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The Seventh Commandment of Leadership-Self Management and Relationship Power

Guest post by: Tim Schneider

Article Overview: The most difficult person that you will manage in your leadership career is you. That is a very hard statement to get your hands around and grasp but managing yourself is a very challenging task. Without good self-management, the delicate balance between leader and follower is jeopardized. You can loose credibility. You can damage relationships. You can completely become irrelevant. First, a little background on self management. Self management is half of the science of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence tells us that eighty percent of our reactions, responses and projections are driven by emotion and not by logic or processed thought.

The Seventh Commandment of Leadership-Self Management and Relationship Power

The most difficult person that you will manage in your leadership career is you. That is a very hard statement to get your hands around and grasp but managing yourself is a very challenging task. Without good self-management, the delicate balance between leader and follower is jeopardized. You can loose credibility. You can damage relationships. You can completely become irrelevant. Background on Self Management First, a little background on self management. Self management is half of the science of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence tells us that eighty percent of our reactions, responses and projections are driven by emotion and not by logic or processed thought. Many leaders struggle with this concept because they fancy themselves as creatures of pure, unemotional logic. This is nothing but a fallacy designed as a cover for the true nature of decisions and responses. Emotional intelligence is split in two distinct and different pieces. The second piece is external and relational management and the first piece is self management. Working with the skills associated with both of these pieces, a complete emotionally intelligent leader is produced. Another point of emotional intelligence and self management relate to age and experience. There is absolutely no correlation between calendar age and emotional intelligence. Some twelve year olds can have outstanding self management and emotional intelligence while some fifty year olds can have very poor emotional intelligence. A final bit of background information about emotional intelligence is that organizations of all types and sizes have found that good self management is a great predictor of workplace success. Much more so that experience, formal education or technical skills, team members and leaders with good emotional intelligence and self management are much more likely to be successful than those with poor or lacking skills in this area. What this has caused is that more and more companies are testing, screening and interviewing for emotional intelligence and self management. Your next career move may become dependent on how well you can manage yourself. Complete Understanding is the First Step The first, and perhaps hardest part of self management begins with full understanding of the subject matter. That would be you. You will never completely understand yourself and about the time you think you have a handle on all of your behaviors and personality traits, new iterations of you and your style will emerge. Understanding yourself is not a singular event but a necessary leadership process that needs to be frequently addressed and consistently administered. There are three sources of information for self understanding. The first is the most overused and most unreliable source related to effective leadership. Far too many leaders rely solely on their own discovery and feelings to try to understand themselves. Unfortunately, this source is full of pitfalls and lies. Often, self talk and intuitive feedback is more about who we would like to be rather than who we really are. Internally produced feedback is a part of understanding yourself but it is a highly unreliable source. Another reason that self feedback is not a good sole source of understanding is that many leaders have a tendency to be either very hypercritical of themselves or self aggrandizing. The hypercritical feedbacks leads to many negative thoughts that are very counterproductive in self management. The puffing that comes from believing you are more and better than you really are can lead to alienation and loss of followers. Self feedback needs to be balanced with information from other and more objective sources. Assessments and Profile Tools One of the best sources of leadership self-understanding comes from psychometric personality tests. Great examples include the DiSC profile and the Myers-Briggs assessments. A psychometric instrument or test is a fully validated and predictive tool that can be used in a variety of settings including coaching, counseling, team building and leadership development. Test like color coding, what Star Wars Character I Am and handwriting analysis might be fun but they are not valid or predictive of your behavior and attitude traits. One of the great dynamics witnessed in the past twenty years of coaching leaders relates to the use of personality tests. Almost without exception, people will find a piece of language in one of the DiSC profiles and just fall in love with it. Things like “works well under pressure”, “considers the feelings of others”, “builds relationships and teams effectively” or “takes charge and accepts challenges.” They will just ooze with pride when reading and reviewing results like those. Without missing as much as a breath, the same people will read language such as “can become manipulative and quarrelsome”, “easily distracted by interruptions”, “overly concerned with details” or “appears artificial or disingenuous” and react with contempt for the validity of the survey, assessment or test. The difficult bottom line about psychometric instruments for feedback is that you cannot embrace the good comments and trends without owning and being accountable for the other behaviors and traits in