I am in a relationship?—?with my team

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As a leader and to be frank, as a human being, the most important relationship in your life are the ones with your parents and close family, with your beloved ones and with your team.

In comparison to the other two, relationship with your team is the easiest relationship to break out from and also the hardest relationship to be open and vulnerable in. It is a very confusing relationship.

Am I a “big boss”? A mentor? A Coach? Dad/Mom? Who am I and how should I communicate? Will I be taken seriously? Will they follow me? Am I in the right relationship?

Despite leading teams for over 10 years, sometimes I still struggle with my own understanding of my role as a leader. With my third most important relationship — with my team and my company.

Some of us escape this relationship by being closed and emotionally armored, some draw a line between who they are in “real life” and how they are at work. Some decide to become a freelancer to potentially escape a need of emotional attachment to coworkers.

If you are similar to me and you value the relationship with your team and understand how critical those relationships are to the success of your business, here are 6 bulletproof strategies I use to build these personal connections up and fix them if needed.

1. Listen Closely!

Every moment of your day, people tell you and show you who they are. Sometimes they do it in their weird way.

Once, during a team evening, a teammate came up to me, she asked me for feedback. She told me, she doesn’t receive feedback that often and this is very important for her to hear my opinion. I was excited! I was so happy she brought it up!!

I spent days thinking about her performance and structuring feedback in a way that is clear, non-judgemental and actionable. I came prepared! At the end of a 1,5h meeting (I know…), she asked me for a raise… well. I got angry. I wasted my valuable time and the only thing she wanted was money…

It brought me back to the moment when she asked me for feedback in the first place.

During the same evening, she told me that she was moving to a new apartment, she also needed to buy new furniture and we joked about her first work anniversary coming up.

If I would listen closely, I would know — she doesn’t need feedback at work at this point in her life. She is building her new home. She needs financial stability.

Listening hard enough would save me days, it would also save me and her from frustration and further “relationship” fixing. In the ideal world, after she asks me for feedback, I would feel the gap between her life goals and her “ask” and I would bring that up. “Why is it important now to get work-related feedback, when you are in the middle of a big life change?”

2. Tell the Truth!

As a leader, you are not only responsible for your people, in the first place, you are building a business.

As a daring leader, you will be often confronted with situations, when the needs of the individuals in your team and the needs of your company misalign. As a response to that, a lot of leaders tend to choose one of the two strategies: 1. Being nice. 2. Being strict.

Both strategies imply that you are taking over the responsibility on yourself. It is not a dialog. It is dictatorship:) You are like a parent talking to a child.

How would a nice person solve the situation above? You would feel you need to help your team member and will try to find ways to increase their salary. Not taking into account the company’s situation, remuneration structures etc.

How would a strict parent solve the situation above? A strict boss would know that due to the performance, team goals, KPIs or any other important words they can’t raise the teammate’s salary. So without an explanation, it would be a clear NO.

I don’t want to be anyone’s parent. In my relationship with my team, I want us to be equal. So my strategy is — truth. The truth might be uncomfortable, vulnerable and unpleasant, but I choose it because it is the only way to build a healthy team culture.

Truth is, we have all been there: where we needed emotional and financial stability, where you doubt your future. At the same time, as a boss I am responsible for the company’ growth and wellbeing, I will be the one to answer in front of the CEO and the board, investors, and employees. And I can’t just give a raise because I want to be liked or feel pity, or whatever I feel in that moment.

I tell the truth. Both sides: that I understand the pain and that I have my own responsibilities that I carry. It helps to keep the connection and explain the NO. The truth helps to make it less personal and invite your team member to share the responsibility for the company’s wellbeing.

3. Understand their Values

The story above was not only about listening and about telling truth but also about values. Through my experience as a leader, I realized that to understand one another, we need to understand our values first.

I know it is not easy, some of us do not understand their own values sometimes.

By coming to me for the feedback my colleague touched some of my strongest values: clarity and connection. So I lighted up like a torch. She spoke my language!

