Leadership Fundamentals that Accelerate Organizational Growth!

All organizations want to grow. The opportunity they need to seize is being READY to grow. One of the most important leadership principles is relationships. One of the building blocks for being ready for growth in any organization is ensuring that you have healthy business relationships on your Executive Leadership Team and that these are role modeled as well as cascaded down and across your enterprise.

The Challenge

When your organization lacks healthy relationships can mean can posture your executives engage in political posturing. They do not listen or hear ideas with an open mind or heart. The impact is that the Executive Leadership team wastes time challenging each other’s personal motives, spins in circles without actionable outcomes, fails to engage in productive conflict, or worse, succumbs to compliance outcomes from the CEO because either they don’t care enough to fully engage or they don’t have the required skillsets to successfully navigate through their business discussions.

This is a serious problem that exists in many private or family businesses today, though it is often unnamed.  Instead, it remains a “pink elephant” that the executive team does not address causing the team to perform at levels below their potential.

Introducing The Currency of Relationships Introduction

Organizational Leaders know that value creation and innovation requires their teams to work collaboratively. Your work flow touches and involves many stakeholders across the enterprise, so how your community engages with each others can either facilitate the speed of your performance and productivity or drastically slow it down. The ability of an Organization to demonstrate collaboration at the highest levels requires skill building in the “Currency of Relationships.”

There are three levels of relationships.

Transactional

A relationship at this level usually includes basic requests for or exchanges of information on a task level only with little to no interpersonal connectivity beyond the basic pleasantries like hello and thank you.  A typical example would be a request to process an invoice or sending someone a copy of a report.

Business

This is where your leadership skills come into play.   At this level you must be able to successfully build trust, negotiate and engage in productive conflict, give constructive feedback to each other, align expectations, and coach for performance while holding people accountability.  These interpersonal soft skills is where the a leader invests the majority of their time to facilitate the progress on a daily basis which requires you to have strong communications and relationship building skills.

Personal & intimate

When a relationship is at this level the people involved not only know each other very well they are likely to be friends and may even consider one another to be trusted advisors in their professional and personal lives. This is a wonderful extra, though not a requirement for business success.

The Struggle

Building relationships can be extremely difficult.  Here are a few reasons why leaders struggle building relationships.

• An individual may be introverted and need a lot of time to get relationships established
• Someone may be so self-absorbed and focused on their work tasks that they literally don’t even notice the people around them.
• It may be that someone simply thinks building relationships is not that important to them, so they just minimize or ignore them.

If you fall into one of these categories, it might be wise to it’s probably time to look at your beliefs and behaviors here and maybe consider even working with a coach on how to change your approach so you gain more comfort and achieve greater success in building successful relationships.

The Next Step Opportunity and Solution

Healthy relationships in business do not just happen magically and most importantly they are not dependent on whether we “like each other.”

Business relationships are based on Skills and Behaviors that must be learned as well as practiced consistently. Many Executive Leadership Teams are stuck and do not know where to begin or how to identify the reasons why relationships are not healthy or why their business is not moving in the right direction.

Erica Peitler is a Change-Partner who has worked with CEOs and Executive Leadership teams for over 15 years in designing and delivering Customized Leadership Learning Journeys.  In collaboration with these CEO and their Organizations, she has developed an Enterprise Level Leadership Academy designed specifically for private companies and family-owned businesses to build healthy relationships and cultures across their entire organizational communities.

If you want to learn more about how your executive leadership team can get to the next level of performance, visit the Leadership Rigor Online Academy or visit her website at: ericapeitler.com.

You can also reach out via email at erica@ericapeitler.com to schedule a connection together.