which you don’t like or don’t agree. We always encourage leaders to note all the statements in these instruments in which they disagree and then ask someone else to review the statements and provide honest feedback. The results: almost unanimously, other people reviewing the results fully validate the accuracy of what is said. Like it or not, it is you and your behavior. Many times, the information from psychometric assessments and tests in which the leader does not agree represent behavioral blind spots. Blind spots are those pieces of behavior, or in the case of leadership, stylistic elements that the person does not recognize but all other people see with perfect clarity. If unmanaged, blind spots can be very damaging to a leader. The blind spots can alienate followers, harm and strain relationships and create poor image elements that can damage a career. Blind spots can also be a very limiting factor in the growth and ongoing development of leaders. If Three People Call You an Ass, You Should Buy a Bridle The third and final source of information related to understanding yourself comes from the feedback of others. This can be in two subsets, formal and informal. Formal feedback from other people includes performance reviews and 360 degree evaluations. Performance reviews are usually not a very good source of self understanding and awareness because they are done infrequently and they are generally not done well. The formal process of gathering leadership, performance and behavioral information from others is commonly referred to as a 360 degree assessment. It obtains feedback from those you lead, your boss and others, including vendors and customers, in which you exercise influence. The best versions of these instruments contain both quantified and numeric ratings about key leadership indicators but also include a section for anonymous comments. The most helpful information is often found in the comment section under headings that include behaviors to stop, behaviors to begin, things the person does well and things the person could do better. The one intellectual honesty risk with 360 degree feedback comes from selecting the audience to comment and evaluate. Two errors occur frequently in choosing either people that you know will be very supportive and positive or choosing people that will be very critical. Both populations do not provide an accurate picture of you or your style. Evaluators and comment providers must be a cross section of those who love you and those who do not. Informal methods of gaining feedback include the highly complex transaction of (gasp) asking people how you are doing. One of the best leadership sources of this information come from those being led. Simply asking how you are doing as a leader, what you could do better and what is working well is a great source of feedback to understand yourself and uncover some important blind spots. Another great source of the same type of information comes from peers or near peers. Since they have no real vested interest in how you lead, their degree of honesty would be pretty high. This works especially well if you can create a peer mentoring type of relationship where the feedback is shared between both of you. As with all types of self understanding feedback, this also contains a warning tale or two. The first time out of the gate, many people will not provide you with direct and fully honest information. In fact, your subordinates and peers may sugar coat things or deny that there is anything in you that needs to be changed. They may even openly think you are up to no good in this questioning. It is only through a consistent approach in which you have demonstrated no repercussions that team members will provide you with complete honesty and feedback that you need. You must ask several times across multiple months and show that no one is going to get hurt to get the self management information you want. The final cautionary tale about direct feedback is the desire that many people have to dismiss the source. In informal feedback, if you hear something you don’t like from someone you don’t like, it is easy to discredit the information. You might say things like “you know Bob, nothing ever pleases him” or “Mary has not had a good thing to say about a boss in ten years.” Unfortunately, even when the source is not valued, some of the feedback is important. Even when wrapped in exaggeration or dislike, important information about you might lay below the surface and underneath some emotion. Focus on the message and not the messenger. The three ingredients of understanding yourself are what you already know and believe, feedback from personality assessments and profiles and the feedback from others. Armed with this information you are now ready to begin the final step of self awareness and understanding. Owning Your Behaviors Like it. Love it. Hate it. It is you. The final piece of self understanding and awareness is to begin to reconcile all of the feedback you receive and owning who you are. The good and the not so good. The parts you like and the parts you don’t like. The effective leader owns all of those pieces of who they are. From this point, most effective leaders will construct a plan to deal with the areas in which need improvement or need to be corrected. This is a longer term approach in which your behaviors and style are modified through consistent application of better skills and competencies that take the place of the old behaviors. This type of change and progression takes time, persistence and dedication. Difficult? Absolutely. An absolutely necessary to your success as a leader. A Little Note About Personal Change and Growth The biggest obstacle that most leaders face in their own growth and development is success. That is a tough concept. When things are going well. You get good raises. Your performance reviews are solid. Results are good. Everything is peachy. What is your motivation to change, improve and grow? Success often creates an artificial sense and aura of need to continue to grow, develop and change. Success can be a fog that blurs reality. Success can blind leaders into believing they are doing