In life and business, relationships are of central importance. If you want to progress your business, progress your relationships! Oh, and find a worthy work you can do together. Every business needs people doing different things which can be divisive, but you should be united in purpose and your pursuits of excellence, no matter how diverse your skills are. You should be aligned in your Vision, Goals, and Values for your endeavors together, but most of all you should cherish the relationships you have with the people you work with. Build relationships of trust by building each other up and you will all go far together!
Build Relationships of Trust
When I first married I trusted my wife because of our mutual values, but we continued to grow in trust and to gain confidence with each other and our relationship. Relationships are give and take and where there is a mutual benefit it continues to grow. With trust comes greater responsibility, authority, growth, successes and rewards.
Build Professional Relationships
Relationships are a tricky balance. Business professionals must always be professional. We need to have a good feel for when and how to be casual and when and how to be formal. There is a time and place for each and a happy middle ground, often where project activities are intertwined, but at the end of the day no matter where you are you should carry yourself with dignity around others. Whether you work with a past association now or not, there is a good chance you will work together in the future. Never burn bridges. Most of us are hired for our skill set, but we are found as a result of networking for who we are as people, and then we find ourselves working as both friends and co-workers. Make sure when people get to know you that they know you are someone who they can entrust business to and that you are someone they would want to work with. Also, make sure you get to know others professionally. Who knows what opportunities will come where you might want to work together!
The best leaders are both personable and professional. They care about people first and the work second. It’s not easy to build a business relationship out of small talk, but it is also not easy to sustain a friendly working relationship without starting small. Some are more charismatic than others. But nurturing a quality relationship takes time and is well worth it beyond just business. The most meaningful relationships in life as well as business start out by knowing someone on a personal level.
Personally, I am not the greatest at building relationships, because I am not good at the initial small talk. Once someone gets to know me, however, they will find a depth of character, knowledge, and abilities to trust that I can and will do what I promise to do for them. Most the work I have committed to has come from first getting to know other people and trusting in the working relationship we are building together. In the relationship lies the most possibility to exceed or fall short of expectations, because working relationships are so unpredictable. But the more you know someone, the more you can expect them to be who they are at the core, and hopefully they are the person you think they are.
Just know your relationship changes a little when you work together and you should adjust the way you act depending on the setting and the nature of your positions as your interactions grow. You probably should not get too casual with co-workers, if you want to progress a business relationship in a more professional direction, unless you can be professional in both pursuits. Certainly there are people who are married to their business partner before or after they pursued a business endeavor together. Some can manage it, and some cannot. Some friendships and familial relationships improve when working together and some do not. It depends on the people and how well you organize your efforts to get on the same page, buoy one another, and reach for the stars together.
Build Organizational Relationships
Organizations must trust the people they employ. You don’t have to do “trust falls” or hokey “team building” exercises, but it can’t hurt to have well-thought-out company activities. Getting to know your fellow co-worker outside of the business or project context to some degree can go a long way in forming business relationships that just work better. I have certainly been part of “team” training that also neither united us nor gave us practical applications for success together as a team. Still, the organization that realizes great individual and team relationships are the key to group success will intentionally organize business and project activities with that in mind.
Organizations should hold regular company meetings and other meetups that spotlight what great things subject experts, functional areas, and the organization as a whole are accomplishing toward company goals. Naturally, there should also be many other various meetings for cross-functional project teams working together at different times in different ways that build team chemistry. If your company is intent on gaining and keeping the edge on it’s competition it will strive for continual improvement as individuals, teams, and an organization together as part of everyone’s strategic plan.
An organization’s culture is largely influenced by how executives, managers, and specialists work together in teams. How well each level of the organization works independently and dependently largely determines how well you may build an optimal business culture. It takes executives setting up the structure, policies, and work opportunities. It takes the managers connecting the players involved with the work to be done in a cohesive way. It takes frontline workers who can work with others, but also focus in on their tasks at hand. None of it is within control of one person, or even one group at a given level, but if an organization is strategic about how it goes about managing change it can be advantageous for everyone. If your organization helps you progress its business and their change projects where you bring the most value, chances are everyone on the team is being valued and bringing the most value to progress the organization.
Progress Your Business Relationships
Progress your business relationships by getting to know people for who they are as people. When you admire someone, learn from them and let them learn from you. Where your Vision, Goals, and Values align find ways to collaborate on projects. Organize your team and your work and build your relationship as you meet commitments together toward a desired end goal. Reach out and get to know other people on a personal level and on a professional level. Nurture the relationship before requesting anything of them or feeling obligated to work with anyone as well. Reserve your main time and energies for the relationships that matter most in your life with those who have already gained your trust, family, friends, and then co-workers.
Allow others to gain your trust who have abilities no one else you know has, where they could help advance your cause and don’t waste time micro-managing or mismanaging how you both work together. The best working relationships work in tandem with one another seamlessly because they know how to collaborate, coordinate, and communicate the work together. That’s one thing I love about the world of professional project management. Project teams often have to form these relationships quickly and trust others whom they have not worked with much before. But projects allow professionals the opportunity to do something more than they have previously been able to do without a project team, and building new relationships and accomplishing new things together is exciting.
Storyboard PM Solution
I founded Storyboard PM to integrate organizational project management as a business solution that gets and keeps our business teams on the same page to progress our work together.
Let’s lift organizational and project management maturity from one level to the next on the way to realizing our best potentials by progressing business relationships and becoming successful individuals, teams, and organizations.