Coach Train Learn

Building Relationships – To Make Business Changes Easy

Relationship building is a vital element of any manager’s activity.

It has to be an incessant and pro-active behaviour which is – or becomes – the very essence of any manager’s personal style.

When we work with change, it’s going to be challenging for our people to accept, so the relationships we have with them will be strained by default.

We are doing something to them which is going to have an impact – it’s almost always our fault.

Where no real effort has been made to create substantial relationships with the individuals in a team, the more challenging it will be to make sure that change is delivered successfully.

The Challenge

Building relationships isn’t hard. Many managers find that creating the necessary time to build conversations with each and every one of their team is difficult.

When this is the case, it’s important to take a close look at how time is used and consider different ways to work.

Sometimes managers are not focused enough to make sure that they do their own role. It becomes easy to take on tasks which are less demanding at the expense of making time for their people.

Yet relationship building is the core of a manager’s activity set. The role is to manage people, not to push a pen around or work with objects. People are where the focus has to lie for any manager worth the title.

How To Do It

As a simple step to making relationships work, target having one-to-one dialogues with a set number of your people each day. Try to ensure that the way you interact with them is to value them.

An easy way to do this is to let them do most of the talking, by triggering their thinking with open questions that seek information. You can then easily let them talk and do most of the listening when that is your goal.

This can have a remarkable effect that shows them you care about them as individuals and that you have the time to make them feel a valued member of the team.

Investment upfront will then pay off when the tricky conversations take place in changing situations.

© Martin Haworth 2011. This is an expanded version of just one of many change management ideas, from Resilience in Change. For your free – downloadable today – ‘Managing Change’ Super-Simple Success Tips e-book, visit http://www.ResilienceInChange.com

Under New Management

My football club has a new manager. So I set to thinking about just what he might be doing on his first day.

Clearly, there will be a need to be introduced to all the key people on his team – and not just the players – so that he has at least got some sort of idea of who does what and where each of them lies within his remit of management.

Of course his behaviours will come under quite a bit of scrutiny too and how he comes over will – at least for the beginning of his reign – create an environment which is very important for the early days.

Now, managers have an obligation to deliver results – none more obviously than a football manager. Positive results will be great if they are instantaneously successful and they will also need to stand the longer test of time, during which overall team performance will be judged.

Like in a race, position in a league gives an obvious assessment of how they do and by definition, how their manager has delivered too.

In the cut throat world of football management, managers are only judged on results and, perhaps sadly, not really how they deliver them.

So there are managers out there in the industry whose attitudes and behaviours run the whole range. From out and out dictators, to the highly approachable ‘people-persons’. There’s no simple template that sorts out the winners from the has-beens.

On that first day, there is probably one asset that will be second-to-none for this new manager.

In his interests too, listening carefully to what each and every member of his extended team say will build relationships and trust in him – with the added benefit that the longer he listens, the better he will understand the individuals who will have to perform their duties – often on his behalf as they cross that white line onto the pitch each week.

Best wishes then to Eddie Howe at Burnley FC!

For an extended range of activities that the best managers focus on on their first day, here’s a link to an article I wrote a while ago http://supersuccessfulmanager.com/blog/10-things-better-managers-do-on-their-first-day/

Poor Management? This is Not a Solution!

Happy New Year!

OK, so after the hectic period of Christmas and New Year, I sort of forgot my usual Sunday evening activity of writing my newsletter. I knew it this morning and so I thought that I’d do it later on.

As it happens, this was fortuitous, because there was a phone-in on Radio 5 Live this morning as I was driving into my office that really resonated at first and, as the show and callers ran on, really began to annoy me.

It seems that the Cameron co-alliance, co-operative or co-alition thing – whatever we want to call it – has come up with a bright idea to stimulate business. They intend – or so it has been reported, that employees will not be able to take an employer to an industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal unless they have been employed for 2 years, rather than the current one year.

For once in my life as a manager, I found myself in complete agreement with the Union member of the panel. This was ably assisted by a rude, arrogant and 70′s command-and-control style business owner (Peter from South Wales) who, amongst other things, complained that women who are sick during pregnancy are a pain in the rear end.

I was amazed that he was allowed to get away with this – or perhaps there was little the presenter seemed to be able to do with such a rude, loud and equality-resistant man. It was a horrifying reminder of days gone by.

What I took from the program was that this change in the law is intended to nanny-state protect poor-quality managers who simply do not use existing processes, such as performance management or discipline rules to manage their people effectively, so would be given a right to get rid of under-performers – or indeed anyone they took a dislike to, with little or no redress for the employee. Back to pagan times then.

This is simply crazy. In 25 years managing, I was able to dismiss a few people who needed managing out of the businesses I was running because quite simply they were not good enough. Capable management practices enabled me to manage this adequately and legally within the framework of management.

I don’t think I needed some bizarre law change to do that.

No, this smacks of a soother to managers who simply have poor management skills. Managers who are unable to be effective; to hold difficult conversations; to be strong and fair; to be focused and rigorous with standards.

I once dismissed an individual whose performance was managed very precisely. It took myself and her line manager a full 12 months to work through the agreed performance assessment processes that were fair to the employee and to us. That was perfectly acceptable, if a bit of a challenge, but it worked and was fair.

As obnoxious caller Peter from South Wales, who found that someone pregnant who was ‘a little bit stressed’ and was signed off sick, well, it’s time to get real, my friend. Since when are you capable of making a medical decision about her condition? Time to manage effectively and what’s more, time to plan for the unexpected by developing more of your people, more of the time, so that you have a succession plan in place for eventualities just like this.

Mr Cameron, we need no changes in the framework for employees to be able to be got rid of more easily. What you do need to pay a bit attention to is the poor quality of managers we often find in this country and get that sorted out.

Not to create excuses for them.