everything well and nothing needs to be tuned. The most changeable and development desiring leaders are those who are coming off of a failure event and not a success event. Those feeling and experience failure embrace growth while those experiencing success often rebuff it. Let the impetus for your leadership growth and development be success and not failure. Key Components of Leadership Self Management After self understanding and awareness, effective leaders must learn to embrace some key self management skills and competencies. Chief among the self management competencies is self control, discipline and regulation. Not far behind is the need for resilience and confidence. Confidence that does not morph into arrogance but genuine, unspoken confidence. The final component and skill associated with effectively self managed leaders is work ethic and results orientation. None of these are easy and all require a great dedication to consistent self management. Self Control, Discipline and Regulation The best definition of self control is resisting the urges to act and speak when not appropriate. This is about holding your emotions, your tongue and desire to behave when you know it is inappropriate or even when you have doubt on the appropriateness of the behavior. One of the most important concepts for leaders to embrace is that of hot buttons. We all have them. They come in a lot of shapes, sizes and colors. Some even have the names of people attached to them. A hot button is any event, issue, subject, situation or person that will evoke a negative, sarcastic or edgy response from you. A person or event pushes the hot button and you react in an adverse manner. A critical point about hot buttons is the transfer of power that occurs when pushed and a reaction occurs. The button pusher gains power and situational control when you react. You lose power by reacting to your button being pushed. They win. You lose. Related to this phenomenon is the learning that occurs by the button pusher. Whoever pushed your button and you reacted will remember this event and return to that newly learned skill again and again. Those of us that are parents understand this circle well. An effective leader must identify their personal hot buttons and do everything possible to not react when those buttons are pushed. That includes avoiding situations and people that push buttons and confronting button pushers directly and tell them to cease pressing your buttons. Remember, we condition others that button pushing is effective and we can also begin the process of reconditioning them to cease pressing. One of the most common occurrences in management, leadership and supervision is over-emotionalism. Often labeled with the highly scientific and technical term of crack pot. Effective leadership and over-emotionalism do not work. A leader must be calm and cool in all situations and events and be level-headed in all interactions. A crack pot leader will fly off the handle and become angry when things do not go his or her way. They often blame that on being passionate about their job but in reality these type of bosses are alienating their followers. They will reduce their approachability and actually have their team avoid any contact out of the fear of an angry reaction. When upset by an event or circumstances, you know it and deal with it by going for a walk, workout, take some time off or get some coffee. Anything to blow off your steam except to interact with your team. When angry or disappointed it is also important to resist the urge to vent unless to a trusted friend, peer level leader or family member. Venting to a team member is never appropriate and credibility may be lost when venting to your boss. Another symptom of the crack pot type leader is pouting. Hiding in the office. Avoiding all contact. Sullen and unapproachable. Often occurs when things don’t go quite right or when a leader has suffered a set back. Remember, your team looks to you for tone, optimism and hope and if you pout, you are telling them that things must really be bad. As a sub-type of the crack pot type leader is the Chicken Little. You remember from either the childhood story or the Disney movie, Chicken Little is the predictor of the sky falling. Chicken Little predicts doom and gloom at every opportunity. As with the character, a leader that loses his or her calm when times are difficult will lose credibility. Our team members look to us for calm and optimism in time of difficulty. They do not want a leader that commiserates and sees only the negative. They desperately want their leaders to pick them up and pull them through the difficulties. The concept that we most often teach and coach is battlefield cool. This important leadership skill comes from the American civil war when the government forces under the direction of U. S. Grant camped a little too close to their Confederate adversaries. One particular morning, the command tent of General Grant was overwhelmed with cannon fire. The scene was chaotic and confusing. General Grant’s primary aide was decapitated. General Grant’s response? To make a pot of coffee. He responded to the most hectic and desperate events by making coffee. When asked about this, he indicated there was plenty of time to withdraw and he was not going to be shaken by immediate events. His troops response? To rally behind his battlefield calm and rout the Confederates that morning. Poise under pressure and difficult circumstances is tough but it is a necessary competency of effective leaders. Resilience and Persistence When I was a child, I always wanted the blow up clown that when you punched his nose, he bounced right back up. Never got it but always wanted it. That clown teaches us a valuable lesson in the resilience needed by effective leaders. The one certainty is that you will get smacked down. You will have obstacles. You will have setbacks and defeats. You will get criticized. You will not always be liked or even loved. The true measure of an effective leader is not about the setbacks or obstacles but how you choose to respond after them. The effective leader must be resilient and bounce back just like