Coach Train Learn

Workplace Relationships – What Does Responsibility Mean?

Managers and employees have shared responsibilities for ensuring that they have a relationship between them that is strong.

Let’s get clear about what this actually means in practice.

In the workplace, everyone interacts with each other. This is how society organizes itself and communicates together at work. These relationships are valuable for the opportunities they create to improve performance of individuals, as well as benefiting them, by creating a more useful and interesting place to work.

Each person in the team has a responsibility and a vested interest in making these relationships work, for their mutual benefit.

When you are a manager, there are steps you might take to rebuild a damaged relationship. Or perhaps it’s vital to start off a whole new team of people and hit the ground running by creating the right environment for working together.

As an employee, you need to have a voice that’s heard in an appropriate setting and also, where you can, show that you too can add value by the contributions you offer.

In practice, ‘responsibility’ is all about doing your bit (and maybe a little more) to oil the wheels of the relationships you have with all of your colleagues, at whatever level of hierarchy they might be, such that everyone is a winner.

This is not a time to take sides, so this is vital for everyone who shows up each morning to do their bit. Whether you are one of the senior management team or newly recruited this week, it doesn’t matter.

There are five critical activities that anyone creating a workplace relationship needs to be aware of – and be prepared to put into practice.

1. Show Commitment

By being onside and decided to make the difference, whatever the history, you are starting a process to build relationships, even if it means you have to rethink your position as well a bit.

2. Let Go Of The Past

Relationship building can be made much more difficult by ‘history’. This is a time to lead from the front, whichever position you are coming from and bury your own hatchets, ready for progress.

3. Be Interested in Others

You’ll build relationships faster if you dump talking all about yourself and make sure you ask questions that will help you get to know people better. Yet, this isn’t actually the point. It’s that you are showing that you are interested that counts.

4. Take a Breath

Leaving space for others to say their piece is a vital part of building relationships with anyone, remembering that when you are prepared to listen, you will stand out in a crowd, where others simply do not do this, making you all the more attractive for the ongoing relationship.

5. Create Trust

Following through with what you say you will do; being as open and honest as possible; giving and accepting feedback, as well as showing confidentiality and discretion, are all tiny and still vital tactics to adopt when building new and maintaining existing relationships.

These are the actions of all sides of the responsibility calculation where relationships are created or lost.

Everyone has a part to play and everyone is just as equally a contributor to the overall challenge, for which the outcome is always going to be of great value.

Employee Relationships – What is Responsibility?

Responsibility is fast becoming a lost art in the business worlds in which we exist today.

When managers take responsibility for creating valuable relationships with their people, there are many opportunities to be had. But what is responsibility?

Whilst relationships between individuals requires attention on both sides, with managers and employees there is a drive more from the side most likely to benefit – and that is the management side in terms of the business value, whilst it is also in the interests of employees where there are benefits for them too (such as career progression and skills development, as examples).

It is really worth taking some time to understand what ‘accountability’ and responsibility’ are in this manager/employee context, so that a clear picture can be drawn to show what needs to be done.

There are two defining descriptions that need to be addressed here, ‘accountability’ and ‘responsibility’. Whilst these two words might seem to be very similar, there is a difference when managing employees is concerned.

Accountability is for someone – usually a manager in a business or organization – where ‘the buck stops’. As a manager you are the person ultimately ‘accountable’ for all sorts of required outcomes in your part of the organization.

Responsibility is one level lower, where as managers we delegate the ‘responsibility’ for an action to someone else, enabling them to be the person who delivers that part of an overall ‘accountability’.

We are ‘accountable’ for the delivery of something and we delegate parts of this to others who are ‘responsible’ for the activities they need to take to complete their part of the overall ‘something’.

We, as managers, take on accountabilities that the organization requires us to deliver to provide the returns that they, their stockholders and any other stakeholders want and need to be successful. We, in turn, break down these ‘accountabilities’ and let others in our teams take on ‘responsibilities’ that they can deliver to contribute into the whole.

Being responsible for actions is a big learning curve for your people to experience and sometimes they will need help with that. It can be a daunting prospect. It can also be misunderstood, where they don’t recognize that your expectation of them is real and finite. So they may need a nudge to comprehend what that means, especially to start with.

When we are building relationships, whilst we might be accountable for this overall (not least because it’s in our interest to do so), there are responsibilities that can be attributed to both sides to make the relationships start, continue and where appropriate, end effectively.

