In large part, success as a leader is about getting the right people with the right skills into the right places: hiring people with the skills the team is looking for, unblocking obstacles that stand between them and success, and being an ambassador for their achievements in the boardroom. As the leader of a team, function or organization, much of your work is about practicalities: getting people on-task, keeping them on-task, and overseeing work that will yield strong business results.
But once you’ve got the right people working on the right things, there’s something much more elemental to work on: building strong workplace relationships that will elevate the team from good, to great. Once you’ve got those foundational underpinnings in place, your role as a leader becomes that of the Great Relationship Facilitator.
Relationships of depth make the difference
The fact is that even the most qualified or skilled employees may not have similarly-developed soft skills. Employers have traditionally found it easier to invest in hard skills training, as it often yields more easily measurable results. But those days are over, and it’s now widely recognised at the highest levels that soft skills – what we often call human skills – are what makes the difference between some success, and overwhelming success. To make sure that your teams’ efforts are as good as they can possibly be, you must cultivate an environment in which relationships are king. Let’s look at some changes you can make to bring about a culture of truly great working relationships.
Take your mask off
Do you ever pause just before you enter the office, take a deep breath, and feel as if you’re mentally slipping your leadership mask on, ready for a brand-new day? If you do, it’s time to let that habit go. True leaders don’t subscribe to stereotypes; they embrace their flaws, their humanity and their mistakes, and their authenticity is absolutely central to their success.
And what happens when you decide to get real? You encourage - and allow - others to follow suit. Stripped of artifice, your team will be able to see each other for who they really are, appreciate each other’s unique skills, and learn to get the very best out of each other when they collaborate.
Collaboration stations
We all know that open-plan offices can be a pain: the noise, that terrible strip lighting, the inability to hold a private conversation. But the trend for open-plan working isn’t going anywhere, so leaders in the know should make the most of what they’ve got. A dedicated collaboration station - a space somewhere in the building that’s exclusively designed for collaborative work, ideation sessions, and team time - can really help to make stepping away from individual desks a daily feature of office life. That can only encourage richer conversations, stronger relationships, and collaboration as a methodology.
Get feedback (and feed back)
The only way to take relationships from polite and professional, to something more powerful, is by getting real. But at the word ‘feedback’ people tend to shrink away from the concept, as it sounds uncomfortable and confrontational – but it really needn’t be. Leaders must be able to give feedback in a way that means it’ll really be heard. That means delivering it with empathy, clear examples, a narrow focus (so you don’t get carried away and damage relations and feeling forever), and with the person’s development in mind.
But you can’t just give feedback as a leader, you also have to be able to accept it. Your team must feel able to approach you and say, openly and honestly, ‘Boss, when you changed the team structure, it made me feel disenfranchised.”; or “I’ve been thinking about how we communicate, and I’ve got ideas for how we can do better together”; or “ I respect you a lot, but when you called me out in front of people, I felt belittled”.
Feedback will help you understand how others experience you. But it goes both ways – by feeding back to your team, you help them to understand how they’re experienced by others too. Once the feedback door is open, you could consider team development based on a 360 degree feedback tool, to take relationships to an even deeper level.
Creating a culture where relationships are the game-changer is what 21st century leadership is made of. And as we all know, great relationships are what takes organisations from good to great.