Coach Train Learn

How Workplace Relationships Generates Unexpected Positives

Although it might not be the most obvious of reasons, when you spend time building relationships with the people in your team, there sometimes are those unexpected positives that come out of it.

One of the interesting points about creating useful workplace relationships is that you can’t always predict the positives it creates.

When we manage others, we enjoy the rewards that management provides. It pays better than what those we manage get and, for many, the working conditions of managers will usually be better in the main, than those people in their charge.

With this comes a role that can be isolating and distant from colleagues in their team. The levels of discipline and detachment bring penalties amending relationships such that then can seem to have barriers in place.

Yet the purpose of relationships in the workplace are such that we expect value to be created. Value in terms of performances of those who work for us, creating enhanced returns in the results we need to achieve.

Value in terms of their behaviors when they do their job; when they manage their loyalty in their attendance longevity of service with us, because of the culture that supports and encourages them. Because of the relationships you build.

For those who manage, there can be spin-offs too. They can feel much more partnership and collaboration with the team than they might expect. This quite simply because they are prepared to make the effort to have open, honest and developmental relationships with their people, one by one.

When this happens and as long as we manage professionally and consistently, we can be taken into the group as friends as well as ‘the boss’ sometimes.

This can mean inclusion; support; being watched out for, as well as the general camaraderie that is such an important element of many workers’ lives. We can enjoy this with our people too.

Inclusion can take many forms, yet it is the smallest things that touch managers when they feel much more accepted, whilst still being able to carry out their professional role competently and delivering the results expected of them.

One of the purposes of good managers creating worthwhile relationships in the workplace, is to create an ambience where everyone – including themselves – is nurtured to fulfillment and achievement of their potential.

Once the relationships are created between everyone, even managers will find small surprises come along, And even when it’s such a small thing as a remembered birthday; a Christmas card or even a simply an occasion where someone has a humorous dig about a defeat for their football team.

This is when relationships are just right, and the effort is all worthwhile.

Workplace Relationship Building – Developing Intuition Skills

One of the most important reasons that we spend time and effort creating valuable relationships with our employees, is to get to know them well.

This can seriously enhance your sensitivities.

As we work to understand our people better, we spend time with them really finding out what they are all about. At the same time, we give up a little of ourselves too, to show that we trust them knowing more about us too. This generates a mutual respect and care for each other, slowly and surely.

As the relationship builds, the time we spend with them provides simple factual information about them and we start to feel that we know them and their lives much better.

Because the purpose of our relationship is to better support each other towards our obvious – as well as personal – goals, so the mutual trust between us is a vital component.

That understanding extends further than simply knowing the names of their kids, or where they prefer to vacation. It becomes more than about their career aspirations and their hopes and fears, as well as those areas of their capability that they worry about. Listening as they tell us provides the space and respect needed to help them share some of these difficult areas too.

As they open up to us, we start to build another picture too. A deeper purpose of the ongoing interactions we have is to know them and their character better too. Knowing this deeper – and often carefully hidden – side of them, helps us to become much better sensitized to their every day moods and behaviors.

With that inherent knowledge, we develop that sense of intuition about them to help us recognize those all-important and sometimes almost invisible signals.

Signals that really help us when we get that gut instinct that provides us with much more about them and what they are about right now. More of the ‘who’ they are today, than simply the ‘what’ that comes across when we know them less well.

One of the key reasons about building relationships is that we are there to work ever more closely with our team members, always for mutual benefit. By having heightened senses about what they are feeling, we can work more closely again, by showing them that we notice, even when there is nothing overtly to see or hear.

And when we are able to do that, it’s amazing how the relationship is strengthened even more again, leading to added value to the time spent in initially building the bonds between us, for both our sakes.

Creating new purpose to the developing relationships we are forging closely between us.