How You Relate, Creates
It is not always clear what comes first. Is it that your relationship quality drives your experiences and outcomes in your environment? Or does your experience of culture influence the quality of your relationships? Or can it be that both perspectives are accurate? If so, how you relate, creates, and how you create, impacts how you relate.
When in a work environment, we tend to decide who we are compatible with, or not, and we work with those people based on conscious or unconscious approval systems that are based on this compatibility bias. As leaders who are interested in building and sustaining engaged teams, it is important to attune to the quality of work relationships especially when you need to cultivate a foundation of trust.
Attuning to relationship quality is especially important when you aim to address damaged relationships or when you want to manage your professional brand. Quality relationships require commitment, especially on off days. They also entail taking deliberate steps toward building bridges.
Becoming aware of yourself and how you impact the climate of your team is essential to achieving your individual and collective goals. This is because when your team members feel that you value them, they will forgive your mistakes, they feel safer, and will most likely share their ideas with you.
What is interconnectivity?
When we think about interconnectivity, we tend to consider the connective dynamic that occurs between people. These relationships can be healthy ones, based on trust, serving the greater good of the team or they can be associated with individual agendas that seek to form allegiances for building power structures.
Interconnectivity, in and of itself, can be constructive or dysfunctional, it really depends on what you are using your relationships to achieve. As a leader, it is important to discern why relationships exist within your environments, which relationship circles or teams connect, and which ones don’t. Otherwise, you may be in for a few surprises.
Authentic interconnectivity is possible when employees feel you care about them. If you merely go through the motions of demonstrating their value, they can often detect your insincerity, and this can lead to distrust and hard-core skepticism. While this seems obvious, insincere gestures like this can happen.
When leaders are ready to build constructive relationships and networks, ones that tap into human potential, the first step is to become aware of the impact of their own behavioural patterns. One example of a dysfunctional pattern that shows up frequently is when leaders rely exclusively on their best performers to get things done. Their primary intention is to choose someone who does not need to be managed and who can achieve goals within the allotted timeframe, with high quality work.
However, an unintended outcome can surface because constantly giving the same person(s) opportunities for visibility and growth, disenfranchises employees who feel overlooked and undervalued. This is because this type of delegative action creates an imbalance of power between those who are perceived as the favoured few, and everyone else. Understanding the impact in a situation like this can help leaders to make more inclusive decisions.
7 Relational Skills That Support Constructive Outcomes
Here are seven relationship cultivation skills that can contribute to constructive outcomes when applied appropriately by leaders:
1. When leaders model emotionally competent communication they contribute to the creation of safe space and safe space is a foundation for team trust, engagement, innovation, and agility.
2. It is important for leaders to hold team members accountable to demonstrating respect and empathy. A healthy climate can lead to improved team cohesion.
3. Leaders should be able to attune to unhealthy power dynamics and possess the skills needed to address them. Restructuring can help to diffuse power, but so can the development of skills like emotional intelligence because it brings self-awareness as well as the awareness of others into focus.
4. Leaders should consider their teams as an extension of themselves. Not from a codependent perspective, but in a way that involves the balanced implementation of appropriate boundaries and connection. Sometimes we view boundaries as divisive, but when healthy boundaries are in place, leaders can successfully balance their connections with others with opening appropriate space.
5. Ensure communication channels are not only open, they should also be active. This means the right information should be transmitted at the right time, using the right communication modalities in the right way.
6. Leaders ought to contemplate the potential consequences of their actions so they can choose actions that will most likely lead to the best possible outcomes.
7. Trust building and sustaining skills are important because it helps you to continue to think about your impact on others.
Self-Reflection
As leaders we should be aware of how we relate and what we create as we relate to others. You can consider these questions to determine how you relate and what those relationships produce:
1. Which core values am I modelling at work?
2. How do I relate with others?
3. How do my relationships impact the team?
4. How much do my coworkers trust me? Why?
5. What are the characteristics of relationships between members of my team?
6. How would I describe the quality of the relationships between my team and other teams?
7. How can I continuously build and reinforce trust?
By asking yourself these questions and exploring your responses, you can become more aware of how you contribute to the quality of your relationships and by extension, what you are creating through them.
Yvette Bethel is CEO of Organizational Soul, an Organizational Effectiveness Consulting and Leadership Development company. She is a Board and CEO Advisor, Consultant, Trainer, Speaker, Facilitator, Executive Coach, Author, and Emotional Intelligence Practitioner. She is also the innovator behind the IFB Proprietary Ecosystem Transformation Methodology. If you are interested in a free consultation with Yvette, you can contact her at www.yvettebethel.com. To learn more, check out her podcast at Evolve Podcast.
