See the bad say the good
There is a school of leadership that believes you don’t thank people for what they are paid to do. After all, they are being paid.
Here’s the problem with that approach.
“It takes about 4 positive statements to balance 1 negative statement”
Read more at Dan Rockwell’s Leadership Freak (‘Helping leaders reach higher in 300 words or less’) blog right here
As we set out to build relationships with our people, it’s vital that there is every opportunity to make progress. And sometimes, you can be in the driving seat to make that happen…
Managers need the support of their people to build teams that will have positive impacts on the running of the business – and the outcomes that are necessary.
To make the most of this, good managers create valuable one-to-one relationships with as many employees as they can, such that rapport builds and creates win-win opportunities, where both sides get positive benefits from the interactions.
Where there is repair work to do – as new managers often find when they take on an existing team – perhaps where the previous manager has underperformed, the progress to rebuild trust can take a little time.
Employees who have suffered consequences of poor management relationships will by pretty shy when it comes down to exposing themselves to more painful experiences in the future.
So, this is when the manager really starts to earn their crust. Their efforts at this time will really need to demonstrate a changed workplace environment for the better, through the immaculate way they interact with their people.
There are many ways to rebuild relationships. There are ways to start them off too, but the key impact when things haven’t gone so well in the past is the white flag of peace to offer. Sometimes this can be enough for those forgiving types in your team.
Others will be less easy to turn around. They may be scarred more badly and will need real evidence of goodwill on your part, to accelerate the healing that will need to take place.
Managers can position themselves to make upfront gestures towards their people to more rapidly progress their collaborative input. Small actions to show their willingness to move relationships forwards are hugely valuable.
Be it a small gesture of thanks; an idea shared to help a learning need; simple trust building activities; remembering the name of an employee’s child; recognizing when they need to listen much more than speak.
Taking the first step to enhance a relationship with small gains for your people will quickly start the ball of a bond rolling. Once that happens, there are short-, medium- as well as long-terms gains to be enjoyed, on both sides.
The most interesting aspect of this is that although a manager is offering small gains to their people as a constructive activity to develop the relationship between them, make no doubt about it, this investment is one that will pay off over time for them too.
The key to building effective relationships is that both sides see benefits for themselves, whilst – and this is significant – allowing the outcomes to make the business more effective, efficient and organizationally valuable too.
So there are winners all the way round, just from a manager being prepared to stick their neck out and offer upfront value to a maligned bunch of employees.
And changing their views of the possibilities that can come from good management forever.
Customers are an asset. Yet how many managers have the insights to make much more of these people that simply completing today’s transaction.
They are much more valuable than that.
It’s easy to appreciate the challenges that providing great customer service can pose. You see it’s not simply a case of giving them what they want, when they want it, at a price that they are happy to pay.
No, there’s a lot more value that we can squeeze from them in the customer relationships we build.
And the good thing is that they will be the beneficiaries as well. Because the way we generate ‘Raving Fans’ is purely by being great with the customers we already have and being clear about what we want from them too. It’s as simple as that.
You see, what we want from our customers, are people who like us so much they want to:-
• Support us as a gesture
• Help us along the way
• Become a resource to their family, friends and acquaintances too
• Come along and trade with us more often
We want to create people who love us so much that they will tell our story for free to anyone who will listen.
For many small businesses, this is all they do.
They are great to their customers; they go an extra mile even/especially when things go wrong and they are loved for it.
So much so that their customers become their marketing tool.
When you have complaints, you have the opportunity to interact fully with your customers – which, ironically, you miss when things actually go right!
A complaint is a little door to create a relationship that is open, honest and mutual. Over a little time, you will be able to move that relationship into a partnership too.
These people are a vast asset whether you are in a small local business or a huge mega-corporation, by creating one-to-one relationships like they’ve never had before with a service or goods providers.
And they tell others about how great you are.
If you are smart, you even start to ask them to collaborate in the development of your business or service, by asking them for their input beforehand.
Whether you are a store; a call-center or an online business you can move into the sport of open-sourcing.
And that will enable you to draw on the insights of your most important asset (along with your people, of course) – your customers and clients!
The ‘Raving Fan’ is the most cost-effective customer or client you can create. They are worth more than their weight in gold and are out there, right now, waiting for you.
(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.
The iris reader in passport control was out of order at Heathrow Terminal One this weekend.
When I remarked on it to an official there (with care, as I had been delayed long enough), he smiled and said, ‘Well, it’s usually working 99% of the time’.
Since I’d only recently joined this scheme, designed to more quickly get you through the queues at passport control, I was disappointed.