the inflatable clown. Smacked. Right back in the game. No pouting time allowed. Resilience is affected by many factors. Your physical health, emotional well being and rest all impact your resilience responses. When you are tired, worn down and beat up, resilience is hard to summon. If you have dysfunction in your personal life, resilience at work is difficult. Restoring and maintaining resilience is often a matter of being in close contact with your physical and emotional status. How does your body feel and what is it telling you? How is your emotional composition? Do you feel sad, blue or down? When you hear these signs it is time for a recharge because your resilient responses will be down. One of the best tools for restoring resilience is to immediately return to a productive activity. There is nothing like a full task list or appointment schedule to take your mind off of a set back or defeat like immediately getting busy. This strategy is also an important sign to your team that you will not be distracted by minor bumps in the road. When you are down, get right back to work doing something different. The old saying goes that the best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer up someone else. As a skill, assisting others is a powerful method to restoring your own resilience. The self-satisfaction obtained by helping out someone or encouraging someone is a tremendous method to restore your own personal resilience. When beat up, down or losing battles, go an help someone else. Another tool to restore resilience is to redirect energy into an area in which you know you will be successful. You have areas in your life in which you are very good. Go do those things and restore your confidence in your abilities. Maybe you are a good golfer. Go golf. Maybe you are artistic. Create a masterpiece. Maybe you coach a soccer team. Go engage with them. A final tip for restoring resilience is about surrounding yourself with positive people and those whom you can rely upon to provide some positive feedback. When you are feeling a little down, seek out the trusted sources that can pick you up and restore your responsiveness. Persistence is also an necessary ingredient in effective leadership. Leaders must persist in doing the right thing without becoming stubborn or pesky. You must have the judgment to know when to continue plowing forward and when to give up, defer and move to other issues. One of the most common challenges to persistence is related to the disciplining or firing of a team member. In some organizations, the human resource function produces obstacles and barriers to eliminating a team member. The effective leader responds to these obstacles in a persistent manner and enhances documentation, completes another probationary period or provides additional coaching to the employee. Unfortunately, some leaders respond to the obstacles by giving up and declaring the team member cannot be terminated. Persistence is also challenged by organizational realities and sacred cows. When a leader wants to innovate and they run headlong into a pet project or sacred cow, only through persistence can they achieve the desired change. Often the best persistence comes in the form of a temporary withdrawal followed by seeking a new path beyond the barriers or obstacles being faced. Poking an issue in the same manner over and over again is not persistence. It is stubborn and unyielding. Confidence Confidence is an interesting personal dynamic that is generated internally but affected by many outside influences. Effective leaders must be confident or at the very least, appear confident. Your confidence as a leader will dramatically affect the desire of your team members to follow you. Quite simply, with confidence, your team is more likely to be willing and loyal followers. Without confidence, followership will be impacted adversely. Many times when the formal leader lacks confidence, the team will migrate to an informal leader that possesses and demonstrates confidence. That informal leader may or may not always be in sync with the objectives of the organization and may have different motives from the formal leader. Past successes, failures, tolerance of risk, experience and subject matter expertise impact confidence. So does feedback from others (are they cheering you on or booing you?). Confidence is also impacted by your resilience and general state of well being. At it’s core, confidence is the reconciliation of the consequences of failure. Every time you process what could go wrong and then proceed, you are producing confidence. Each time you hesitate or cease because the consequences of failure is too great or you are not comfortable with the consequences of failure, you are harming confidence. This is not the same as being rash, hasty or arbitrary. This is about lacking the confidence to proceed when proceeding is the right thing to do. Your boss has hired a fellow manager that is utterly incompetent. He has driven away key employees and is impossible to work with on any level. Your boss does not see it. Discussing it with your boss has consequences. Is it the right thing to do for the organization? Is it a necessary dialog to have? When the risk of action is measured, do you proceed? That mental processing, that usually occurs in a matter of seconds, is what produces confident actions and behaviors. Improving confidence is a lot like improving resilience and the two characteristics are closely related. To enhance the feeling of confidence, remember past successes and relate current scenarios and challenges to past events when you succeeded in your actions. That piece of self-management is important and also assists in the speed in decision making. Another technique to improve confidence is to track, monitor and report achievements. Many of us are very hypercritical during setbacks and defeats but we fail to balance that with the volume of successes. Keeping a written, running tab of accomplishments is an important reminder that we are doing well and should continue boldly and confidently down our path. Confidence can also be achieved and improved by changing games. If you are not feeling