Managing Relationships

Unless you live in complete isolation (why are you reading this if you are?!), you will meet and interact with people on a daily basis. Sometimes you may not always empathise with or like these people, but you are continually creating relationships which need to be managed.

The relationships you have created in your personal life - such as those with your friends, partner, children, siblings or parents - have usually happened without conscious thought. They have been created through a mutual exchange of knowledge and experience which affect the interactions within them.

Professional relationships are a different matter, workplace relationships take on a new and different importance.
Consider the people that you meet in a single day at work - peers, Managers and Directors, employees, clients, suppliers, and business partners - each of these interactions require a different relationship with different responsibilities, objectives and expectations within them.

Why is it these relationships need to be managed, can they not be left to develop and evolve in their own way? Unfortunately managing your professional relationships, particularly if you have the responsibility of leading and managing people, involves premeditation, mindfulness and calculation. Relationships in the workplace cannot afford to become static; they must continually develop and evolve. Think of your best working relationships, they are dynamic and engaging and involve proactive engagement with each member aware of the change in each other's needs, desires and outcomes.

Extraordinary Relationship Mangers
Individuals who are part of a well-managed relationship are committed, motivated, and productive and are aligned with each other and the outcomes of the relationship. Their needs, wants and desires are considered and their individuality is accommodated for. Communication channels are open and clear, and communication itself appears to be naturally effortless.

Extraordinary leaders already have extraordinary communication skills, which leads to the development of extraordinary relationships. Remember those occasions when you have met an exceptional communicator? You will have left the exchange feeling valued, listened to, attended to and responded to. No doubt you were also looking forward to interacting with them again. We all go back to those people who have made the effort to communicate with us on this level and a connection grows which leads to trust and loyalty. This is the mark of an extraordinary relationship manager.

When relationships go wrong…
There can be an infinite number of things which can affect a working relationship: there are occasions when one individual feels put out or feels constantly on the receiving end of blame, they may also feel envy at the other person's experience, salary or position. There can also be personal difficulties such as resentment, a difficult history or something as simple as a new way of doing things. As a result of these situations and feelings, communication channels become blocked and they are no longer as effective as they once were. This leads to misunderstanding, frustration and a breakdown in communication.

In the workplace there are usually two occasions which lead to ineffective relationships: An inheritance of a situation through promotion or movement that is already difficult, and a focus on "if only"s to make a working situation better, e.g. if only the other person saw this from my point of view.

As an effective manager of these situations you would understand that the only thing to be changed in these situations is yourself. In the first instance you were not able to influence the events which have led to the difficulty, but you would need to change your behaviours and interactions to manage this situation correctly.

Another aspect that leads to difficulty in managing relationships is the personalities of the individuals involved causing conflict. They may be a difficult individual that does not enjoy working with people, they may be aggressive, a bully or someone who takes a personal dislike to the people around them.

Lose control and take charge
During situations such as these you are no longer able to take control, this would involve getting the other person to conform to your ideas which they clearly wouldn’t do. Rather than feeling powerless because of this, drop the need for control and take charge of the situation.

Taking charge of the situation involves seeing a situation for what it actually is, and encouraging the individual involved in this situation to also see it for what it is rather than what either of you wish it to be. Accepting your differences, in effect agreeing to disagree, and putting these aside for the benefit of the outcome of the relationship means that you can both begin to work around and more importantly with each other.

Taking charge, in a mindful way, of situations develops your own capacity to change your actions and behaviours thereby creating a different response in the other person. You are learning to manage using Advanced Communication, a powerful NLP based technique which encourages outcomes of mutual benefit.

What else can be done?
All relationships require hard work, commitment and enthusiasm from every individual involved. To improve your own relationship management skills:
• Don’t change who you are but change what you do
• Change your perception of situations
• Change your attitude
• Open up to seeing situations from others points of view
• Initiate solutions to problems as they arise, don’t wait till afterwards
• Give more than is expected of you
And most importantly keep developing your communications skills

Melissa Wong, Marketing Consultant to Different Dynmaics