When I want my team to hear me — I speak their language. For some it is security and connection, for some, it is money and success, for some — growth and daring. Every task you share, any direction you give should be in a language they understand.

Here is a trick to help you: Write a short story about each of your team members and answer six questions below. I challenge you, you can do that.

1. Look at your team member’s role and work behavior. What did they go out of their way to do and not do? If they are doing smth “extra”, you have a good clue about their values.
2. When does your teammate gets upset? Gets emotional, irritated? It might be a good indicator of the values that are not being met.
3. When is your teammate really happy? What values are being met at that moment?
4. What is their must haves? For example, I must have a calm place to meditate in the office, my value is mindfulness as you might have guessed.
5. What is your teammate’s favourite activity and why?
6. Who is your teammate’s idol and why?

You might want to have a list of core values next to you while writing this story.

Rephrase whatever you want to tell your colleagues through the lens of their values and they will follow you.

4. Find “Emotional” Comfort Zone

No need to be super open if you are not comfortable with it. I personally do not like talking about my private life with my team. I do not like telling them about my relationship with my parents, I also don’t post stuff like this on Facebook. It makes me neither a bad leader nor a good leader. This is just my value — privacy.

I think my biggest mistake so far as a coach and facilitator was my desire to push harder and go deeper. Make people open as wide as I could open them.

Through my experience as a mentor, coach, and a leader, I learned that at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what your team members are open about and how deep are the feelings they are sharing. What really counts is that they are willing to be open and express feelings. You might feel, that the fact they are sharing is insignificant, for them it might be a leap of faith.

5. Be an Adult

I will tell you something academic and very grown up:) Stick with me. Coaching and therapy use a widespread concept of Parent/Adult/Child states, developed by Psychologist Eric Berne. This is an idea that says that people can switch between different states of mind — Parent, Adult, and Child; not only in different parts of this lives but also in the same conversation.

In plain English, if I feel resentment, I feel hurt and want to fight with my boss or with my colleagues, most probably my “Child” part of me is taking.

If I feel like I need to teach someone something, give them advice without them asking for one or even punish for inappropriate behavior — I am in my parent mode.

The trick is to make sure you talk to your team in your Adult mode.

So who are you as an adult? The adult is a mediator between your Inner Parent and your Inner Child. It is also a “sober” self. Both Parent and Child love to be drunk on emotions. The easiest way for me to find my inner Adult is to sober up my Child or my Parent, to get rid of their emotions, their behavioral traits and look at a situation from the perspective of facts. Cold, clear facts. What do I really know about this situation? Is this person really mean and disrespectful? And here comes my #6

6. Doubt!

Always doubt. Don’t act out of “certainty” and “clarity”. My favorite quote and mantra says

If you meet the Buddha on the road — kill Him

Which means — if you are 100% certain about something, put a lot of effort into proving yourself wrong.

In one of my first jobs, I was 100% certain that my colleague is trying very hard to get my role/position and make me look unimportant or stupid with all the dirty tricks she knew. She was (in my mind) manipulating my boss, doing favors to the whole team, drawing attention to herself. It was my insecurity talking. It was my inner Child asking for love.

I had a chat with her, I was upset, I was mean. At the end of our conversation, I realized that all she tried to do — was to find her own place in our team. Since she was new she tried to be helpful, she tried to understand processes and people as fast as possible and she didn’t really think of me. Not a single second.

Today, when I have such feelings I double check myself, I doubt. Sometimes even out loud. I come to my colleague and say “I feel it is not as important to you as to me” or I might ask “What did you mean by…”. I find my Buddha and I make sure he gets killed.

As every relationship that matters, relationship with your teammates is not a walk in a park. Sometimes we are afraid to say things out loud and share our concerns, our needs, and our wishes. It is just easier to hide, to be right and to say “no” without an explanation.

All of those 6 strategies above take a lot of energy and a lot of courage to execute. But if you don’t follow them, in my experience it gets harder to build great businesses, to achieve goals and live together as a team.