confident in one area of your work or like, change to an activity in which you have the certainty of succeeding. This too is similar or the same as improving resilience. On those days, and we all have them, that legitimate and real confidence cannot be summoned, the effective leader has to at least appear to be confident. If not, there are those people that will sense your lack of confidence and pounce on it for their own good and many time for the detriment of the organization. Think sharks smelling blood in the ocean. Producing the appearance of confidence is relatively easy. Walk with a sense of purpose. Head up. Smile. Greet people and initiate conversations. Dress and look good. Assist others in projects and tasks. Speak directly and in an object oriented and authoritative manner. A funny thing about looking confident will also assist in the generation of real confidence. Sadly, a warning note about confidence is necessary. Overuse of confidence, like any other leadership skill and competency, can cause disconnects with your team. Too much confidence can morph into arrogance, aloof and unapproachable. It can also appear to not be genuine and human, which leads to disconnects in team member relationships. To avoid confidence turning into arrogance, follow the simple rule that confidence is unspoken. Arrogance and cockiness is spoken trash talk. Confidence is quiet while arrogance is loud and obnoxious. Confidence is understated and arrogance is overstated. Confidence is a nice suit. Arrogance is the same suit with suspenders, Italian loafers and gold cuff links. Confidence is a functional car. Arrogance is the Jaguar. Work Ethic and Results Orientation The final personal leadership self management competency set relates to work ethic and a little reminder about breeding sheep. Effective leadership requires a work ethic that is strong and committed. Committed to the betterment of the organization and the results required to be successful. Not committed to personal comfort and self-gain. Work ethic is sometimes described as an intangible that is learned early in life or somehow genetically encoded in people. Work ethic is also derided by prior generations as being non-existent or diminishing in subsequent generations of team members. As a matter of historical record, this comparing work ethic unfavorably from generation to generation has been occurring for ages. The fact is that work ethic and commitment are learned skills and competencies like all others. When reward and feedback is provided for work ethic behaviors, work ethic improves. When no feedback or reward is provided for work ethic, it will be non-existent. The effective leader must demonstrate a balanced approach to work ethic. You must not become a workaholic or work more hours just to work more hours. Your role is to work the amount needed to get the job done and be effective. You must also me a model of efficient behavior to get the most done with the most effective use of time. Two very different challenges exist in leadership work ethic. The first is the challenge to personal comfort and self-interest. An effective leader must subordinate their own interests and comfort for the greater good of organizational successes. This will mean sometimes skipping a lunch, not leaving right at five or even cancelling a vacation. The effective leader is prepared to do this, not because of what it shows and demonstrates but because it is occasionally necessary. The effective leader also demonstrates this commitment silently and without grandstanding about it. With companies and organizations going through difficult times, many leaders have learned negative lessons about commitment and work ethic. Some people translate layoffs, downsizings and reductions in compensation as the signal to disregard work ethic and commitment. This could not be further from the truth. Even if your company does not recognize or reward work ethic, you must set aside your self-interest and selfish motivations for greater organizational objectives. The second challenge to work ethic is an over exaggeration of needed time on the job and becoming a workaholic. No one likes to work for a workaholic because they will never demonstrate the hours or commitment that he or she does. Followers will come to resent it and far too often workaholic leaders compare the time they put in to those of their team members. Leaders must work and work hard but not fall victim to the mandatory seventy hour rule. Work when you have to. Be efficient in your use of time. Go home and have some balance in your life. Results orientation is a simple competency for effective leaders. It is the drive and focus towards meaningful results for the organization. From a self-management perspective, it requires the discipline to recognize the behaviors and activities that are not productive and the resolve to redirect team members towards the achievement of results. The orientation to results also require effective leaders to not overly rely on procedures, processes and policies but focus rather on the bottom line achievement. Within the boundaries of legal, ethical and safe, it is not the “how” that matters, it is the “what.” Result orientation also allows greater levels of participation and innovation from team members and avoids the dreaded “micro manager” label often assigned to leaders who are overly concerned with the discipline of process and not results. Result orientation and sheep breeding are very closely related. In order to have a nimble, thinking, responsive team, you cannot breed sheep. Similarly, to achieve results and have effective result orientation, you cannot breed sheep. Effective leaders will challenge themselves to not manage the process but lead their team to the desired results. Personal Power and the Effectiveness Equation Every leader needs personal power to operate in an organizational and corporate environment. Personal power is what a leader uses to get the job done and achieve results. Personal power is necessary and must be carefully balanced for optimum leadership effect. There are five types of personal power for leaders. They include threat, reward, organizational