General

No fear, it is the foundation of a great team.

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

No fear

The past weeks, we have been looking at the employee experience. If we buy into the whole concept of the Service Profit Chain, it makes perfect sense that creating a great employee experience will help us create the best possible guest experience.

So let’s explore another element of the employee experience.

At a very basic level, we all have a need to feel safe. Only when we feel safe can we do our best work – if we feel anxiety in some form or the other, our system directs our resource toward coping with whatever we feel as a threat and, at a very deep level, tries to answer the question: Fight, Flight or Freeze? Obviously none of these modes are conducive to producing great customer experience or anything else for that matter.

When we dissect great customer experiences, most of them are the result of one of our team members deciding to do something ‘different’ in a given situation. The guest’s situation does not fit ‘the script’ and there is a need for an improvised solution. The last thing that guest wants to hear is “Sorry, we can’t do that”. But in order for our frontline staff to produce those creative alternatives that win us customers for life, they need to feel safe.

A good team is a great place to be, exciting, stimulating, supportive, and successful. A bad team is horrible, a sort of human prison. – Charles Handy

That is also confirmed by research from Google where they have identified psychological safety as the number one driver of great team performance. Teams that experience a high degree of psychological safety outperform teams that don’t.

But what does psychological safety actual entail?

The research breaks it down into four components:

Tribe – A sense of belonging
Expectations
Hierarchy – what are the roles
Autonomy

So in simple terms, that means it is important that everyone feels included, that we set clear expectations and that we try and limit the surprises; that there is not an excessive focus on authority and positions – and finally the ultimate motivator: do I get to have a say in how I do my work? (Not what I do, that is a management decision, but how I do it.)

This is all fairly easy to understand and makes perfect sense to most of us. But how do you as a busy team leader actually do that?

Well it so happens that there is a very nifty way to approach this. It is called the high performance team model and I plan to explain how it works in details on my next managers workinar*.

If you have this approach in the back of our head as you tackle your day, you will notice a marked difference in team performance.

* I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the 13th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

Employee experiences and why you need to focus on consequences

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Motivation
Last week, we looked at how progressive organisations are focusing on managing their employee experience as way to ensure the best possible customer experience. From a Service Profit Chain‘s point of view, this makes perfect sense.

We can create super sophisticated employee career journey maps – but we could also just look at what a day looks like on our team from an employee experience point of view. What are the emotional highs and lows in a day? So we looked at how managing positive ending has a huge influence on how the whole day is perceived.

This week, I would like to look at why managing the end of the day is just as or maybe even more important than managing the start of the day from a motivational point of view.

A reasonably accepted definition of motivation is:

“A reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way”

So that reason, we call it the activator, for doing or not doing something can come from two main sources. It can be external; somebody does something to make you act (A request, a threat, a reward etc.). Or the activation comes from within yourself; you feel an inner urge to do something.

In either case, you end up doing whatever it is. That is the behaviour part. And all behaviour has a consequence. So there is this sequence: Activator – behaviour – consequence in everything we do.

In simple terms: You feel a craving for sweets. That activates you to get up and go to the cupboard and find a bar of chocolate. The consequence is that you feel good – your sugar craving is satisfied. (And, maybe you learn that eating chocolate is a solution for killing a sweet tooth.)

So now just pause for a minute.

What do you think has the largest influence on your behaviour on a day to day basis? The activator or the consequence?

If you are like most of the people I have in my workshops, you will say the Activator – We tend to think that we do things because there is a push. But that is not entirely correct.

80% of what we do or don’t do is determined by what we think the consequences are going to be. The drive is the consequence – that triggers the activator.

Ah, but that is not true, you may be thinking because I know that the consequences of eating chocolate is that I will get fat. So why do I still do it? Because we are all wired to value short-term consequences higher than long-term consequences. On top of that, we will value consequences that are certain, more than consequences that are a possibility in the future.

At 2 o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Eve – someone suggests that we crack open a bottle of Jack Daniels. The short-term well known consequence is that it is going to feel great. The long-term possible consequence is that we are going to feel terrible tomorrow.

That is also why it is hard to get people to stop smoking. The immediate 100% certain consequence is that they will feel a kick from the nicotine, the long term possible consequence is that it may kill them.

So back to managing our daily employee experience.

What do you think has the largest influence on our motivation to go to work? How the day starts (activation) or how the day ends (consequences)?

It’s a no brainer.

