START YOUR WEEK WITH THE COACH
”How well do you balance your tasks and your relationships?”
If the interaction with your team is focused solely on completing the task, I would argue that you have a functional, but not a personal relationship and certainly not a friendship. Both are critical for providing leadership excellence and sustainable success.
A relationship of convenience or production expectations provides little, if any, relational equity or a healthy work environment. No relational substance below the surface equals no margin for strife or strain that challenge all relationships.
Without relational margin with your team members you are constantly making demands on overdrawn accounts. That may work in the short term, but without eliminating the negative relational balance, your best team members will soon leave you for greener pastures.
Your success as a leader is not so much from your positional authority, but from valuing relationships in a way that your team members know you understand their world and how they feel. That is something that the growing field of technology and absent or remote leadership styles will never replace.
There is a political and emotional component to every relationship and every interaction and decision within that relationship. The political component determines how your influence will increase or decrease. The emotional component determines how you will feel about it.
Leaders who forget these two components struggle to stay above the waterline at best, or worse, drown in failure because they want to lead without significant relationships above them, around them, or below them.
Would your staff say you care more about them as a person or more about what they produce? Not sure? Why not do an anonymous survey and know for certain!