In today’s dynamic workplace, strong relationships among leaders, supervisors, and subordinates are essential to the business’s success. These relationships form the backbone of a healthy working relationship, fostering trust, communication, and collaboration among all employees. Accurately measuring a successful project, event, or entire business rests on these relationships.
When understanding why this relationship matters, we must consider that strong relationships build trust and loyalty, enhance communication, improve morale and engagement, reduce conflict and turnover, and increase productivity and innovation. This becomes an entire domino effect as one results in the other. Without strong communication, because of proper communication, you cannot achieve high productivity and innovation.
When trying to figure out why projects, events, and businesses fail, one common theme within each organization is that it starts with marginal to bad relationships. This will result in low morale, employee turnover, communication breakdowns, leadership distrust, and stagnant performance.
In developing strong relationships, you will need to build these key elements into your process:
- Trust: is the foundation of any relationship
- Respect: Valuing each person’s role and contributions
- Transparency: Open, honest communication
- Empathy: Understanding and addressing other’s needs
- Consistency: Reliable behavior and expectations
The steps for building these relationships require deliberate actions for success.
- Establish open communication
- Encourage feedback (and act on it)
- Lead by example
- Recognize and appreciate effort
- Support professional development
- Practice emotional intelligence
- Foster team collaboration
In building these relationships, Leaders and Supervisors must set the tone for culture and communication, provide clarity and vision, serve as mentors and role models, and address conflicts constructively. Subordinates need to be open to feedback and growth, communicate their needs and concerns, contribute to a positive environment, and show respect and accountability.
In today’s environment, with more people working remotely and in hybrid teams, this can create additional challenges because you can’t just drop in and see them in the standard workplace settings. To succeed, you must have regular check-ins, use video calls to build connections, encourage informal conversations, celebrate wins virtually, and be proactive in communicating.
In conclusion, relationships are the foundation of a successful organization. They require intention, consistency, and a shared commitment across all levels of the organization. When nurtured, these relationships lead to greater engagement, productivity, and overall workplace satisfaction and success.