To resolve differences and get things
done, people in organizations need to work together. To foster this kind of
collaboration, managers need to develop personal relationships – and some
amount of trust – with potential partners. Without this foundation,
negotiations often become adversarial; parties question each other’s motives
and neither side truly listens to the other.
Sound
familiar? The struggle to reach consensus in Washington over gun
control, spending, taxes and other issues is a case in point on how the
absence of relationships constrains compromise. Clearly the issues involved are
divisive and emotional, but watching our political leaders try to find a middle
ground is painful and discouraging – largely because they seem to have so
little relationship capital to draw upon. According to news reports last year,
Republican leaders routinely
turn down invitations from President Obama to come to the White House for
social events, whether they are state dinners or movie screenings. And
President Obama, for his part, has indicated that he prefers to spend time with
his family instead of schmoozing
with members of Congress.
Nobody is suggesting that President
Obama, Speaker Boehner, and Senate Minority Leader McConnell become close
personal friends. They do, however, need to understand and appreciate each
other’s points of view and be willing to look for middle ground. Getting to that
point takes hard work. As one manager at the World Bank once said to me,
“Building relationships requires a thousand cups of tea.”
A number of years ago, many of the big
commercial banks and private corporations encouraged their officers to build
relationships by providing special executive
dining rooms (with gourmet meals). While there was a certain amount of
elitism involved, the practice gave managers a chance to get to know each other
and create an underlying support structure for doing business. Similarly
companies also organized regular offsite team-building retreats, and social
events for managers and their families.
Today companies tend to be more
egalitarian, and more concerned about costs and perceived boondoggles, so that
many of these relationship-building vehicles (some of which were excessive) no
longer exist. However the need may be greater than ever, since managers often do
not work in the same locations as their peers, spend more time traveling,
and usually do not have the luxury of extra hours to just “get together” with
colleagues. The result is that many managers simply do not have relationships
with a wide network of people across the company (and outside) and therefore
struggle to resolve conflicts. In fact I’ve been in a number of senior
management conferences in the past few years in which top-50 managers are
meeting each other for the first time.
The bottom-line is that whether you are
the president of the United States or a mid-level manager, it’s worthwhile to be
strategic and proactive about building relationships.
To do so, here are two steps you can take:
First, identify the people in your
company, or in adjacent organizations (e.g., customers, thought-leaders,
partners) with whom you might need to collaborate at some point. In particular,
focus on managers who are likely to hold divergent views or may see the world
through a different lens.
Second, develop a tailored way to reach
out to each person on the list – a few at a time – with the simple goal of
getting to know each other. I know one manager, for example, who commits to
setting up 10-minute calls with three people each week, just to “say hello.”
Another manager makes sure that he contacts people on his list whenever he’s
going to be traveling to their city or country. And still another uses social
media to connect to some people and builds an email dialogue with others.
Most people understand that building
relationships with potential business partners is a critical strategy for
success. But it’s a strategy that often won’t happen by itself.
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Ron Ashkenas' blog post on Forbes. Join the discussion.