4 Ways to Win at Work Through Your Relationships With Others
My approach and tactics to solving problems, generating solutions and winning with others
Navigating The Transition From Corporate Life to Entrepreneur
2 years ago when I left the corporate world to go into business for myself, I knew that there were going to be changes that I needed to make in order to be successful as an entrepreneur. Up until that point, I had only worked, or served large Fortune 1000 companies.I knew that working for myself was going to be a different endeavor and require new ways of thinking and working if I wanted to be successful.
This immediately manifested itself in some obvious ways, like in the kinds of work I was doing. Having to jump head first into accounting, finance, legal, or going to find customers were all things I tangentially touched in my old world of work, but now, I was either on the hook for making a decision about or having to do it myself.
I certainly experienced the level of autonomy that comes when you are in charge of the work you do versus getting told to do something because of your stakeholders or leaders, and now that I called my own shots, having control over my calendar and seeing chunks of free time in my calendar to work on work I wanted to do was one of the most freeing feelings.
My creative output and productivity increased significantly right away, and I often say that the creative output from the first year of working on my own was at least 3x higher than in prior years.
But there were also some unexpected parts of going off on my own that were challenges that I had to figure out, and that I didn’t necessarily expect. A big one, which in retrospect seems obvious, was around relationships, and my network of colleagues. Working for yourself is by the very nature, a solo endeavor.
The buck stops with me, and autonomy and accountability are two sides of the same coin. However, just like in any kind of job, it is very hard to do something solely on your own. Work in today’s knowledge economy is a team sport, and even as an independent business owner, I have to work with others in order to achieve my goals.
The challenge is, the infrastructure that I previously had (namely: 80,000 really smart and intelligent colleagues) was no longer at my beckoning call. One of my favorite parts of working at Deloitte and Salesforce was that whenever I had a challenge, I always knew that I never solely had to solve the problem on my own. I could use the resources, relationships, and collective intelligence to figure out the solution.
At the end of the day, as the author Tim Sanders once said to me, “we’re all just looking for answers.” To me, in my previous jobs as a consultant, and then as a product marketer, whether I was solving a problem, or trying to come up with a new solution or idea, the answer to the problem or the idea was just a phone call away, or a person away from getting closer to the answer.
And when you have thousands of smart people literally at your disposal, it’s not surprising how that can be true. On many occasions at both Deloitte and Salesforce, I was able to get to a solution or solve a problem by figuring out who were the right people who needed to be in the room or on the Zoom, and then worked to get the insights out of everyone that we needed to move forward.
Work is a Team Sport
Not only did this help us get things done, but it also just made work a lot more fun. One of my favorite sayings at Salesforce was that Salesforce is a team sport, and I know that my most meaningful contributions came from when working on something that was bigger than myself.
A lot of that mapped back to having the ability to build relationships and reach out to find the right people and answers to the problems that we were solving. And while that still works as an entrepreneur, it certainly looks a lot different.
This year, I’ve faced all sorts of challenges and needed to devise all sorts of solutions, ranging from figuring out how to generate sales pipeline in a down market, how to improve pricing, how to better scope projects, managing invoicing and vendor terms, managing legal and compliance issues, hiring all sorts of contractors, and so much more. While some of these problems I could solve on my own, I had to rely a lot on others to find solutions to these problems.
In this situations, I didn’t always know what to do or how to proceed. But being able to rely on some of the lessons I learned while working at those organizations about building relationships, problem solving, and connecting with others have helped me in many ways. I wanted to share them here as a way to help others think more expansively about how they can use their relationships to advance in their jobs and careers.
1)Focus on The Right Kind of Trust
Business is about people, and in my line of work, people buy and work with people that they know like and trust. When you can grok that belief, you can start to think about how you can go out of your way to build trust with other people that you need or want relationships with. For me, that is about building trust with prospective clients, partners, the leaders that I serve, as well as the other contractors and service providers that help me run my business.
At a fundamental level, there are two types of trust: cognitive trust, and affective trust. Read More:
Cognitive trust is based on the confidence you feel in another person’s accomplishments, skills and reliability. This is trust from the head. Affective trust on the other hand, arises from feelings of emotional closeness, empathy or friendship. This type of trust comes from the heart.
Most of us understand cognitive trust. We build that through our credibility, competence and character. Affective trust often feels a little bit squishy because it’s hard to pin down, but the research shows that we actually need to focus on affective trust first.
Since I am still new at this work, a lot of the relationships I have are with people who I am just meeting or with people who I have known for a short period of time. This has led me to try to intentionally go out of my way to foster this trust that is needed to build effective relationships.
Building trusting relationships takes time. This is especially true in terms of selling and finding clients. I work in a crowded market where differentiation is hard to come by. The only thing that really differentiates me is my own unique point of view, and to the degree that I can communicate that trust is correlated to my ability to convince someone that we should do business together.
These are not things that happen magically, nor through an amazing linkedin post, or awesome podcast episode (They don’t hurt) but rather through a set of habits and practices that over time earn the trust and right to do business with another person. In the image below, I’ve listed some of my favorite practices for doing this, consistently and repeatedly over time.
2)Know When You Need to Collaborate
At the end of the day, an organization is just a bunch of people that are working toward a shared goal. We all need the help of others, and the ability to work through and with others to be successful. This is still true when you are an entrepreneur or a solo practitioner, if anything, as an entrepreneur you become even more reliant on the people you work with and collaborate with, because it truly is hard to do everything on your own.
But at the same time, whether you are an entrepreneur or working for a company, you can’t just spend all your time collaborating for the sake of collaborating.