or legitimate, expert and relational or relevant power. The effective leader must combine the use of all five and avoid the overuse in any particular power area. This all leads to a very important concept and manageable competency. Leadership effectiveness is comprised of 25 percent job and technical knowledge, 25 percent integrity and ethical values and 50 percent relationships. The first two areas, job knowledge and ethical values represent core leadership credibility while the relationship piece is how a leader accomplishes his or her objectives. This leadership effectiveness equation must be managed daily to insure that one area does not over-shadow any other. If technical and job knowledge is more in play than relationships, team performance, tone and loyalty will suffer. If integrity and ethics are at a higher than needed level, crusading and lack of approachability will occur. When relationships are weighted more than 50 percent, the team may not trust the leader. Balance in this effectiveness equation must be kept constant (LE = .25 JK + .25 I/E = .50 RE). Overuse of Expert Power The overuse of expert power is one of the most common challenges among new and emerging leaders and can lead to some serious disconnects with a work team. Expert power is the technical skills, knowledge and expertise that you have amassed during your career. It is your experience and understanding of how things get done and how they should be done. It is you being an expert in your field. It is also the organizational savvy you have grown to understand during your tenure with your company. It is the who does what to who and what can and cannot be done within the organizational culture. As indicated previously, some expertise is needed to preserve credibility with your team and within the organization. You must know the basic functions of what goes on and how it is done but you do not have to know everything. That is why you have team members. The challenge with new and emerging leaders comes from the fact that most of them are promoted from the ranks in which they will now supervise and manage. They were expert doers so now they will become the leader of doers. It is the promotion of people for technical abilities and success and not based on leadership skills and competencies that cause problems here. It also is a challenge in smaller environments when the owner, founder or original entrepreneur begins to hire team members. New and emerging leaders often struggle with the awkwardness of leadership. The communication, tone setting, coaching and decision making needed to be effective is difficult for them so they retreat back to where they were previously successful. Doing things. Things that should be done by team members. After all, they were promoted because they were the best doer. What occurs in this environment is a complete drain of leadership and results will suffer shortly. The other phenomenon attached to the overuse of expert power is that team members have room to participate or contribute. This will lead directly and quickly to sheep breeding. Why should they make suggestions or innovate, when you have all the answers and expertise? The effective leader must be more concerned with sharing expertise and growing the knowledge base of team members rather than protecting and reinforcing their own expert power. Overuse of Threat, Reward and Organizational Power Threat power is a form of “if, then” equation. It is the direct or intimated threat that if a team member fails, something bad will happen to them. A little bit of threat power is needed in any leadership dynamic but if overused, can drain the spirit and desire to perform from any team. The necessary application of threat power is usually reserved for formal disciplinary actions when coaching has not produced a successful turnaround in a team member’s performance. In formal disciplinary action, there is the “if, then” that relates to continued failure could result in more disciplinary action or termination. Beyond this application, threat power serves no good purpose in leadership. Like threat power, reward power is an “if, then” type of proposition. The only difference is that reward power provides for a positive reward or carrot at the end of a stick upon achieving a desired result. Also like threat power, it is necessary but in small doses. Two areas of concern for any leader is the ongoing availability of rewards. If rewards dry up, now what? The other area of concern is why people work for and perform for a leader. Is the leader really building loyalty and relationships or simply offering compensation and spiffs on a regular basis. Many times the leader that is over-reliant on reward power is compensating for a lack of true relationships with team members and trying to buy performance. Organizational or legitimate power is the actual authority granted to a leader based on their position and title. It is where you live in the organizational chart. It is your authority to approve things, initiate action and operate independently. It can also be seen as “do it because I said so.” It is very common in military and paramilitary type organizations which rely on a rigid hierarchy. Unfortunately, too much emphasis on organizational power will lead to bottlenecked decision making, lack of innovation and failure to take risks. It can also be a contributing factor in sheep breeding and the lack of success associated with that. The use of organizational power can also become territorial and hoarding with people waging turf wars to insure their areas of influence are protected and insulated. The effective leader should never have to order anyone to do anything or beg anyone to do anything. The effective leader creates a climate and the relationships needed for team members to want to do the work prescribed and direction defined by the leader. Relational Power With half of your leadership effectiveness at stake, relational power represents a very important element for any leader. Relational power is the influence that you have created based on the strength and number of relationships you have built in your organization and within your