I then reflected that 1% out of order for them was 100% out of order for me.
It’s about perception. What seemed a small outage for the people at Heathrow was my total experience, so, noticeable and a big thing for me!
In the work we do as managers, there are many issues we engage in with our people.
By its very nature, our perspective is very different from theirs – and here’s where we have to be careful and learn to be good managers.
Our insights into what is very important to them must be given extra focus, because otherwise we will miss things that make the biggest differences to them, small though they might appear to us in our role.
And this is as inherent a part of our job if we want to make a decent fist of management.
Because, frankly, most managers don’t understand that being interested in what’s important to their people, is most likely to be of high value to the team and organizational performance.
Can you see where the 1% view needs to be from the 100% angle?
When we are managers, supervisors and leaders, we build workplace relationships – and we do it for a reason. We want to achieve successes and we need to do this through our people.
This really is the bottom line for the interactions we take our part in.
The purpose of relationship building in the workplace is pretty simple really. There is value for all sides of the equation and within that, it’s important to acknowledge that there is a bottom line.
As employees; indeed as business owners, managers and team leaders, we are all in it for something, because the most of us need the work we do.
When we attend work, we do so for some pretty basic reasons. We want shelter to keep us from the elements. We want to be fed and kept healthy. In modern societies we are very fortunate that these are pretty much covered off for most of us.
So we need more. The basics – the core rewards that work provides us with – are sufficient to provide the minimum we need. If that was all we went to work for, well, that’s it all pretty much sorted.
The more we need is the cerebral value that work provides for us. The stimulation of the work we do provides a healthiness that is not measured by outward disease. Our mental well-being is provided for by finding stimulating challenges that we enjoy and get personal satisfaction from.
Work is not about material reward alone.
When we manage others, we take that on as a stimulating challenge that gets our juices flowing, so we too are satisfied from the fulfillment that we get from the achievements we make.
Both sides achieving successes in their own personal challenges, are leveraged by organizations to ensure that results from the whole, go to meet and exceed the results that need to drop out for the financial bottom line.
If managers and their employees have personal goals they want to achieve and these are aligned with the needs of the bigger organization, then we are all in business pulling together.
The glue that binds us is the way we communicate together. And we communicate most effectively by having close working relationships that enable us to make the best outcomes possible, where everyone is a winner.
That bottom line for the relationships we build is the pleasure – the joy even – we get from achieving what we want from the work we do.
It isn’t just about financial reward. It isn’t about getting a company car that’s a bit bigger. It’s not about the pension pot we build.
Relationships enable us to work together towards a common goal. The purpose of the relationships we co-create, is the bottom line for all of us, which is very personal, yet always contributes to the outcome our employers expect of us too.
So we are all winners together.
One of the biggest challenges for managers, is how they are able to shift their very personal view of their people.
Once that’s in hand, they then need to sway and influence the way their people see the world differently too, without intimidating or imposing on them…
We all take a position in the way we live our lives. It isn’t something that we consciously do, minute by minute, it’s how we evolve as we live through the experiences from our earliest days after our birth.
The things that happen to us day-by-day – every day of our lives – shape who we are. Within this we take positions that impact on our behaviors, in every moment, right now.
So, we all have a perspective on life that we show up with in the things we do. We do as managers; our customers do and we mustn’t forget that every single one of our employees has their own story too.
That presents us with a series of problems when we attempt to build relationships with our people:-
About Us
1. We have our own perceptions that shows up in our behaviors
2. We have our own perceptions which judge others
3. Our own behaviors (from our perceptions) cause others to amend their behaviors
4. This can lead to different and even more incorrect perceptions
About Them
1. They have their own perceptions of life and work that show up in their behaviors
2. Their own perceptions amend their behaviors away from what would be real
3. Their perceptions are used to judge others
4. Their own perceptions cause behaviors in them that cause you to adjust your behaviors
…and so on!
So that becomes a challenge when we create relationships with our employees, because we have perceptions about them that can, unless we are careful, be false. Perceptions potentially causing erroneous decisions
that can affect our abilities to create win-win outcomes for both sides.
Our experiences lead us to make perceptions of our circumstances. When we’re with our people, they can be incorrectly judged because of times when we had similar experiences that we learned from. We then use that
experience to be too quick off the mark as we use our perceptions to make decisions.
So it’s important when we work with our employees, that we make the effort to set aside perceptions that don’t come with actual proof, so that the relationships we build have the chance to develop and grow.
When we are able to set aside the often false perceptions we have of our people – even those we seem to get on well with – the opportunities that fall out of the relationships we have with them, have every chance of being the win-win that we want.
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