by for the Harvard Business Review
Does this experience sound familiar? Dmitri, an experienced knowledge worker, finds it difficult to have productive conversations in his organization, especially with those who are in service roles designed to help him do his job (e.g., IT, HR, etc.). Emails and conversations are brusque, uncooperative, and at times downright rude.
When Dmitri brings this up to the CEO, the CEO says that the organization has a “culture of helping,” that “our employees take care of each other,” and that “bad behavior should not be tolerated.” But when Dmitri talks to his VP, she doesn’t really listen to his concerns and turns the conversations toward complaining about Dmitri’s colleagues.
Dmitri leaves these combined interactions — with the CEO saying one thing but the manager on the ground caring about something else — confused. Does the organization care about helping or not?
The key to solving this problem is to recognize that it this is an organizational problem, not a case of a few bad apples and a demanding boss. This means that solving the problem demands an organizational solution — specifically, putting into place structures, systems, and routines that build positive relationships.
Our research suggests that precious few companies are there yet. Given the importance of inter-employee relationships to productivity and resilience, that means there’s a big opportunity there for the taking.
Clearly, Dmitri’s VP is not incentivized to care about relationships, and because IT and HR employees report to the VP, it’s likely her attitudes have spread to those functional areas. Further, it is unlikely kindness, respect, and helping are built into the performance management system for the IT and HR employees. Are they incentivized to be helpful and respectful? Probably not. It’s also possible they were never trained in communication or relationship development.
Let’s look at what top management should be doing to prevent this from happening:
1. Start listening and talking about relationships.
To diagnose properly, the company’s leadership team must first listen. Not just to their “inner circle” — the people they typically talk over business issues with — but to everyone. When leaders meet with the managers of units and teams reporting to them, they need to put time on the agenda for identifying and discussing relational weak spots: what people in the unit sense is not working well in work relationships.
In Dmitri’s case, leaders could go to the various parties involved and ask them about their experiences, why they communicate in the ways that they do, ask how they were trained, and so on, which would probably reveal that the relational dysfunctions reflect an absence of structures for promoting and incentivizing positive relationships.
Depending on the state of relationships between people, such conversations could potentially run hot at the outset (You want to know how I feel about us? I’ll tell you!) The goal is to have productive conversations that progress toward resolutions for any conflicts or frictions raised. But simply having these conversations sends a signal that interpersonal connections are a priority, allows leaders to model the desired behavior, and provides a structured occasion for leaders to engage in the work of building ties across their local work units.
2. Provide real structures for growing relationships.
Roberta, an early-career data analyst in a large consulting firm, says her company claims to have practices in place to support and incentivize strong working relationships. For example, new joiners are assigned “buddies,” who are theoretically expected to “help [me] out and make sure I feel connected and succeed.”
But Roberta’s buddy, Tim, works in a different, secure, government facility, and as a result she is never able to talk to him during the workday. It is an open secret in Roberta’s organization that participation in the buddy program is not a priority for anyone. After people are matched, there is no guidance given or follow-through to ensure quality connections are being built.
To prevent this outcome, top managers at Roberta’s company need to be explicit about why mentorship is important, explain what should happen in mentoring sessions, and create accountability for both program staff and participants. Leaving it to chance guarantees that only some people will take the program seriously and forge connections based on openness, trust, and respect. The majority almost certainly won’t, creating sharp differences in who gets access to support, resources, and opportunities to advance.
Structures, systems, and work practices can also be designed to focus attention on relational dynamics and support relationship building. For example, stable work arrangements (e.g., few part-time and temporary positions, longer-term contracts) and role structures (e.g., greater use of cross-functional team structures and standing teams with stable membership) create opportunities for repeated interaction that are key to relationship building.
To complement such efforts, all-hands or unit-level meetings should dedicate time to showcase and celebrate relationship-building efforts, as well as show precisely how relationships are integral to company-wide or unit successes. Note that this is not satisfied with a one-shot “team building” exercise; such exercises are often done so that managers can ignore relationships among coworkers the rest of the time.
3. Incentivize positive relationships.
Thomas, a cybersecurity manager in his late forties, is employed by a company whose leaders routinely discuss how important culture is and how much time they want to devote toward building positive relationships up and down the organization. However, Thomas describes how there is never any follow-up to these proclamations. On the contrary, he and his colleagues face bruising weekly “gotcha calls” where low performers are routinely called out and shamed in front of colleagues. Unsurprisingly, Thomas now wrestles with major employee-retention problems in his team.
In Thomas’ case, the lip service paid to positive relationships during infrequent meetings does nothing; rather, the middle managers respond to the incentives baked into the organizational culture. In his firm, there is no incentive to treat people collegially and build strong, functioning relationships. The incentive is for short-term profit at all costs.
To incentivize relationships, organizations must build the idea of positive relationships into interviews, job descriptions, and performance evaluations. Make it the rule that employees know that “part of your job is helping other people do their job.” The beauty of communicating this and building it into performance management is that it changes helping from being a chore to being a valued activity. For managers, part of their job is to manage not only their relationship with the employee, but the relationships between employees. This would ensure that isolates are brought into the fold, that individuals are talking, and that relational deficiencies are found and addressed sooner rather than later.
. . .
Doing the hard, patient work of putting structures and incentives in place will help convert a system characterized by an indifference to relationship-building into one that promotes it. It will generate focused and repeated inspection of relational dynamics across the organization by shaping how people work together, how they communicate, and, critically, how they are rewarded. When relationships are on employees’ radar, questions such as “How can I learn about another’s needs?”, “With whom do I need to repair trust?”, “Who is disconnected and what can I do to change this?”, and “Where can I most add value in a relationship?” become default considerations.
