Building Relationships

I was catching up on my Projects@Work newsletters, which I've been dutifully auto-filtering into a Newsletters folder until I would have time to read them – and here we are at Christmas with newsletters going back to Octber. I'm definitely finding some gems.

So far, my favorite article is the following:

The Human Element: Janis Rizzuto

This quote here really spoke to me, about the lessons I've been learning this year. I can't say I'm an expert yet – in fact, in most ways, when it comes to leadership, I am a freshman. It's only now that I'm realizing just how important they are. As one of those "logic-based" people (and you know who we are), I believed that people should do things – and things should get done – because they were the right thing to do. Some of us are guilty of treating our co-workers not unlike the machine that we work with – input A, output B, with email as the delivery mechanism. Someone's job may be to do something, so they should do it. Then it breaks down – you sent your input, but you're not getting back the output.

In this environment of limited resources, where everyone is tasked with doing far more than 100%, it's your leadership – and relationship skills – that actually get things done. If every person we walked up to was doing absolutely nothing at that time, I bet the things we'd need to get done always would be. But it's not the case – most people are busy with competing priorities and more work than they can possibly hope to achieve. So, that's where "leveraging relationships" comes in.

"Project leaders need to be constantly building, maintaining and leveraging relationships to get things done. No one is going to care that you are the project manager, so you need to figure out how to broker agreements between multiple stakeholders to move things forward. Part of your value to your customer as a project leader is to remove obstacles, and the way you do that is usually not through authority. You have to be creative about how you drive accountability to make sure that people come through on their obligations to the project team." (Janis Rizzuto, 2010).

 

This is my biggest personal challenge for 2011, if I really want to succeed, is to develop these skills. If they are like anything else in life, it's not about a natural gift, it just takes knowledge, practice, and effort. Also, as this article says, you need to pay attention to these as part of your work. Building relationships with others is as important as anything else you do.