Many of us are faced with collaboration overload, and with the constant stream of cross-functional projects, meetings, status updates, and communications, struggle to navigate throughout the course of the day. This was my day to day struggle in my previous career, and while it is much better now that I have control over my schedule, I still struggle with this from time to time.
Because I know how important it is to build relationships with others, I can easily fill my calendar with meetings, meetups, podcast recordings and opportunities to connect with other people, and oftentimes, I overdo it. What I’ve had to learn is to be much more intentional about how I choose to collaborate and when, so that I can get what I need to do, without feeling the constant stream of pressure.
One way I have thought about this is through drawing on the work of Dr. Michael Arena who has studied how cross-functional teams collaborate. In his research, Arena uncovered four “phases” of collaboration (Discovery, Development, Diffusion, and Delivery, you can read more here)
I’ve used this model to think about the projects that I am working on, when it makes sense to engage with others, as well as, the types of people that I want to be engaging with.
While this looks different to me as an entrepreneur, leading companies are starting to wake up to the value of this, especially as they think about how to make sure their teams are collaborating effectively whether they are remote or in-person
At The Charter Summit, I heard Shopify Chief People Officer Tia Silas talk about a concept they have called “bursting”. Bursting involves bringing people together for short but focused periods of time in order to intentionally problem solve and collaborate.
As a remote-first company, Silas mentioned teams rely on bursting to rapidly make progress toward a shared outcome, and to intentionally build trust and connection within teams as a result. While not all companies are remote first, there are still so many creative ways companies could employ something like this, or at a team level, how leaders can do this for their teams.
#3) Expand The Nature of Relationships
We all need others to get things done. This also means we have to eventually ask other people for things. While this may seem difficult, it’s also necessary and important to achieve goals. As someone who is not always comfortable with making asks of other people, this is really hard. But I've learned to navigate this by focusing on this idea of making something bigger than yourself.
At a fundamental level, we often view relationships in a Give/Get Way. I can give something, and in return, I get something. There is nothing wrong with this approach, however, it can feel transactional. Making things bigger than yourself means expanding your view on the nature of a relationship. And that’s where the 3rd G comes into play: and that’s generate.
In the relationships I have, I not only think about give and get, but I also think about what could we generate together, that could create a positive impact for something or someone else? This helps “grow the pie” of what the outcome could be, but what it also does, is that it invites the other person to have a greater role and impact in achieving that outcome.
And assuming that you are asking them to participate in something that is of interest to them, many times they’ll want to participate. This does two things. First, it helps build trust (cognitive and affective) second, it helps you and them, and third, it benefits other people or something bigger.
By simply reframing the nature of your relationship with someone else, you can start to earn their trust for how you engage with them in the future. Here are a few examples of what that looks like:
I was having some issues with processing payments through a tech platform earlier this year, and reached out to a few other practitioners for their advice. After they helped me, I took the responses to the tech platform and gave them the feedback, which they then used to fix a feature in the product
I had a leadership training I was delivering, and my client asked me to put together some resources on a topic that I didn’t have as much experience with. I asked a few other people to share me their favorite resources on this topic, then turned it into an article that I shared with everyone who contributed
Two separate clients of mine asked me about some challenges they were having around measuring leadership development inside their orgs. I connected them together so they could chat, and then started a quarterly virtual meetup bringing together others who had the same issue so we could talk about it.
Someone asked me what were some examples of best practices for leadership development programs, so I started looking around. I couldn’t find many, so I decided to start looking on linkedin. I started a weekly round up of examples that I saw, so now other people can benefit from what I'm learning.
#4) Connecting With Others to Generate Innovation
As a consultant, facilitator and speaker, the quality of my work is directly correlated to the quality of my ideas. If I can generate better and more novel and unique ideas, I can generate better business results. But that also means, I have to put conditions into effect so that I can generate better ideas.
A lot of the research around innovation suggests that for novel ideas to spread, people actually need to spend more time with people they don’t know. This helps generate new and novel ideas as a result of the diversity of the people that are in the room.
To create this for myself, I have been intentionally connecting with other people that I haven’t met that are in adjacent, or specifically related fields. These typically are other newsletter writers, podcasters, or other people in the leadership & talent space. These opportunities have exposed me to new ideas and new concepts, as well as given me chances to build more relationships that help strengthen my own network and brand. But the ideas can’t live in a vacuum or in my head. To help bring these to life (and also to practice #3 in “Give, Get, Generate") I’ve been hosting small group meetings of people who care about the same topics where we can brainstorm ideas and connect with one another. Some of the ideas from this newsletter come right from those meetings, and it’s also helped me broaden my network of people I can go to, partner with and in some cases, these have helped me generate business.
In some ways, this is the classic “how do we create serendipitous interactions, water cooler moments, and hallway conversations.” The answer is to do so intentionally. Hubspot is an example of a company that is trying to create these disparate and serendipitous interactions, ranging from cutting down on status meeting time to make more time for intentional connections, or with creating spaces for internal teams who don’t know each other to get to meet with one another.
Conclusion: We’re All Just Searching For Answers
The Author Tim Sanders once said to me, “At the end of the day, most people are just looking for answers.” I know that’s how I felt as a newer entrepreneur trying to navigate this new job, and many of those answers I found in my existing relationships and in connecting with others.
Hopefully, these are some practices and tactics that you can apply, to help you and your team work better together. At the end of the day, an organization is just a bunch of people working toward a common goal. Being intentional about how you connect, share ideas and build relationships can facilitate that.