If we want our team to come in tomorrow, energised and ready to rock and roll, we need to think about how we manage the ending today. What was the consequence of their efforts today?

How are they going to feel when they go home: Elated, confident, positive? Or downcast, self blaming, frustrated and angry? Whatever it is, it is going to be our starting point tomorrow.

So how do we do a better job of managing our endings?

That is the subject of my upcoming tranings: The Manager’s Toolbox – you can join us and participate with your questions on comments live. Check it out here.

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This is the 12th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

What drives a fabulous employee experience?

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Progressive service organisations have for a while now been focusing on the customer experience. It is well established that the way our customers perceive the total experience is crucial to getting their loyalty – and loyalty, at the end of the day, is the magic path to profits and growth.

But only the most advanced companies are looking at the logical consequence of that thinking: How are we managing the employee experience? If you are familiar with the Service Profit Chain, this line of thought will not come as a surprise to you.

The customer experience at the end of the day is a reflection of the employee experiences. So it makes perfect sense to start looking much more closely at how we are managing our employee experiences.

There are different ways we could approach that. We could look at a classic journey map over the life span of employment. What is the pre-employment experience (recruiting, etc.)? How does the on-boarding flow? What is the developmental path proposed? And finally, what happens when people, for one reason or the other, move on? Who does the exit interview? You do have exit interviews, don’t you ? And how are we using the exit interviews to feedback into improving the current system?

Personally I think that any HR department worth its salt should insist that we create that map – and, once we have created it, do some research on what the emotional highs and lows are on the path.

But as a manager – the immediate supervisor of those all important frontline employees, there is possibly an even more important perspective to take on the employee experience. How does each day begin? How does the day then unfold and how does the day end?

Every day when we leave our work, we tell ourselves a story about how the day went.
It is not a factual objective recorded version of the day but our story of our day.

What shapes our story is basically three things: changes, significant moments and endings. These constitute the highs and lows of the day. Then we string them together and create a story from that.

When something changes for the better compared to what we expected, we have positive emotions and when something turns out to be worse, we have negative emotions. Positive or negative emotions trigger corresponding positive or negative thoughts respectively in our brain.

Depending on whether they are positive or negative, they influence our performance and relationships – as you probably well know. If you are aware of this, you can try and manage the day to the best of your ability to minimise unpleasant surprises. Often this is a question of taking the time to communicate with the team so that they understand what’s coming.

Significant moments are a bit in the same category – they are either positive or negative – if they are neutral, they would not be significant. What are your opportunities for building in positive significant moments? It can be anything from getting doughnuts for everyone on a tricky day, to having that important conversation with a key team member. Significant moments are very largely within your control – if you want to.

And finally, psychological studies have shown time and again that the ending is the most influential factor in how we evaluate an experience. A visit to the dentist that ends with sharp pain is remembered vastly different from the same visit extended with a 5 minute empathetic soothing talk and hug.

So how does a day end on your team? Have you ever given that any thought?

There is a nice process that you can incorporate into your manager’s toolkit for wrapping up the day in a constructive way – we call it the goals grid reflection – it’s a 5-10 minute process you can do at the end of the day with your team.

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This is the eleventh article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

You won’t get results by pussyfooting around the issues!

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Ed Catmull called Creativity Inc. Now you may not be familiar with the name Ed Catmull, but if I tell you that he was one of the three original founders of Pixar film then you’ll probably have an idea of who I’m talking about.

In the book is a chapter where Catmull describes the process behind making a successful animation movie. Catmull writes “Early on all our movies suck!”. This makes sense when you think about it. But when we see that fabulous animation, we often forget how that represents three years of hard work from an awful lot of people. And of course that rough idea was not born a box office hit. It was worked, reworked and polished endlessly until it became that work of art.

One thing is being a lone genius, a Picasso or a Rodin – tirelessly and self critically continuing until you get it right. But how does that work when you are 60, 70 or even 200+ people?

According to Catmull, one of the secrets to Pixar’s success is that they have this culture of candour. A feedback culture that is open, straightforward and honest – and maybe most importantly, never compromising.

So once a month, the management team sit down with the team working on a given animation project for the monthly review. Imagine this is meeting #24 i.e. 24 months into the project. Probably still another 12 or 18 months to go. The team that has been working on the project has been working long and hard on it, and they are probably relatively proud of what they have come to see as their baby.

