Most work environments require interacting with others. Some people view these interactions as separate events they must endure and others view them as enriching, ongoing relationships. The truth is, you get out of your work relationships what you put in. If you are totally independent in your work environment, not requiring anything from anyone, then you don’t need to read any further. But, if you’re dependent on others, then you need to learn how to build strong work relationships.
There are four key behavior traits that contribute to building strong relationships. You need to be trustworthy, care about the other person, be committed to excellence in your performance, and bond through adventure. Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
Be Trustworthy
It is important for you to do what you say. When you commit to something others listen and then watch. They want to know if you can be trusted to deliver on your commitment or if you will just blow it off. When delivering something will you deliver it as requested and on time or will it be incomplete or late.
Others also want to know if you are going to attempt personal gain at their expense. They will watch how you go about getting things you want, looking for methods or actions that take advantage of others. Even if they are not involved, it will be a tell tale sign that they need to watch their back when working with you.
Care About Them
People want to know if you care about them as a person or see them as an object, a means to an end. No one wants to be viewed as a resource for someone else’s consumption. They want to be known as a unique individual with life experiences, emotions, and a choice in their work demands. Showing someone you care about them requires showing respect regardless of their position in the company and gaining general knowledge of who they are and what they like and dislike.
In practice this means scheduling a meeting or conversation instead of just dropping in or calling. If you can’t schedule in advance, do not interrupt an ongoing conversation, politely wait and then ask if it is a good time to chat. Before you discuss any business ask them about their personal life. When you are first building the relationship, ask general questions about their past and current experiences. Topics could include family, hobbies, vacations, pets, past jobs, etc. As time goes on, you can ask more specifics questions, but wait until you sense trust developing between the two of you.
Another way to show you care is to reflect back the information you receive. If Sally tells you she has a big vacation starting tomorrow, then make sure you ask her about it the next time you see her. If Bill tells you his dog died, don’t forget about it and then ask him if he took his dog to the park two weeks later.
Commit to Excellence
Very few people like to work with low performers. You can’t help but get a little slimed from someone else’s deficiencies and poor results. Working with a person like this can require twice the effort and time of a competent worker. This is why your work attitude and quality affects your work relationships. Committing to excellence means showing initiative and not waiting for someone else to point work out to you. Having a can-do attitude signals you are not afraid of a challenge and that you will carry your weight when times get tough. Remember to be thorough and complete when you declare something finished. This will not only make you pleasant to work with, but it will also inspire others to follow your commitment to excellence.
Bond Through Adventure
Adventures are not all good or all bad; they are a mixture of both. In a work environment they are always experienced with a group of people, and have a general beginning and end. Adventures never kill us nor take us to nirvana and they usually have a central theme. In our personal lives adventures may be vacations, kids sports teams, neighborhoods, community efforts, etc. In work environments, they may be projects, departments in transition, recessions, building moves, working with a very difficult person, etc. Adventures almost always develop deeper bonds because they are shared experiences that we get to survive together, laugh and cry about, reminisce about, and to some extent relive the emotions again.
The key to reaping the benefits of bonding through adventure is by creating adventures in your day-to-day work environment. This starts with identifying the themes of your group adventures, highlighting the highs and lows you experience, acknowledging things will change and the adventure will end, and enforcing the group experience of it.
Each of these key behaviors requires multiple interactions over time to make a difference. There is no pill you can take to instantly have strong work relationships. In the beginning, ten good interactions may take you a level deeper in your work relationship with someone, but one bad one will set you back a level. Over time grace becomes more a part of your relationships and good and bad interactions become less pivotal to the relationships strength. Strong work relationships will not only make you more productive, they will make you a lot happier too.
Exciting news, Systemation has released a new website! We are still at the same address (http://www.systemation.com), we just changed how the site looks and functions.
One great new feature is that our blog has been incorporated into the new site, now you can find it here. We will continue to post to this blog only until June 1, 2010 so please make sure to update your bookmark and/or RSS feed. You can subscribe to the new RSS feed by visiting our new blog and clicking on the orange RSS icon or entering your email address in the right-hand column. You can also subscribe by going directly to our feed.
Feel free to stop by and check out our new site. We look forward to seeing you online.
We’ve talked about how useful the project triangle (RIP: The Project Triangle) is for understanding the dynamics between scope, time, and cost on projects. Now we are going to see how useful it is in making decisions about controlling projects.
Every project is launched with an explicit or implied priority scheme for the project triangle. This priority scheme establishes which side of the project triangle is most flexible (lowest priority) and which is least flexible (highest priority) when it comes to leveraging one side to benefit another. In fact, all project planning efforts use a priority scheme to create the initial estimates of what is going to be built, how long it will take, and how much it will cost.
The majority of projects start with scope being the highest priority and therefore time or cost must flex to meet the demands of the scope. Sometimes the number of resources is limited, making time the most flexible; this is when the project end date is determined by planning efforts and not stakeholders. In other situations where scope is the highest priority, the project’s end date may need to be within a 6 month window; this is when the number of resources and money need to be readily available to accommodate the scope and time.
