Why The Future of Work is All About Relationships
Why in a technology driven world, success starts with relationships
Welcome! This week’s edition of WIP is some thinking I’ve been doing about how employees can thrive in our connected and always changing world of work. If this resonates with you, I’d love to know what you think and your thoughts.
The Importance of Relationships in Life and Work
When we’re children, we get taught the importance of sharing, and being nice to others. When we’re in school, we learn the value of teamwork, whether it’s working on a group project for a class, participating in a club, or playing a team sport.
But somewhere along the way, we lose sight of the fact that while traits like hard work, personal ambition, and individual success are laudable, in our world of work and in life, we all live in a system that is much bigger than ourselves.
My Own Experience: Turning Around From a Tough First Year of Work
I learned this first hand myself when I was working at Deloitte as a young 22 year old fresh out of college. I remember going to my very first meeting with my manager, excited and ready to dive in, and remember being asked to A) order lunch for the rest of the team and then B) build 52 slides and right align the text boxes and make sure that all the chevrons were the right color. This, to me, was not changing the world, it wasn’t even, in my opinion at the time, the best use of my time. I was struggling and flustered with my role, and wanting to make a bigger impact.
After a less than stellar performance review, I began to realize what I was doing was not working. I had a desire to succeed and wanted to make a difference, but knew the way I had been going about things was wrong.
After the performance evaluation, I began working with a new manager who I started to develop a good relationship with. One day, I asked her for some honest advice: I told her that while I was doing okay, I didn’t feel like I knew how to make an impact, and I wasn’t sure exactly how to be successful, and asked for her help in figuring it out.
She told me something that changed the trajectory of my career and still sticks with me until this day: The quantity of your impact correlates to the quality of your relationships.” Her point to me was that companies hire consulting firms for their collective problem solving knowledge - not the individual, but the team. I didn’t have to be the hero, to try to solve the problem, and while I could wait for someone to tell me how I could contribute, one way to contribute and make an impact was to think about how I could use my talents to contribute, and to raise my hand to do that task.
“Harness your intelligence, relationships, ideas and bring people together, to find a way to make an impact on the bigger picture, and you’ll always have opportunities,” she went on to add.
She added one last thing: “good people help good people.” If you want to be helped by good people, start finding ways to meet, and help good people.
I think I had been so cognizant of wanting to “hit the ground running” in my first job that I got lost. In a large 150,000 person organization, it is easy to feel like a number, and that your work may not matter. But an organization is just a complex system of people, norms, rules, and relationships. When you can understand, at an organizational level, what is going on, you can see where you can contribute, and also, how you can lead and make an impact in your work to a larger goal or mission.
Reframing my role to scale my impact
These realizations helped me fundamentally re-think my role as an employee.
I started building relationships with other people, and learning what they did, their unique expertise, and what they were working on
I started intentionally developing a point of view on things that I could share with others
In any situation or role, I would always think about how I could contribute to the bigger goal
Whenever I started developing a goal, I would always think to myself ‘who else might benefit from working on this with me?”
Over a short period of time, I began to see a noticeable impact. Instead of waiting around to be told to do tasks, I got to work on more projects that I was interested in because I proactively raised my hand to take them on. As a result of sharing my knowledge and ideas, my people started proactively reaching out to me to ask for my advice as well as to support their work.
But another amazing thing happened: I started meeting all sorts of incredible people. Smart, hard-working, kind, and incredibly knowledgeable people who were willing to go out of their way to help me and to make me successful. It really was true: good people help good people. A self-fulling prophecy started to talk place: As I got bigger projects and assignments, I was often outmatched or unprepared. Naturally, I began asking for help, and these same people were the ones who began helping me figure it out, which ended up helping me become successful, which led to more opportunities for growth. By going out of my way to invest in others, I was scaling my own ability to drive impact.
The World of Work is Far Bigger Than One Person
By realizing that my job was not just about myself, I began making a larger impact in my work, and had an impactful 13 year run at both a large consulting firm and technology company.
Looking back, I can absolutely credit my approach to a simple but powerful lesson: your success is correlated to the amount of people that want you to succeed.
If you want to be successful, start investing in your relationships. Your relationships with others play a huge role for your success, in your job, and in your career. That is true whether you’re just starting off as an entry level employee, whether you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur, or whether you’re a seasoned executive.
Where Common Leadership Advice Falls Short
If you’re reading this, chances are, you know that relationships are important. Chances are, someone has probably told you it's important “to network” and to “have a personal brand” or maybe even “it’s not what you know but who you know.” I don’t think those things are wrong, but they are not always actionable.While many of us learn when we are children how to go about building relationships, nobody ever teaches you how to do this well inside of the corporate environment.
We Need Another Form of Intelligence For The Networked World of Work
As I think back to my time in the corporate world, I think about the incredible colleagues and teammates that I had who taught me so much on how to make an impact and who helped me make an impact. What I was most impressed with, is that I had a handful of my colleagues who were the ones who often went out of their way to help me. They weren’t the highest up on the org chart, but they were always getting things done, achieving goals and making an impact and constantly praised by their peers. I’ve spent the past few years trying to study and find more of these people. And I’ve walked away with one observation:
I realized that they possessed a unique mindset and practices that enabled them to thrive. Simply put, were People Smart.
