J: Welcome to Slingshot25’s Shotcast, a series of bite-sized podcasts that will feel like an espresso shot to your brain. I’m Jackie.
C: And I’m Courtney.
J: Something we’re thinking about and talking about and thinking about again. And then talking some more is relationships.
C: Are you sure?
J: Yes. Specifically, we’ve been talking about a book by Mike Irwin, Michael Irwin, I don’t know him. I don’t know if I can call him that.
C: Let’s just call him Michael and see if he wants to call into our podcast and correct us.
J: Called leadership is a relationship and we want to just sort of take that concept which he wrote an amazing book about and you should go read that. But we just want to talk about our experience with that and sort of, put our two cents in.
C: In a good book. When you’re listening, like I was in the podcast version of it on Brene Brown I loved it already because he was talking about things we talked about and they were saying things that we say I teach about relationships all the time in the change management classes because I think it is the most expensive thing that gets impacted when we change things. We do organizational structure changes. Well, they’re all organizations such we take teams and we blend them together, we give him a new boss. We take this team and take half of it, have it report someone else, and at the heart of those teams are people who know each other and trust each other and work together and we tear them apart.
And I leave a person not knowing who to call, not knowing if they know the answer to my question, not knowing If they’re even going to pick up the phone, if I call. Like, who is Jackie Pelland? Well, everyone knows Jackie Pelland, But let’s pick someone else, right? And so it’s just, it’s so
We lose so much productivity with our org structure changes. And it’s because of the relationship. Like, we’ll worry about the tools and we talked about the processes, but at the end of the day, our relationships are what make things work, and they’re invisible.
Our leaders make all these changes and restructure things and don’t even understand what it’s really costing. And I think that’s why this leadership is a relationship book is so important.
It reinforces a lot of what we think and talk about in our class, I say a lot, like it takes a long time to grow an old friend. When you think about the most productive relationships, you have at work. It’s cuz, you know, the people and they know you and that is insanely valuable to companies and leaders don’t quite get that.
What happens, right? We restructure, we tear apart the relationship. We spend, like, 6-12 months with the team in the new structure. It’s not working because we tore apart the relationships and didn’t know it. And then the answer is to restructure it again, because it’s obviously not working. Let’s take different parts and so whatever relationship started to grow back. Get torn apart again, and again. And again. What are your thoughts on that Jack?
J: I’m thinking that it’s impossible to have a dynamic and growing organization without, without some of that restructuring. And so, I don’t think we’re here saying, oh my goodness, everyone just put a freeze on the growth and, and, you know, dynamics that are needed to stay relevant and to keep, you know, producing in and serving your customers. No one is saying that the new what we’re saying. Just put a really fine point on. It is knowing what you’re doing when you do that and help people to do the kinds of things that are needed in the aftermath to rebuild those things.
C: And so do it intentionally.
J: That’s right. So this means leaders, we’re looking at you again, and which is why we’ve of course focused on l a lot here at Slingshot25. And leaders, I have kind of an odd bit of advice for you. We all know that relationships are built on trust. That’s what grows inside relationships.
What makes them so good is that we get to know each other. And now we have sort of a true organic form of trust with each other and those… trust doesn’t immediately happen in a new relationship where you just meet someone You know, it’s having the question of what to do. I trust them as kind of a silly question to ask at that moment. So, my sort of upside down bit advice to you is when you don’t have trust with someone for, you know, one of those reasons like, you know, new relationships being put together, you know, due to restructures or new hires or whatever it may be. It’s just act like you do trust them. I mean as in kind of a performative way just. The opposite is never going to work. Like to withhold trust from that relationship is guaranteed not to grow trust. It’s not you know we got to get out of the old big boss advice if I got to earn their stripes and they got to earn my trust.
It doesn’t really work, it just doesn’t really work. A faster and better way to deepen a relationship and build trust is to act like you do. Meaning how do you treat people that you trust? Treat them that way. That’s what I’m talkin about here and then Step 2 of course is and then get busy nurturing that relationship so that trust can grow. But, you know, don’t you have to start by just the going in premise that I’m going to treat them like I trust them. So I think that is probably one of the biggest things that as these dynamics happen because of markets and in all kinds of external pressures that happen for companies. We know that some of these you know some of these changes have to be made really intentional understand what you’re doing, dial it down to the degree that you can and not make so many, you know, damaging sort of tearing relationships apart in your organization because we’re going to say we’re not robots, we are not. you can’t just factor that in. Like you can just reprogram people, it doesn’t work that way. We are social animals and it’s much more an art than anything else. So dial it down.
If you can but where you have to make those changes, just do it intentionally and teach particularly your leaders. Teach them what it takes to nurture and grow those relationships as fast as you can.
C: Yah, one quick easy thing, you can do right now is just taking inventory. Like, just take a journal and ask yourself like, who are the five or ten people that I work with a lot? Ask like ask yourself. Do I have a relationship with this person? What is the quality of it? And we’re within my circle of people that I need to get work done. Do I need to grow that relationship? Do I need to build some trust and then ask great questions. What can I do to do that, right? Cuz now you can actually invest some time in regrowing those connections in creating something that’s more productive and more healthy and that’s actually a lot more fun cuz it’s actually fun to work with people that, you know, in like and Trust.
J: Who knew? That’s all we have for this episode of our Shotcast but we always have much more to say.So if you want more drop us a line at Slingshot25.com. Until next time…