Many different factors determine the priority scheme for projects. If the project deliverable is aimed at beating your competition to market, then time will be the highest priority. On these types of projects cost will be identified as the most flexible side of the triangle. If the project is going to use an iterative methodology for development, there too, time will be the highest priority. Each iteration will be time-boxed to accommodate the development approach, and the number of resources will be held somewhat steady forcing scope to flex the most. In tough economic times, cost will be the highest priority. This is also true of projects that are funded by grants. In each of these situations scope will be the most flexible because there usually is a time frame the project needs to be completed in.
It would be nice if priority schemes remained the same over the life of a project, but unfortunately they don’t. Some of the changes may be driven by external fluctuations in the business environment: economic cycles, competitor behavior, customer demands, etc. These can happen from time to time; however, the vast majority of priority changes happen because of the specific time in the project lifecycle: major intermediate milestones or project completion. Take for example a project with the scope as the highest priority. As the project nears completion, the stakeholders often become impatient and want the major deliverables sooner than later. Now, all of a sudden, time is the least flexible and cost is the most. In iterative developments, as they come to the end of the time-box, it may be most beneficial to make scope the least flexible and time the most. This is because it may take longer to pull out features than to keep them in and finish them late.
Decisions made on projects based on priority schemes usually are critical in nature. For this reason they need to be explicitly agreed upon and communicated. When the project is being planned there should be an agreement with stakeholders about which side of the triangle is the most flexible and which side is the least. Remember, as the project progresses the prioritization can change. It’s not as though there is a specific point in time when the prioritization scheme changes, it usually is discovered over the course of many decisions. But, when it becomes clear, the recognized change needs to be agreed and communicated amongst all project stakeholders. As with all projects, the more clarity people have regarding the project’s environment, the more consensus you will have when making decisions and the quicker the project will be completed.
If you’re a leader you have a vision. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Your vision is the starting point to make your organization better in some way. It’s supposed to bring about positive change and consumes a sizable portion of your organization’s resources in doing so. But, we all know that not all visions become realities. They start off with such flair but can burn out before they are achieved. Making your vision become a reality is what separates the great leaders from the good ones.
If you want to insure that your vision becomes a reality take these three actions: don’t try and boil the ocean, learn to say no in lots of different ways, and hitch yourself to the initiatives. Let’s look at these actions in detail.
Don’t Try to Boil the Ocean
Visions always have a lot of passion and desire built into them by their creators. There are no limits in the creative genitive process and, as such, they can become massive in scope. This is not a good thing. The larger the scope of the vision the less chance there is of it successfully becoming a reality. The reason for this is that the bigger the vision, the more people need to be involved, and the harder it is to communicate the vision with clarity. Additionally, it will take more time to complete and thus, harder to keep the momentum moving in the right direction. In general, a vision should take no more than 18 months to complete; it is far enough over the horizon to constitute a vision and yet still very manageable. The vision should also have very hard edges, meaning you have to know what is included in the vision and what is not. This will become very important in the next action. And lastly, it should be very easy to communicate to others; people should be able to follow the flow of the vision and easily connect the dots.
Learn to Say No in Lots of Different Ways
Visions put today in the context of tomorrow. This is not to be taken literally but figuratively. Because of this, not doing the right thing today will take you away from where you are trying to go tomorrow, your vision. Visions rarely get derailed due to large unexpected events; they typically fail because they lose momentum due to attention and resource parasite attacks over time. Visions need to be protected and to successfully achieve a vision leaders need to spend twice the amount of time defending the vision as they did creating it. This means saying no to people and ideas that appear to be great opportunities in the moment but will actually dilute the efforts directed towards your vision. Yes, these new ideas may make a lot of sense and can be easily completed in a very short period of time, but it will be at the expense of the vision. Leaders must become masters of disappointing people at a pace they can handle, so as not to discourage them from pursuing your vision.
Hitch Yourself to the Initiatives
Initiatives are used to organize the efforts required to make visions become a reality. Leaders almost always delegate responsibility for managing these initiatives to their staff. It is how organizations function and how work gets done, but not all work is created equally. Rarely does a vision consume all the organization’s resources. Therefore, there will always be projects commencing at any given point in time that have nothing to do with the vision. While it may not be efficient for a leader to get actively involved in these projects it is imperative that they get involved in the initiatives of the vision. This tactic does multiple things. It shows others the level of importance of the initiatives and helps them prioritize their work accordingly. Also, if the momentum begins to drop leaders will know it right away and be able to adjust the level of intensity to correct the problem. Lastly, the leader’s level of knowledge and awareness related to the initiatives will be high enough to allow them to make real-time adjustments to resolve vision ambiguities. This will save time and reduce any frustration team members may encounter.
As you can see, having a vision only gets you so far as a leader. Making that vision a reality requires some heavy lifting on your part, but doing so will put you in another league. Follow these three actions and you will be on the trail to success.
