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The level and depth of your relationships with others is a guiding factor for your success.
As we’ve moved through each of the three previous sections of EQ, you likely noticed that each built on the one before it. That is certainly the case with relationship management. Social awareness, self-management, and self-awareness feed into success here. You may see a conflict explode at work, school or home and it roots in the person’s lack of skill to navigate the relationship successfully. It’s like a computer that gets an error and locks up. Unfortunately, you can’t control, alt, delete your way out of these scenarios.
Understanding Relationship Management
Relationship management is the ability to build value-adding relationships with others. Notice that I didn’t say friendship. A person strong in this area understands and realizes the value of building relationships even with people that they don’t get along with. Unless you work in a very small people environment, you’ll likely have someone that you interact with that you don’t totally get along with.
Example of low Relationship Management
“John makes a decision about a person and that’s it. There is no changing his mind. He sees you as an ally or enemy. If he sees you as an enemy, he will let others know and will not put the effort to establish any kind of relationship. He reacts to people instead of responding to them. “
Example of high Relationship Management
“John is an artist when it comes to people. Everyone he interacts with feels valued and knows that they matter. Even when John is not happy with an outcome, he communicates it in a way where you know how you missed the mark, but he’s not angry. I think I feel worse about it because I let my leader down, and I hate letting John down. He owns mistakes and is complementary to me.”
Tips to increase your Relationship Management
- Back your decision up. When you make a decision, especially if you know it may not be a popular one, explain the whys behind it so that others understand where you are coming from. Also be open to listen to their concerns and be prepared to change if needed.
- Be proactive with the inevitable. When you see a conversation that needs to happen inevitably, the time to connect on it is now. Time has a way to fuel the problem and it ends with you and/or the other party boiling over. I would rather take on a small problem than a work-stoppingly large problem that it morphs into later. When you have these conversations, be direct without emotional attachment and be sure to include your strengthened empathy and listening skills that you’ve picked up.
- Build trust. A couple of ways to build trust in a relationship is to first be willing to accept feedback in a constructive way. When you show that you can’t take feedback well, you lose the trust of the other person and they no longer want to help you get better. The second is to own your mistakes and failures. If you are a leader you may have to own a mistake that you didn’t even make the decision on. Being willing to do
the small things like apologize, say thank you and appreciation go a long way.
- Acknowledge where the person is. This was an area I was really bad at before. Someone comes to you and tells you what they are going through and you do your best to quickly move on from the conversation. It may be because it makes you uncomfortable or you don’t know what to say. Simply acknowledging the emotion or struggle is a great starting point.
Combine your relationship management skills along with social awareness, self-management, and self-awareness to bring your career (and personal life) to new satisfying heights.
Make a better tomorrow.
-ZH