“Success Is Going from Failure to Failure Without Losing Your Enthusiasm” – Sir Winston Churchill

But there is still work to do. So the challenge for the management team is, to give the ‘creatives’ the necessary feedback without them losing motivation and enthusiasm. So each management team member voices their opinion but in a very precise format. They explain what they feel worked well for them and they state very clearly what did not work well for them. “If the scene at 37 minutes, was supposed to make me laugh, I didn’t find it funny.” The management team makes a point of not suggesting what needs to be fixed or what they felt was wrong. They only communicate very clearly: Is this working for me or is it not working for me?

And so it goes on and on, iteration after iteration, and gradually the rough sketches and crazy ideas are honed into one smooth and fabulous animation movie. Management gives straightforward no nonsense feedback – but the project managers are always left with their ownership for the project intact. They must come up with a new solution or improvement.

It’s not personal, it’s a challenge

Note also that this type of feedback is not personal. This is not feedback that says you are a bad animator. It just says we need to try something different. It’s a challenge, not a criticism.

But now think of your own team and how you are conducting team reviews, feedback sessions, evaluations of past performance? Do you have a culture of straight talk?

Do you as the boss fall into the trap of telling them what was wrong and what they need to do in order to fix it?

No feedback, no progress.

Feedback is crucial to our progress, without it we would not see improvements in anything we do. But the wrong kind of feedback, the criticisms, the ironic comments, sarcasm and lukewarm endorsements, just kills motivation and engagement.

What is needed is a culture of candour.

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the tenth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

Take charge of your energy levels!

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

In our ongoing summer series on how to best support the first time mangers, we now need to look at one of the big challenges – lack of time.

Landing that first managerial job is, for most new mangers, exciting and challenging: so much to do!

…and then the realisation: so little time to do it in.

The natural reaction is to just put in more hours. Crank up the work volume. And often it works for a while but then we run out of steam. Then in our pursuit to squeeze more productivity out of the hours available, we start researching time management tricks and tips – maybe we invest in a super To-do app for our phone or a fancy leather bound paper organisers.

But regardless, chasing more time quickly becomes exhausting.

There has got to be a better way.

There is.

But it is not about managing your time, but about managing your energy instead. When we are energised, we fly through the day – stuff seems to get done almost by itself – on the other hand, on the days when we are drained, even the simplest task seems to occupy the whole morning for us.

Where does our energy come from?

To some, it’s just a question of getting enough sleep and the right amount of caffeine in the morning – but it is actually more complex than that.

In the book “The Power of full engagement”, Tony Swartz explains that we draw our energy from four sources:

Body, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual.

Ideally, we need to manage them all to ‘Full’ in order to function at our best.

Body: physical energy

The basics are well known to most. You need your sleep and you need to eat in a sensible way. If you do not know what that means, there are lots of resources on the web to guide you – Google is a good place to start.

So assuming that you have the basics under control, you also need to manage your body energy over the day. This is less well known. You body is not a machine – if you don’t give it time to replenish and recover over the day, you wear it down in such a way that your productivity drops of dramatically as you move through the day. Ever notice a different in energy levels during the first hours of the morning and your 3pm drowsiness?

Every 90 min or so we need a break – a 15 min switch of, close your eyes, daydream or even better, take a brisk walk, whatever you can do to give your system a break from what you are doing.

If you apply these breaks every 90 min or so, you will experience that you can sustain the same high levels of physical energy throughout the day – afternoons become just as productive as mornings and thus make up for the time you ‘wasted’ taking these 15 min breaks.

Emotions: the quality of our energy

Maintaining a positive state of mind requires a conscious effort. The more pressure we face and the more fight-flight reactions we have during a day, the more we tend to slip into negative emotions. Being in a negative frame of mind reduces our effectiveness quite dramatically; we see problems where we need to see solutions and possibilities. And the negative impact is not limited to ourselves – negative emotions are contagious – they spread to our surroundings and make everyone else less effective as well. Apart from the fact that it ruins their day….

The two fastest ways to make a quick emotional reset when we sense that we are slipping into a negative state is to take a deep breath and exhale slowly – when we exhale slowly, we provide instant stress relief.

Secondly, we can shift our focus. Next time you are in a negative mood, notice where your focus is. You will be focusing on something that you don’t like or don’t want. When we do that, we trigger a negative emotional response. If we shift our focus to what we do want, what we could create, what would be a possibility then we also trigger a more positive emotional response – try it – it works wonders.

