Management requires curiosity

Organisations with a high performance culture continually invest in relationships.

Good relationships are the bedrock of learning and shared creativity (two essential features of high quality knowledge work). When we have good relationships, we’re also more willing to engage in healthy, productive conflict - debates about whether we have understood customer problems, and debates about how to solve them. To have a really effective organisation, we want a really solid network of relationships among the team.

But we cannot make people have good relationships with each other. A good relationship is not something that can be forced or faked.

So what can we, as leaders of the organisation, do?

We can invite people to better relationships. And we can do this through good management.

A good manager is someone who can tap into their natural human curiosity about other human beings. We all have this capacity. When we use it, our relationships deepen - and when that happens we end up caring more about the other person.

Good managers get to know their reports as people in a way that goes beyond just knowing them in the context of their role (although this is important!). It’s also important to build up an understanding of (some of) the context of their lives outside work.

This is not about prying, or trying to trick people into thinking that their workplace is ‘a family’.

People come to work in order to succeed. They show up every day to express the natural, universal desire to experience themselves as competent. Sometimes things happening in the rest of their lives get in the way of that. Their child is sick, their boyfriend left them, their dog died. These are all things that make it hard to show up. And, yes, of course, it’s okay to be less productive when things like this happen. But it’s also commonly observed that in periods of emotional stress work can be a comfort. Something that you can go and get absorbed in for a while. Again: we want something to be engaged with! We want to feel competent and useful! It is in our nature. Doing it is meaningful. If we have a manager we trust, we can lean on them to help us get the level of engagement that we want.

All of which is to say: A good manager is there to help their reports overcome any obstacles to being engaged with their work. Even when those obstacles are happening outside of work. And to do that, they need a good relationship with them, one in which there is real - not faked, not forced - trust, built up, over time, through curiosity.