Why would I do that?
I write here often about the importance of relationships in organisations. I think it’s a key part of a manager’s job to build good relationships with their managees. I’ve explained why regular 121s are an important part of this, and outlined a good way of doing them.
But what about the times in between 121s? Relationships are still important then. So what can you as a manager do to fulfil this responsibility?
I have to confess that I’m suspicious of formulaic approaches to relationship building - and somewhat resistant to offering advice along those lines.
I’m not saying this to be difficult. I’m saying it because a relationship is an emergent property of a whole system of interactions. Those interactions are the things that we can concretely do, but the relationship is abstract.1 The relationship is not ‘in’ any one of these parts - although they all contribute to it. There is often not a clear path of cause and effect between the parts and the whole. So I don’t think it makes sense to say ‘If you do X and then Y and then Z, you will have a better relationships’. It’s just not that kind of a problem.
I stand by my previous assertion that you don’t need special skills to build relationships: you are already enough. You are a social being, and if you pay attention to other people, your curiosity will light up. You do not have to be perfect - you just have to be you, doing your best to understand them.2
In my experience, that is hardest to do when someone else is being... unreasonable.
When other people don’t do what we want or expect3, it’s easy to fall into blame - “why won’t they just do this?”, “what is wrong with them?”, etc. Our natural tendency is to defend our own self-image, and so we make other people the problem.
But this is the total opposite of understanding people!
It is imposing our worldview, our expectations, our way of doing things onto others. In other words, it’s all about us.
This leads me to one of the questions I have found it most useful to ask myself in leadership roles:
“Why would I do that?”
It’s a simple question but a very powerful one. If you take it seriously, it immediately slams on the breaks for your train of though making the other person the problem. It invites you to see the world through their eyes, and to give them the same benefit of the doubt that you would tend to give yourself.
That’s not to say that your theory will be correct. Other people’s motivations might be completely different from how they appear - but having a hypothesis that paints someone else in a positive light makes it much more possible to approach them and discover what’s really going on.
This not only brings you back to the mode of relationship building, it invites you to look at the broader context that shaped the other person’s behaviour. Some of that context is made up of the policies and practices of your organisation - and so it might not be the people who need to change, so much as the structures that are being imposed on them.
I hope this question will serve you as well as it continues to serve me.
This is the same way we cannot act directly on ‘culture’.
Management roles do demand a certain level of maturity, and I make the assumption that people in these roles have reached that stage.
Given how much of leadership is about getting other people to change, and how little we tend to like having to change… people not doing what we want is pretty much the norm.