Negative emotions are like Tamagotchis, they need to be fed in order to persist. We can all experience burst of anger or frustration during a hectic day – that is unavoidable. Emotional bursts last on an average 90 sec if you just leave them to lose their steam. Only if you feed them with more negative thoughts do they survive for longer – Don’t feed them, shift your focus.

The Mind: Focus Energy

The fastest way to dilute your mental resources and energy is to shift tasks rapidly. In your brain, there is no such thing as multitasking, what we sometimes refer to as multitasking is just that we are asking our brains to perform several tasks at the same time by rapidly switching from one to the other – when we do that the loss in productivity is dramatic. Typically, you add an extra 25% time to tasks when you switch attention. So answering phone calls, replying to email, etc. while trying to finish that monthly report is a very bad idea.

Chunk and batch process your tasks in categories. Emails in one time slot, phone calls in another.

Big Rocks First

The number one productivity enhancer that everyone who implements it says changes their life dramatically is what Steven Covey called Big Rocks First: Start your day by tackling one big important project that you need to get done. (Decide the night before what it is going to be) Do it first, before the emails, and the 15 yellow post-it notes with things to do and people to call on them. Practice every day for a week and notice how much more you get done. It is amazing!

The Human Spirit: Energy of Meaning and Purpose.

How does it feel energy wise to work on something that in your view is meaningless? It’s a drag – yes?

On the other hand, how does it feel to work on something that you personally feel is ultra important and very meaningful? Now you are maybe thinking, but hey that’s not work, that’s called a hobby… Exactly. When something is meaningful to us – when we can see the purpose, it is so much more fun to do that we would even consider doing to for free.

So how do we tap into that energy?

We do so by becoming more aware about what is important to us. What we value in life. Becoming more aware of in what situation we have had this ‘flow’ experience and then asking ourselves so how can I organise myself in such a way that I get to do more of that.

Sometimes we are just in a situation that we will need to create our own meaning in order to survive. At the age of 21, I landed a job as a lift operator in a very posh Parisian hotel. Now that is not the most inspiring of jobs. So in order to preserve my sanity, I started to think what would it take to become the best lift operator in Paris? How do you run your lift in such a way that people (i.e my superiors) notice? That became my meaningful project every day and three months later, I was promoted to a new position in the hotel.

So in conclusion – and I do realise it is a bit of a cliché – but it really does apply here -Don’t try to work harder – you will just kill yourself – work smarter.

Take charge of your energy levels!

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This is the ninth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

Conversations, not small talk

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Before you plunge into this, take a moment – and think about leaders that you have admired in your life. This could be a teacher, a scout leader, a sports coach or a boss. Go on – do it now.

When you think of a leader in your life that you have admired, does a specific conversation come to mind?

I think most of us can remember at least one (maybe even several) conversations that we have had with a great ‘boss’. A conversation that somehow shifted something in our thinking, understanding or behaviour.

Great conversations have a powerful impact.

But great conversations are also time consuming and for exactly that reason – they are also often the most neglected part of your leadership toolkit. We don’t seem to find the time.

That is a shame because when we neglect our conversations, we miss out on one of the most effective leadership instruments at our disposal.

Now, conversations are not just conversations, they come in many forms, some are constructive/destructive, important/irrelevant or inspiring/draining etc.

So as a first time leader, the first step is to become more aware of our conversations and in that process look at:

The quality
The participants
The frequency

What is a Quality Conversation?

Most conversations can be categorized as anything from weak at one end of the spectrum to strong at the other end.

A strong conversation has three key ingredients:

Advancement of an agenda
Shared learning
A strengthening of the relationship

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the weak conversations. At best they lead nowhere. And at worst, they produce confusion and distrust.

A high-quality conversation typically has three stages:

The initiator of the conversation sets up her agenda with an honest feeling or sincere expression of need. This signals to the other participant(s) in the conversation the importance of the agenda. At the same time, it can also a request for help and an invitation to contribution.

Strong conversations often follow a natural path of divergences / convergence that goes something like this:

In the first phase, you establish rapport and set the scene.

You ‘frame’ the situation, explain your view and if possible, illustrate what you mean.

The second phase, you explore, primarily using questions. You are probing in an effort to uncover and surface the real assumptions behind the issue as well as to make sure that we have as many facts as possible on the table.

Once we have a common understanding of what is going on, we can move to a third phase where we examine alternative ideas and solutions. This is a phase where we can try and stretch our thinking and not fall into the trap of grabbing the first solution that surfaces.

