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Management Relationship Building - Your Easy To Do Secret

Guest post by: Martin Haworth

Article Overview: Managers all need to build critical relationships with the people they manage and lead. For some this is easy. For others, there's a challenge ahead. And here's one simple tool you can use to help you...

Management Relationship Building - Your Easy To Do Secret

We need great communication skills to interact with each and every one of our people. From members of our supporting management team, to the newest of the new-join employees on intake. Where we make the effort to get to know them well, we will have a head start in successfully utilizing the capabilities of all of our people - not just a few.

Of course, many managers find it hard to dig out the social skills they need to make the best of their interactions with their team. So often they forget that having casual conversations is a truly great activity and ultimately, very natural indeed.

Here it's time to work out comfortable (on both sides) ways to ask about something personal of their people. In fact, this is easy.

By asking about something gentle and loose - as well as very relevant to them - you will take a big step in creating the relationship fast.

You see, most people like people who are interested in the things that are important to them.

The Benefits

• They immediately feel that you are interested in them

• They will always be able to talk more freely about things that interest them

• Your interest in them builds a ‘deal', so they sort of owe you something too in the relationship

• Once done, you are well into discussing anything that you want to (it pays to shift in and out of this activity)

How To Do It?

• Use this with anyone you want to build and/or maintain a relationship with.

• Think of areas of interest, like home, family, interests; career; education.

• Link what you ask to something relevant ("How was your journey today", might seem to work better than "Where did you go on vacation this year" - at first!).

What Gets In Your Way?

• Nerves, in challenging situations

• Focusing on what interests you, not them

• Business only mentality

• Talk too much rather than listen

How to Fix?

• Be actively interested in them as people

• Try it!

• Forget business issues sometimes

• Recognize the real value of workplace relationships being about more than just business

Getting to know your people deeper down than simply as they think you do - just numbers on a payroll docket - you will immediately become much more endeared to them.

With this small effort with the small talk, your investment down the line will have the legs to pay off for you big-time, so making the relationship about much more than workplace task-focused, really is a price worth paying.

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Article Tags: business relationships, management development, management relationship building, relationship building



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