Allow me to start with a question. Can you name one profession that does not require communicating with others? I thought very hard about it and could not find any. Consequently, when you are in the workplace, you are forced to communicate with your colleagues. The choice you are left with then is how effective this communication is.
Another intriguing question is how much of your daily tasks depend on or influence the tasks of other stakeholders in the organization. Let us consider some examples. A training manager will not be able to develop a yearly training plan without input from line managers. A product developer definitely needs to consider clients’ opinions to guarantee sales. A sales representative relies on the logistics team to deliver goods accurately and on time. As a matter of fact, organizations today are like spiderwebs. They require all the knots (stakeholders) to be connected through solid strings in order to be able to sustain their existence.
Consider yourself as a knot in the web. If your relationships with others are struggling, your performance will struggle undoubtedly. An important indicator of how strong your workplace relationships are is how fast your colleagues respond to your job related requests. This is measured using an imaginary tool that we like to call “responsometer”. Let us consider that you are planning a company event and you ask the communication department to design the invitation card. If they do a poor job or fail to give you the invitation on time, your event will be less successful and hence your performance appraisal will suffer.
In conclusion, your productivity is in direct relationship with how responsive your stakeholders are to you. Below, we share how to read your “responsometer”, and then how you optimize your workplace relationships so that your “responsometer” reads healthy.
Your responsometer can indicate five statuses of workplace relationships:
1) Enemy – this person considers your success as his/her failure.
2) Competitor – this person collaborates with you only against his/her enemies.
3) Stranger – this person is indifferent to your needs and results.
4) Collaborator – this person likes you and is very helpful especially if he/she has a personal benefit.
5) Ally – this person considers your successes and failures as his/her own and acts accordingly.
You need to consider your workplace relationships in lights of the statuses above, particularly with key people to your success. If most of them are strangers, competitors, or enemies, then your productivity is in real struggle currently. You can tell by how fast those stakeholders answer your emails, show willingness to meet with you, return your missed calls, copy people on emails to make you look bad, do not alert you about approaching dangers, and even avoiding you during lunch breaks.
Undoubtedly, a workplace relationship is a two-way street, and turning your responsometer into a healthy status depends on both parties. Below however, we share tactics that would allow you to take responsibility of optimizing your workplace relationships and thus increase your chances of maximizing your productivity. No tactic works with all kinds of people, but those tactics surely work with most people. All those tactics stem from a basic principle: if you are responsive to people, their responsiveness to you improves.
1) Never miss a call – when you have a missed call, call back. People appreciate that you did not ignore them.
2) Acknowledge emails – when a colleague sends you a request by email that you would work on next week, reply to them saying so. This provides people with assurance that you care about their job and they will care about yours.
3) Avoid copying higher managers unnecessarily – you will threaten them unintentionally and they might consider you as their enemy or competitor.
4) Congratulate good jobs – show recognition when a colleague does something outstanding, even when you feel a little jealous.
5) Be generous with information – teach others, share with them insights, and help them to become better.
6) Welcome people warmly – greet them in elevators and smile often. We all like to work with a pleasant person.
7) Never talk behind someone’s back – gossiping about a colleague tells more about you than about him/her.
8) Do not hold grudges – when a colleague does something you do not appreciate, find the right place, the right moment, and the right way of telling him/her.
Note: be genuine with the above tactics. People can tell when they are fake.
You might think that this is too idealistic, but remember that it is your productivity on the line here.
If you like to know more about optimizing your productivity through workplace relationships, register for our upcoming workshop: Five Productivity Traits for Optimal Results. All details are in the link below.
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