Finally, we need to make choices and decide what actions to take. This is a critical phase because often we assume that everybody is in agreement about what it is we need to do and everybody sees everything the same way and therefore there’s no need to going to details about this. (and time is running so we all nod and grab our stuff and rush of to the next thing on our agenda.)

But more often than not, this is not the case. We all hear what we would like to hear and we can all fall into the trap of going with half baked inferences and assumptions.

So in the final phase of a great conversation, we agree on explicit action steps: Who does what and when.

In order to move elegantly through this diamond, it is helpful to learn certain communicative dance steps. We call them advocacy and inquiry. We can get back to them in a future post.

Who are you talking to?

The next thing I would like you to consider is who are you actually having conversations with?

Take a moment and think about the week that has passed. Who did you talk to beyond just “So how are you?” or “Did you watch football yesterday?” etc.,

What quality conversations have you had and with whom?

And maybe even more importantly, who did you not have conversations with?

Why do you think you did not have conversations with exactly those people? Often our most immediate answer to that is “No time” or “They weren’t available.” or something else in that category. But often these are just excuses.

When we explore this question deeper, we often realise that there are some people we have a tendency to avoid having real conversations with. There can be many reasons for this, from simply we just don’t really enjoy those people, or that those conversations always end up negatively, or that we know that we have disagreements that we don’t want to resurface.

But also, be aware if there are people that you’re not having conversations with because you are assuming that it’s not necessary. “They know where to find me, they are capable and will tell me if they need me.” etc. That may be true but my suggestion is to test your own assumption on this. You might be surprised.

Whatever the reason is for avoidance, it should be a big red flag waving in front of you telling you something needs sorting out.

Because having or not having conversations and with whom is part of your behaviour pattern – see my previous post and it sends strong implicit signals about what you are interested in/ focused on.

How often are you having quality conversations?

The next thing to consider when you look at the people that you are responsible for is to evaluate the frequency with which you have powerful conversations with them.

Look at the list of the people on your team and think through how often do you actually sit down with them and have a powerful conversation?

Are you happy with this frequency? What do you think would happen if you increased the frequency for all or some of them?

If you think back to the first post in this series on Action, Behaviours and Conversations, we looked at the concept of powerful and powerless. That applies here as well. Powerless leaders have weak wichy washy conversations – powerful leaders have strong engaging conversations.

Generally, there is a huge need for more real conversations out there, not less. Quality conversations are the glue of our relationships, they are highly motivating – and they generate trust.

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This is the eighth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

Powerful or powerless, what do you prefer?

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Powerful

Last week, we looked at the importance of building relations as a basic skill for the first time manager.

Essentially, you are the instrument. How you decide to show up from situation to situation will determine how your relationships with other people are formed.

As the ‘instrument’, you will need to be aware of three things: Your actions, behaviours and conversations. How you decide to mix and match these three will, at the end of the day, determine how successful you end up being in your roles as a first time manager (or in any future management position for that matter).

This week, we explore the first of these three key tools.

What you decide to do – or not to do – defines you in your managerial role.

Leaders who come across as trustworthy and powerful in the best sense of the word are the people whom you know you can trust to act on something when it is brought to their attention. They are in my view the powerful leaders.

Some people have a problem with the words power and powerful. In some cultures, it has negative connotations – and there are often good reasons for that because we have all experienced powerful leaders who abused their power.

In his book Power and Love, which I can highly recommend, Adam Kahane defines two kinds of power: constructive and destructive. He explains the difference as:

‘Power over’ – which is the destructive version.
‘Power to’ – which is the constructive version.

When as a leader I use my power as ‘power over’, it is not very engaging – on the contrary nobody feels inspired by being subjected to ‘power over’ – power over is encapsulated in the response: “Because I say so!” to an inquiry from a team member asking: “ why we are doing this?” .

It is a classic beginner’s error for new manager to get this wrong and to try and bolster their position by demonstrating ‘power over’ instead of focusing on ‘power to’. This form of power shows up when you order people around, grant or don’t grant favour, privileges to team members etc. These are all actions that use to demonstrate ‘I am in charge here’.

‘Power to’ on the other hand is when you use your skills, position and authority to change or create something, to move the agenda forward. You are comfortable distributing power to other team members; it’s all about getting things done and moving the agenda forward.

Leaders who display that kind of power are a joy to work for in contrast to the ones that are powerless because they do not take action but always postpone, hesitate or kick issues upstairs – to the side.