sphere of influence. Relational power will define how effective you are in leading your team, initiating action and getting anything done in your company. Good relationships will lead to great achievement and success. Nonexistent or prickly relationships will lead to failure, stonewalling and frustration. Relationships have to be included in any definition of influence. Even if you are the expert in an area, you will not be invited to participate or contribute if your relationships are not solid. If you are the highest ranking person but have no relationship base, you will not be asked to visibly contribute. You may have all the experience in the world but if you lack the needed relational power, no invitations will be forthcoming. The effective leader spends significant amounts of time creating, maintaining and repairing relationships in four directions. Those directions are upward, relationships with the boss or bosses, laterally, with peer level leaders, downward, to team members and outside of the organization. Relationships with people above you is not sucking up or brown nosing. Some people will call it that but they are generally the ones without any type of relationship with a superior. This is simply about establishing rapport, providing respect and creating trust. Not blowing kisses to someone’s backside but a good legitimate relationship. Peer relationships are important in any organizational dynamic because it helps you manage the flow of information and news that is relayed above you. It also provides you with a degree of forgiveness when something goes wrong. When peer relationships are bad, bad things are said about you and your team behind your back. The relationships with peers can also be extremely valuable in getting things done in large and complex organizations with a high degree of formal rigidity. Can you pick up the phone and get a printer replaced because of a relationship with a peer or do you have to fill out a form in triplicate? The most important relationships you will create and manage is with your team members. It is through relationships that you are able to complete the definition of leadership. Leadership is the art of getting people to do something because they want to do it for you. They only want to do it for you if your relationship with each and every team member is solid. The litmus test for leadership relationships requires you to know the family composition for all team members, their interests and passions outside of work and their point of origin. If you can identify all of those elements for all team members, you are on the right path to developing relational power with your team. Another point of challenge is the quality of team member relationships will all team members. It is pretty easy to build a relationship to those team members in which you have common interests, those of the same age group, same gender, same experiences and same look and feel. What is much harder is to build good working relationships with those that are different. Even those that are prickly and difficult. Those that look and sound different from you. Your success will not be measured on the relationships with the easy people but rather on the relationships you build with the difficult people. Team member relationships is also not about being friends or being universally loved. It is not about being popular or the homecoming queen. It is about creating loyalty and establishing rapport that aids communication and creates a sense of oneness for the team and you. You still have to make hard decisions and sometimes, unpopular ones but relationship quality will keep the group going no matter the current course or circumstance. A great indicator of leader relationships can often be seen when the leader is absent. If the leader goes away to a meeting or goes on vacation, does the team continue on or do they form a line at the human resource department? Do they support the leader or do they tell on him or her? The final relational power element for leaders to manage is external relationships. At the supervisor, manager and executive level, internal relationships are only part of the equation. Effective leaders must also find ways to influence industry groups, communities and political decisions. The only way that this can be accomplished is through the establishment and management of external relationships. You might have solid footing within your company but you need to externalize your influence to truly have relational power. This is also a great way to help manage your career and increase your sphere of influence. Creating relationships is relatively easy. You have to use people skills and the rarest of all communication competencies; listening. You have to show interest in others, find out what makes people tick and spend much less time talking about yourself. Building Relationships As indicated, building relationships with others is not a complex process. It requires the full engagement of people based skills including listening, verbal communication, empathy and understanding. More than these skills it also requires you to place importance on the relationship building process and to go about it in more than just a cursory manner. Having watched my share of “speed networking” events over the years, I am amazed at the cold and mechanical nature of these exercises. Relationship building is not achieved in a three minute interview or in a process that involves you providing an infomercial of yourself. Relationship building is individualized and takes care and concern, not rigid processes. The first step in relationship building is to initiate engagement and interaction. Starting with “hello” or “how are you doing” is a great first step. Especially in leadership positions, do not rely on others approaching you. You must take the first and introductory step. After initial engagement, it becomes all about listening and responding in a counter-punch manner. There is plenty of time to talk about you but this needs to be about with whom you are building the relationship. You must listen, remember and validate the comments and information received from others. As a launching point, you must establish commonality. Commonality is the things that you share in common with another. No matter how diverse the individual appears, you will be able to find something in common. Common elements allow us the ability to have something to follow-up on in future interactions and will greatly warm the tone of future dialogs and conversations. The safest, fastest and most likely elements to find commonality include pets, children, location of origin, interests outside of the working environment and passions. The simple questions like “do you have a dog?”, “where are you from originally?”, “what do you like to do on off times?’ and “tell me about your family” are powerful tools for finding common elements. From this point it is important to engage the skill of complimentary validation. That is simply complimenting the response received in this relationship building process. When some says that they “are from Detroit originally”, you will compliment the response by saying that is interesting or “what a great city.” The purpose of this validating response is to demonstrate that you are listening and to provide the needed feedback for the other person to open up more and provide additional information. Even if you do not like or care for the response, complimentary validation is a powerful tool to obtain greater levels of information for relationship building. After some commonalities are established, you need to find some interesting elements about the person in which you are building a relationship. Ask, inquire, validate and compliment but don’t turn this process into an inquisition. This is not a process but a human connection element. There are no deadlines and no scripts. Just you, your personality and your human based, people skills. People also give us great clues about where they place their interest and passion. Look around in their office. Look at the bumper stickers on their car. Look at them. Are there pictures of family, pets or a sail boat? Are they wearing a lapel pin? Is there a bumper sticker from their college? If you are hooked into the relationship building process, these are clues you should follow and inquire about. Just as you seek clues and information from others in the relationship building process, you must be prepared to provide some information to others and trust others with that information. Information within boundaries. Be open and disclosing but not over-disclosing. Never provide deep and dark intimate details that could affect your credibility and thus your ability to lead others. Provide the common knowledge that others provide to you. Family composition, pets, interests, education, connections to other groups and work history are all well within bounds. Politics, religion, beliefs, your appearance on the Jerry Springer show and your police record are out of bounds and should not be disclosed. After initial interactions, it is critical for you to follow-up on the information you obtained. Since none of us have Seagate hard drives to store the material discovered about commonalities and interests, you should add the information to an index card or in the information file provided by Microsoft Outlook. This allows you refreshing access each time you interact with this person. You can look up their dog’s name, where they are from and their favorite NFL team. Following up is the reinforcement that the relationship is important and you remembered the information you obtained. Asking about their children, cat or favorite team continues to open the door for more information and stronger relationships. Maintaining Relationships As simple as beginning to build a relationship seems, maintaining a relationship in the working environment becomes tricky and difficult. The first order of business is to insure that the relationship is reciprocal and not one sided. People must not feel, perceive or detect that you are using them or manipulating them in the relationship. This means that you must provide assistance and openness when required and without strings attached. You must be willing to help, mentor and coach when there is no immediate gain for your or your part of the organization. You must also spend time with the people you have built relationships with and continue to communication and build rapport. Effective relationships also require a healthy dose of forgiveness. The forgiveness of faux pas, the forgives of neglect, the forgiveness of lack of understanding, the forgiveness of neglect and the forgiveness of the lack of reciprocation. Forgiveness is a funny equation. We all admit we need it for our own mistakes and misspeaks but we tend to be a little stingy in providing it. As openly as we seek forgiveness of others, we must provide it to others. Repairing The final element of fully engaging relationship power is the need to repair relationships in the working environment. Repairing relationships that have been strained over time or not tended to because of the demands of our jobs. Repairing will require a big amount of swallowing your pride and ego to do the right thing. Relationships are about building a long lasting power base and sometimes you have to subordinate your own ego to get this done. Like in building relationships, this is not about you waiting for others to approach you. This is about you taking the initiative and responsibility for the relationship and reaching out to those in which the relationship has become strained. This will also require you to apologize for something that, in many cases, you have not done wrong. You are apologizing for the strain or apologizing for the miscommunication or apologizing for the neglect. It is the first step in repair and may not always be reciprocated but it is a starting point.

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Article Tags: background information, calendar age, correlation, creatures, credibility, delicate balance, emotion, emotional intelligence, fallacy, follower, formal education, leadership career, logic, relational management, relationships, self management, struggle, team members, true nature, workplace success



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