RELATIONSHIPS OVERVIEW

The speaker discusses the importance of defining work relationships and creating connectivity among teammates. They emphasize that work relationships should not necessarily involve socializing or being best friends, but rather having context and commonality to foster cooperative and collaborative work relationships. They share an example of using virtual speed dating to help employees get to know each other better and improve their working relationships. The main idea is that understanding and context between colleagues can lead to more effective teamwork. When we coach people, again, when we think about things like teamwork or communication and now relationships, you know, relationships is a loaded topic as well because it can be very interpretive in terms of what people see as valuable relationships. You know, it's so funny, as I give you an overview of coaching the relationships, you know, one of the things that we were talking about at one of our client sites was talking about connecting with people and creating greater connectivity, and all of a sudden someone immediately reacted and said, well, I don't want to be best friends with everybody. I don't want to socialize. I don't want to have... And I'm like, that's not what we're talking about. So people can be very guarded. I mean, relationships obviously is a very personal thing. So with that being said, I would encourage you as a leader, as a coach, to sit down and talk about what's the ideal work relationship you want from your teammates, from your peers. And that's that defining coach strategy again. What's that ideal work relationship? What's an ideal work relationship to you? Now, the reason I say that is work relationships have a lot of nuances to them. We could talk for 10 hours and cover 1% of what a good work relationship is. So it's always good to get that person's feedback, what they believe to be of great value, of something that they need to do more importantly as it relates to relationships and what's of benefit to them, how they like to facilitate that. Let me give you a precursor to everything that we're going to talk about with relationships. We had a company that was really struggling. And we met with the first group of employees. And what was one of our most common threads of information was, geez, you know, we don't even know what that department does. We don't even know what those guys in the field do were very common comments. So what I ended up doing is something very interesting. And I actually had the president's approval. We literally, think about this, literally in a virtual setting did speed dating. Basically, put people in rooms, just share something that you did this week and get to know each other. And it was not uncommon to hear comments such as, wow, I didn't know you were on the same project team as me. I recognized the email. They didn't know each other. Within 11 months, we do not hear those comments anymore. And it's so funny because people said, what did you do? And I said, just got them chatting about things outside of work. So I always go back to one thing. How you define relationships is critical. I am not here saying they should socialize, they should be best friends. What I am saying is when we have context with each other, the better off we're going to be. If we don't have a relationship at work, the work will drive the relationship. If that's the case, then the relationship will feel like work. Now, if we find out that we both love volleyball, we both love jogging, doesn't mean we have to go to a volleyball match. Doesn't mean we have to go jogging together. But through awareness and commonality, we have context of each other, which creates a greater bridge for what? Cooperative, collaborative work relationships.