Relationships Don't Get Built On Email

My clients this month have focused the mind on the importance of relationships. I have the pleasure and privilege of working across a wide range of industries, cultures and countries, and discussions this month have focused on the challenges to building effective relationships around the business. This ranges from connecting with colleagues who are based in the same building, to creating meaningful connections with leaders in different countries, on different time zones and with very different priorities to our own.

Here’s what I notice: relationships don’t get built on email.

We all understand the advantages of technology to enabling greater efficiency, managing a heavier workload and simply maintaining the pace of business today. However it can be an enormous distraction from the critical task of building effective, mutually beneficial relationships around our organisation, which is a critical differentiator for leaders in fast paced, flat, global, matrix organisations. I have been working with several leaders lately who are classical keyboard warriors; massively responsive and efficient, they manage a phenomenal workload and all of them are seen as an asset to their teams. However, their individual challenges include dealing with conflict, pushing back constructively and getting their priorities supported by colleagues whose focus is on something else entirely. Better relationships would undoubtedly help and in the absence of doing this, my clients simply try to run faster, work harder and ‘just get through it’.

Timing is everything. As I write, we are approaching the end of the month and the end of the first quarter of this year; and this is a particularly busy time for one of my clients in the retail sector. Clearly, inviting them to take time out to ‘build relationships’ now would not be met with a printable response. However what it highlights is that if we don’t make regular time to strategically, intentionally and consistently focus on doing this, it is incredibly difficult to get meaningful support when the going gets tough.

Leaders with executive presence make time to:

• Lift their heads up from the screen
• Identify and plan who are critical stakeholders to their business
• Set relationship goals (not task goals) for their key influencers
• Defend time to talk/meet to understand their issues/priorities/challenges
• Ask ‘how can my team help with that?’
• And do so regularly, iteratively, intentionally.

As leaders we are all in a relationship business, irrespective of the industry, country or function in which we work. That means we need to make time to build relationships, using the best asset at our disposal – ourselves – not our email.