habits).

Delegation is a valuable tactic to free up your valuable time, as well as enlightening your people with an understanding of the capacity they have to do more, learn and develop.

Responsibility for Workplace Relationships – Challenging Beliefs

Hidden in the depths of the evolution of the way that organizations are run is a long held belief. Managers are wholly responsible for the way the interactions with their people progress.

That may not be the case.

Through the decades of the modern industrial era, managers have, rightly or wrongly, held roles which are seen to be very directive. A role where the manager’s word is the final one, with their people complying.

Over the last two decades, whilst this has started to change as organizations become more democratic, involving more of their people in decision making as well as including them more in developing strategies and opportunities, there is still a long way to go in the real world to see this positioning change.

There are managers out there at the sharp end who are embracing the potential of more and more of their people, but it is still the norm for what the manager says is the rule.

For the enlightened ones and as a consequence of this, managers have assumed the role of relationship builders in many organizations, seeing it as their job to be the creators of workplace relationships with their people. This is certainly an exception to the rule even then, so there is work still to do.

Sometimes, managers see this activity as their job alone and one where they need to spend time, yet are frustrated with the amount of effort they have to make, in what can often be a very one way workload.

Sad to say – even where creation and nourishment of strong and valuable relationships with their team is seen to be a useful activity in itself – not much time is overtly being devoted to this, partly because managers are so busy with all the regular management ‘stuff’ they get on their desks each day.

So, what needs to change?

The opportunities that good working relationships provide are valuable for both sides of the equation.

For managers, getting the best from their people often depends on their capacity for getting on well enough with them to help the employee feel valued, understood and that they have a useful part to play in the team. this helps organizational results targets be met, thus keeping senior management at bay.

For employees, there is much to value when they have a strong bond with their manager.

Used appropriately, regular, positive interactions with a manager can open new career doors, create development opportunities (both through learning through delegated tasks and also being more in the sightline of a manager looking for those ready for the next step), as well as create a friendly environment in which to spend a chunk of their time.

Where both sides of the manager/employee relationship see that there is a good point to fostering their relationships – for mutual benefit – the pressure to make it work is halved, making the possibilities much more likely to come to fruition.

Changing perceptions and beliefs, many of which are long-held and culture-based, will take some time.

The outcomes – for all – being really worth the effort.

7 Tips To Transform Leadership – Amy Linley

A leader can take several forms in a number of different commercial situations, often when a person isn’t even “the one in charge”. If you find yourself in a group with tight deadline to meet, with no obvious leader around, the one who needs to be the boss just might be you. When this happens, what should you do and NOT do?

When people normally think of a leader in business they think of the cliche ‘boss’, but being a leader doesn’t require a fancy title, official recognition, and certainly not a specified background. In reality, leadership simple requires one individual to stand up, assert authority, and enable the team to achieve the target set.

How can someone who has not been anointed or appointed accomplish this? Here are some brilliant tips for those who suddenly find themselves in an position requiring unofficial leadership to be asserted:

Continued at :- www.leadership-expert.co.uk
By Amy Linley at http://www.accuconference.com.