Non-action is also action

In my view, the core problem with people in charge at any level in an organisation, who are not seen as great leaders by their surroundings, is not so much that they do the wrong things but that they are not doing the things that they obviously should be doing.

These indecisions come in all shapes and sizes – from small stuff like: “Would it be possible for me to take 2 days off next month to go to my sister’s wedding…?” and then you wait and you wait and you wait for an answer and maybe you even remind them more than once and get: “Oh yes, so sorry I will look into it…” Or more serious issues like, “We have a customer who is very upset with our last delivery on the phone.” There is a world of difference between the leader who says “Let me speak to her now”, and the one that says “I am busy just now, tell her I will call her back” and you think: “That is what she said last week…”

The worst form of non-action that I know is the manager who does not respond to non-performance. It is in my opinion probably the most destructive form of non action that there is.

Think about it – what is the worst way to insult a high performing employee? – It is to ask them to work alongside an idiot. If you are a highly engaged employee and take pride in your job, nothing ruins your motivation and engagement as much as watching someone work alongside you that makes a mess of the product, the customer relation or whatever. Someone who ultimately does not care the way you care.

The powerless manager will come up with excuses – “Yes, I know Joe is not quite up to snuff but that is all we can get just now, so please suffer him for now and we will get it sorted out eventually.” – but they seldom do. Because if someone is not doing what they are supposed to be doing, it is time for a powerful conversation – and there is no reason to postpone it.

Everyone on your team needs to know that if things are not going according to plan, you will act – not as tyrant spewing blame all over the show – but you will act because you care and you will sort it out – you will be asking questions, trying to understand why we are not on track and then you will take appropriate action.

Why can it be hard to take action – well you could take the wrong action and stand there with egg all over you face. So non action is often a result of a fear of being wrong. But as leaders, we need to get over the fear of being wrong. We will be wrong from time to time and that is not a problem as long as we acknowledge it and try to improve. Perfect leaders do not exist.

Think about it, whom would you personally prefer to work for, the leader who acts and makes mistake – and is prepared to acknowledge them, or the leader who does not act but also never seems to do wrong because they push those decisions up the system instead of taking responsibility for their own actions?

Next week, we will look more closely at the second tool at your disposal – your behaviour.

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This is the sixth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

How your relationships affect your results

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Relations

In our continuing series on how to lead a team as a first time manager, I would like to focus on the importance of relations.

Last week, we briefly touched on this when we worked through the high performance team model.

The second step in that process – the who part – is all about relations.

Daniel H. Kim the systems thinker has illustrated this in a very elegant way.

Leading my Team

So we have a fundamental choice here. And it can go one of two ways.

We can generate an upward spiral where we are continuously developing our relations and, as a result, performing better and better; or we can take the downward spiral where it all just gets worse and worse.

It is a choice.

A choice that is going to determine whether the team is going to be successful or not and, ultimately, it’s going to determine whether you are successful in your role as a team leader.

For the first time manager, this sometimes comes as a surprise and we think, “I have a gazillion other things to do. Do I also have to think about that, I just want to get the job done?”

And the next thought is maybe, ‘but what do we mean by relations exactly?’. This is where the first time manger can make a classical and very costly mistake.

Relationship is not about trying to please everyone. A relationship is about mutual expectations and that is something very different.

I like Ed Schein’s definition of a relationship:

“A relationship is a set of mutual expectations about each other’s future behaviour based on past interactions with each other.”

So you have a relationship with someone when you can more or less predict some of their behaviours and vice versa. Relationships go both ways, otherwise they are not relationships.

But we have relationships of different depths with other people. They can be shallow, meaning that both of us have a vague sense of what the other person will do; or at the other end of the spectrum, they can be deep to the extent that we almost know what the other person thinks and feels in most situations.

A good, solid work relationship means that we feel a certain level of comfort with each other, we have a good understanding of how the other will react and we are well aligned with respect to whatever goal or project we are working on.

That kind of comfortable relationship we often summarise in one small word: trust.

But in order for me to determine how much to trust you and how open I can expect you to be with me, we must have a history.

We judge our relationships on past interactions, and we are usually very observant of these first interactions because we use them as a test – and the result of the test feed into our conclusions on how this relationship works.

In practical terms, this means that as a first time manager, you will need to invest time and effort in building these relationships. And when doing so, you have three basic tools at your disposal:

Your actions, your behaviours and your conversations.

In our next post, we will look closer at these three relationship building instruments.

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This is the fifth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out