Definition of People Smart: The ability ability to cultivate strong relationships with others and work through and with others to generate collective and individuals success
People Smart means recognizing that you have abilities and talents to achieve great things and by understanding others and the world that you live in, and using a collective mindset that by working together with others you can achieve something far greater than working by yourself.
It means that your goals and ambitions absolutely matter, but because you are a part of a larger system, you need to work through and with others to achieve them, and that by taking the time to connect and collectively share and help others, you and others can win bigger and more together.
Being People Smart means realizing that the organization you work in is a bunch of people working toward shared goals, and just as you have your own strengths and talents, so do others. And when you recognize how your strengths fit within others and see the strengths of others, you can start to connect the dots of how people, teams, and ideas can mix and match in order to achieve both collective and individual goals.
The world of work is changing fast, technology and automation are changing the very nature of work, and the pace and rate of change isn’t slowing down. But even in a world of technology, business is fundamentally about connecting people together to achieve shared value.
So if you’re someone working inside an organization, or even an entrepreneur looking for customers or partners, where do you begin or where do you start? Here are six ways to use your People Smarts to increase your impact by working through and with others.
6 Ways to Activate Your People Smarts
1)Practice 360 Awareness
Getting to practice and increase your self-awareness to better understand yourself is critical to knowing how to increase your impact. When we can practice “360 awareness” we can understand ourselves, and specifically, our values, strengths, interests and aspirations, but also, how other people see us and rely on us to contribute and get things done. When we understand this, we have the language to find ways to contribute and make an impact on a greater scale.
2)Think about the organizational system and your role within it
One of my core beliefs is that “In a big world, I’m a small person, but as a small person, I’m capable of something big. The same is true for you - you can achieve big things as a small person, but you have to start with understanding the system, how it works, the people within it. In order to make an impact, you have to have a healthy ambition. But ambition and hard work are not usually enough. You eventually need the support of others. If you’re reading this, you’re smart and talented, but you still operate in a world that is bigger than yourself. To make an impact, make sure to understand how the organizational system looks, feels, and operates. When you understand this, you can start to identify how your role fits within it, and how, any of your own personal goals aligned to a much bigger mission.
3)Make Relationship building a part of your job
Organizations are just people working towards shared goals. This means that being effective means having a set of trusting relationships that enable you to achieve more by working with others. But having good relationships doesn't just happen accidentally. Just like in our personal lives, good trusting relationships with peers and colleagues takes time. And that starts with seeing building relationships not as an afterthought, but a core part of your job.
4)Seek Out The Talents in Others
When you are self-aware and know your strengths, you can make impactful contributions toward a goal. That is incremental progress. But when you can do the same for your teammates, that can help you collectively scale to transformational progress. Telling your teammates what makes them great and what strengths they have isn’t about being nice. It’s about helping them understand their own external self-awareness, so they can contribute at a greater level. When you can increase and focus on collective success, you can always find ways to win within it on an individual level.
5 Give Away Your Knowledge
As a knowledge worker, your job is to use your expertise, knowledge, and POV to create value. You aren’t producing widgets or a physical product. Your output, and contribution is correlated to the quality of your ideas, insights, and expertise. Just like a company would invest in R&D to build a physical product, you should also invest in your own “R&D” by building your expertise.
The good news is, that you probably already have some expertise, you just need to spend the time codifying it and writing it down. These can be formal or informal mechanisms, be it through taking classes, getting mentors, or running your own experiments. Finally, the power of knowledge and your point of view is that it can scale, but only when you share it with others. When you can codify some of your point of view or learnings, and then share it with other people who might benefit, you can start to really scale your impact.
6)Be a Connection Spark
In a world of work that continues to increase loneliness and distance from one another, finding ways to stay connected to others is critical to overall well-being and personal fulfillment. People Smarts also means finding your own places and spaces where you can connect to improve your own personal engagement and well-being, and then taking the practice of connection, and finding ways to use that to bring other people together so that they can feel connected and engaged.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, an organization is just a bunch of people working towards a shared set of goals. While you’ll still need book smarts and street smarts, activating your people smarts ensures you know how to work with others to make a significant impact in your work, whether you’re like the former version of me inside a large organization, or if you’re even a solo entrepreneur.
The good news is that every person has People Smarts, they just need to start practicing it in action. Becoming People Smart is not a fixed outcome, but rather an ongoing process and journey. But the workplace is changing and evolving so rapidly that as long as you continue to prioritize learning how to work with others, you’ll be sure to have opportunities.
Does this resonate with you? I’d love to know your thoughts!
If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, leadership development or professional development for this year, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:
Team Trainings & Professional Development: Happy to facilitate training or professional development opportunity for your team & organization - common topics include: influence without authority, navigating change, hybrid working, and others.
Support Your Offsites & Meetings: Speak or facilitate at your team’s offsite. Need a guide to facilitate or speak at an upcoming offsite, QBR or all hands? Happy to engage here.
Leadership & Learning Programs: Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs.
Feel free to contact me directly for more details!
Have a great week!
Al