Seek to Understand
Building appropriate and genuine relationships with team members is also an important skills and competency for leaders. These relationships are built on establishing commonalities, listening effectively, providing respect and knowing a little bit about each team member. These relationships represent the core ingredient in loyalty and the desire for someone to push them in working for you.
When building relationships with team members, remember to spend significantly more time in finding out who they are as compared to telling them who you are. To paraphrase Covey: seek first to understand and then seek understanding. Also be very in-tune with the clues that your team gives you. Look for pictures, bumper stickers or clothing themes that provide a hint about someone’s interests, passions or family composition. Largely, people enjoy talking about their family, their pets, where they are from and in what they are interested. Let them and use that information for future follow-up.
Being an effective leader does not require superhuman memory skills as much as it requires the desire to be interested and the desire to remember team member information. In the pre-proliferation-of-computers era, leaders made index cards that included some key information from relationship building as well as important dates such as work anniversary, promotion date and birthday. That information was reviewed periodically prior to interacting with team members. In the more modern world, many leaders note key information about team members in contact management software and databases for future reference.
One great dividing line of good leaders and a very challenging line for new supervisors is the difference between friendly and friends. Effective leaders bridge the pitfalls related to the appearance of favoritism, clouded judgment and poor perception by being friendly with all their employees but friends with none of them. This is an important distinguishing line that often requires the use of “no, I am sorry I can’t” when responding to an after work drink invitation.
