Growing a team pt 3: Deepening your connections with others
People do their best work when they feel they belong and are valued for who they are. Just simply becoming part of a team doesn’t automatically give people that sense of belonging. You have to work at your relationships on a daily basis to make it known that you value someone’s input and you trust them to do their job.
All too often our work relationships begin with a job description or a brief. The power sits in one party’s hands to dictate what it is that they need from the other. It sets the tone for the relationship and work; it stifles people or outright excludes them before you’ve even begun to explore who you each are. Not only does it mean that in order to work with you people have to fit into defined boxes, but it also presumes that the boxes are correct. Of course job descriptions and briefs can be hugely important - but keeping the content of them to a minimum will make room for others you might have excluded and allow for people to show you what else they are capable of.
We believe that in order to truly connect and develop better working relationships then we must begin with collaboration. We must make it possible for people to learn about each other in a variety of ways before, or alongside, producing actual work together. Even if you’re not yet hiring someone to work with you full-time, it’s likely that you work with people on a regular basis. If you start to practice building deeper connections in all of your work relationships it will come much more easily when you do start building your own team.
Tell people who you are
One of our values is “Lead through action”. If we expect people to be more honest about who they are and what they bring to the table we should begin by being honest about ourselves. In traditional interviews and pitches those in the positions of power (i.e. the decision-maker) often expect the other person to have ‘done their research’ and they’ll jump straight into grilling and challenging the person interviewing or pitching. Not only does this mean that people are forced to present whatever version of themselves they think the decision-maker might want to see but certain people will have been afforded more access to information about the company and the opportunity than others.
As part of our work placement programme we’re building out a directory of businesses. One of the questions on there is “What is unique about the way you work?”. As part of that we expect businesses to be open to sharing all sorts of information that will give our interns a sense of what they might be like to actually work with, not just the type of work they do. Some examples are: “I trust people to just get on with things - which means I’m sometimes a bit slow to recognise when you need help, but it also means you can do stuff without my permission” or “I do this work because I’m passionate about change. Which means that I sometimes I talk too much or get frustrated” or “We’re long-term romantic partners as a well as a business partners so we may gloss over context that we’ve both understood”.
Sharing this sort of information shifts the power balance in work relationships. It allows the other person to be the one to say “I don’t think this company would be right for me” or “I think I’d thrive in this sort of environment”. It can feel scary to be honest about what type of person or business you are but it also empowers people to talk about their values, what they need and what they bring to the table. When I first started working with Sonia I said something along the lines of “Sorry I’ll often talk non-stop as everything in my head is usually connected to everything else and it’s one big mess of ideas”. and she responded with “That’s great because like to hear all the context and then pick it apart and simplify it.” Originally I thought I was hiring someone to do my social media campaigns at the time but in reality she has so much more to offer. I’d never have known this if I hadn’t been honest about my flaws and also non-prescriptive about how I expected her to engage with the work.
Build shared expectations
When people start working together they often race into the work to be done rather than defining what they expect of each other. We do a lot of work with project teams or long-term teams to help them define shared principles or set shared boundaries. Even in our short-term engagements with groups, such as one-off workshops, we’ll always kick off with an expectation setting exercise which asks people “What do we all value in this space?” and “What should we be mindful of?”.
It might be that the group articulates general values like “listening” or they might more explicitly say “hearing from everyone in the room”. Articulating ‘things to be mindful of’ creates space for people to highlight things they might feel uncomfortable pointing out otherwise. “I have a hearing impairment so please speak clearly and slowly” is often the type of information that can sometimes take a while for people to feel ready to share in a group, but that can absolutely transform the dynamics when people are mindful of these things. Things like “I need time to process information so please can we have regular breaks” stops everyone from making assumptions about what’s needed for everyone else to be able to contribute effectively and instead gets them to see what is actually needed for each of them as individuals.
You can have this type of conversation even when you are only working with one other person. And the more you practice having them the easier it becomes to quickly define and review expectations on a regular basis.
We’ll be exploring more of these kinds of exercises in our “Developing foundations for effective working relationships” workshop on 22nd July,
Learn and grow together
Traditional employer relationships are often structured in a way that presumes the person hiring, or the person bringing someone else into a group or a team, is the authority on the work. Even if that’s not what you believe as an employer, society has repeatedly told us that those in power must be the most knowledgeable on the subject and must never be questioned or challenged. New members of your team will likely behave like that is so unless actively encouraged to give feedback and invited to share ideas.
One of the best things a manager has ever said to me was “We want to make the most of your first three months for you to see what we do with a fresh perspective - we expect you to question everything we do and offer up new ideas even if you don’t know all the context”
Many of the businesses joining our work placement programme explicitly do so because they want to gain a fresh perspective on their business. But we also know that many of them have been running their businesses, or generally working, for longer than some of our interns have been alive. We believe that they have just as much to learn as our interns for whom this might be their first experience of work. That’s why we’ve created a programme of workshops and coaching sessions which interns and businesses partake in together - not only will it speed along our interns learning by being exposed to real-life scenarios that our businesses have experience of, but what our interns bring to the sessions will potentially make businesses question long-held beliefs or open their eyes to an opportunity they’d never even considered before.
We also hope that after having the space and support to build deeper connections with one another through our programme that the businesses continue direct working relationships with our interns either by hiring them as a permanent member of staff or by working with them on a freelance basis.