Productive Working Relationships

When I talk about creating productive relationships, keep in mind that I am talking about working relationships in which you and others set objectives, exchanging ideas, execute tasks, and achieve results in a work setting and that you want to personally participate in making those objectives meaningful, the exchanges productive and useful, the execution crisp, and the results powerful and sustainable. That is what I am shooting for. It is a pleasant side effect of this teaching that it will also help you with any relationship in your life.

If a relationship at work is to be productive, then it means that both parties must be able to produce value, meaning they must both contribute to accomplishing objectives. When we spoke about credibility last time, we spoke about how you can measure your own and other people’s for that very reason. I find it useful to find the people that the organization already finds credible and come to know them and understand their strengths and weaknesses in order to find a way to be valuable to them.

This is NOT brown-nosing or kissing up to powerful people. This is looking at the people that company depends on, assessing them, finding a way for your strengths to support them in getting results AND determining new strengths you should develop to increase your value. This is a time-tested way to become a “go to” person. The first step is to identify the right people.

I have found that all companies have times of crisis when they pull their best and brightest together to get them through a rough patch. They even give them names sometimes like “Tiger Team” or “SWAT Team”. They are the ones that are called on when things get tough. Keep your eyes open and you will see them when called into action. Those are the people with whom you want to start your networking. It may seem intimidating to start at the top, but these are the people you want to get to know. As long as you have a good method (which we will be developing over the next few newsletters) they will be excited to get the help.

These week was about WHO to talk to. We will go into specifics about HOW to get to know them and WHAT to talk about next time.

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