It’s Not a Lack of Technical Expertise That’s Holding Your Business Back
Morag Barrett learned fairly early on in her career that merely having a great product is not enough to ensure a brand’s success. “My first career was in banking,” she recalled in an interview. “What I noticed was during meetings with banking clients, we weren’t just talking about money, we were talking about what was helping or hindering them in delivering their results.” And in almost every single meeting, those clients were complaining about people problems rather than any deficiencies in their products. “They were miscommunicating expectations, handling conflict inappropriately, or, even worse, conflict wasn’t happening at all and it wouldn’t be until five weeks after a project was underway when they would finally acknowledge that something was wrong, and by then it was too late.”
Barrett’s conclusion after observing all of this? “Ultimately you cannot be successful in business or in life without being successful in cultivating relationships.”
It was the people side of the equation that most fascinated Barrett, so after 15 years in banking, she went back and got a master’s degree in human resource management so she could focus on that aspect full time. She launched her own leadership development and HR consulting company, SkyeTeam, about 10 years ago, and she now facilitates workshops with corporate teams to help them develop the soft skills needed to truly lead.
Over the years, Barrett developed a framework for how to sort and approach coworkers who might be either hostile or receptive to efforts to execute on workplace strategies. As she eventually documented in her book, Cultivate: The Power of Winning Relationships, she found that colleagues can be sorted into four categories: Allies, Supporters, Rivals, and Adversaries. “It’s a way of diagnosing the health of the relationship and, more importantly, taking action. You’re not a victim, it doesn’t have to be this way, every relationship is built or destroyed one conversation at a time. So, what conversation do you need to have to set expectations or reset expectations so that you and I can work effectively together?”
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There are several questions you can ask yourself to determine where a particular coworker fits on this spectrum. “Just think about who your go-to people are,” said Barrett. “Chances are the people you go to for advice, those are your allies and people you trust. And the people that you roll your eyes at when they start talking, the ones that you tend to avoid — that is more likely to be the rival, or, even worse, adversary.”
Once you’ve categorized your coworkers, then the focus should be on reframing those relationships so that both parties are working toward the same goals. “Start with a conversation,” said Barrett. “Go for coffee, go for a walk, and be curious about what their definition of success is. What do they need from you in order to be successful? Have you found out what their goals are, what their boss is expecting of them, to understand how that might align or misalign with what you’re being asked to do with your own boss?”
So often, explained Barrett, we spend so much time with our heads down focused on the technical aspects of our jobs that we let those relationships sour, which then leads to roadblocks. “If you’re only ever calling me when you need something, that’s not cultivating a relationship,” she said. “That’s just a transaction. That’s when I start rolling my eyes and think, ‘What does he want this time?’ as opposed to, ‘What can I do to help?’”
In addition to incorporating relationship building into the normal work day, Barrett recommends setting time aside for it throughout the year. “Usually the clients that we work with regularly will schedule some sort of team building or retreat two or maybe three times a year,” she said. “It gets people removed from the day-to-day of their office and allows them to sit back and press the ‘pause’ button so they can reflect on what’s working and what’s not.”
Though Barrett’s company works across industries, she’s found that the IT department in particular has struggled to adopt this relationship-centric approach. “IT is where you’ll see people say, ‘Oh, you’re a great developer, we’re going to promote you to management,’ and invariably the person who is good at writing code is thrown into the deep end, given the title but not necessarily given guidance on how to manage people,” she said. “They’re not given guidance on what the company expects in a manager, coaching, feedback, delegation, etc. One of the challenges is how do you prepare technical experts to broaden their horizon and be able to be successful in their people expertise?”
Every year, this kind of expertise becomes more vital as IT gets more and more integrated with the core business. “IT I think is at the heart of every successful business,” said Barrett. “But what this now means is, no we don’t just fix the laptops, we don’t fix the photocopier, we are enabling the digital services that allow for virtual collaboration and teams that now might be working globally. The challenge for these organizations now is to translate from ‘geek speak’ into business speak so that collaboration can happen more seamlessly. The very success of your business now depends on it.”
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