Understanding the difference between ‘accountable and ‘responsible’ is the first step for many managers in this position and one that they will need to be clear about at the earliest moment.

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.

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.

Handling Workplace Relationship-Building Challenges

All managers recognize that it is vital to create effective relationships with their employees. The hurdles in delivering the most productive interactions come thick and fast…

It’s a clear fact of life in the workplace, whatever the industry, when you work with individuals as their manager, supervisor or any other sort of leader, there are going to be some people on the team you get on well with and others with whom there is not quite the same relationship.

That said, no-one who has a team of valuable contributors can afford to make the best from only a proportion of their people – that’s simply an impractical and inefficient use of resources – so identifying what the biggest challenges to create the best return on people investment are for each manager, is a critical first step.

By making a reasoned (and of course unbiased!) assessment of those individuals where relationships are better than others and understanding why, behaviors can be adopted to make these interactions even richer.

Making the most of those where the returns are most effective and easiest is always the most efficient way forward.

Conversely, when there are people where it’s more difficult to create a close and viable business relationship, it is really important to understand what can be done to make this work better – sometimes there’s nothing wrong at all, just a misunderstanding or perception issue that can easily be rectified.

And when ‘push comes to shove’ – as they say – there is only one individual who can decide to be brave enough to take the steps to change the way they are with their people – and that is the role of the manager who is in charge themselves.

It just isn’t reasonable to expect change to readily come from the unenlightened individuals in the team.

Managers are much more able to take the stand back approach and consider the skills they already have that got them to this level of authority and then be smart enough to apply them to their interactions with their people that will create the outcomes that they want.

And challenges are not simply about understanding individuals and expecting that behavioral change is a one off.

People react differently in different circumstances. They act differently when under stress; when they are bored; when success is not quite achieved and even moreso, when they think that they have let someone down. They react differently in the myriad of business situations that get thrown at them.

So managers face an infinite number of circumstances where their perceptions and considered responses need to be flexed, to take account of how their people will react – and then decide appropriate ways to interact with them accordingly.

This is no mean feat for your average manager, supervisor or team leader. That’s why it requires very specific understanding of what relationship building is all about and how, with careful consideration, the very best ones are able to become very good indeed at their job, generating extraordinary results.

Relationship building has it’s challenges and once a manager is able to create a personal toolkit for how to manage themselves to get the best from everyone they have with them, success is there for the taking.

Top Reasons Why Workplace Relationship Building Is Vital

Small things matter. Tiny nuances in the way we interact with people can shift the balance between success and failure. So when we manage people, we have to be aware of the impact our behaviors can – and do – have…

As managers, whether we look after two part-time helpers in our small business, or lead a huge team, perhaps even remotely, we depend on others for success.

Rarely, in most business situations, be they commercial or service driven, public, private or not-for-profit, can a manager do it alone. For free standing entrepreneurs, there may be a few times where they think they can cope alone (though this is actually even rarer), because they work in isolation.

Managers need their people onside to work in the most productive of ways.

And the bottom line is that, whether it be consciously or unconsciously, people are significantly influenced in their capacity to deliver, by the way they interpret their interactions with a line manager.

They say that 65% of people leave their job because of the way their immediate line manager interacts with them, so any manager worth their salt will themselves take note of this and work hard to make the best of the relationships they have with their employees.

Now, some managers have a natural capability to get on well with their people. They create a relationship that is fruitful, seemingly almost without trying. They are ‘people’ people, with a natural flair for building relationships.

For others, it’s much more challenging, where it can often be the case that they don’t know what they are doing wrong and as a consequence, find it hard to work out what they need to change to get it right.

In these cases, with closer investigation, it’s easy to find disillusioned staff who find their manager unapproachable and even unreasonable.

Neither side knows why, yet the manager is the one who suffers the most in terms of performance, whilst the employees suffer most emotionally, affecting not just their workplace experience, but their bigger life too.

Though some people who lead teams will have a more natural talent to create relationships, there are simple tactics that others can learn, practice and adopt that will change their lives – and those of their people too – creating much more effective management, as well as significantly improving business performance as well.

Even simple skills like being better listeners (as described so eloquently in ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ that great classic by Dale Carnegie) make huge differences.

Without effective relationships with their team members, managers will struggle, yet where they make the effort to build relationships with employees, there will be rich rewards indeed, for everyone.

(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.