By Chad Cook, Chief Catalyst, Cook Consulting LLC
To keep your job you must perform. Bottom line. No way around it. The trick is how well you get along. We call this skill “interpersonal style versatility”. Being flexible is the key to maximizing your relationship productivity!
To achieve maximum productivity, you must understand the task and be comfortable with people.
Understand the task. You have a fifty-fifty chance of really understanding your task in any given situation, based on my experience. Too often leaders do not fully explain what they expect. Task clarity provides the information required to be focused on achieving specific goals, within parameters of time, budget and resources or tools that culminate in an outcome.
Too often leaders do not give clear expectations so people doing the work are confused or not clear about the outcome expected. This comes from vague goals and little understanding of the boundaries. This is common but avoidable.
Shame on the leader who does not deliver clear, concise, easy to understand goals! It only causes problems with relationships. The leader inevitably thinks the person with the assignment is doing a bad job while the person doing the assignment just floats along confused and frustrated. This situation does not lead to good productivity, only frustration and exasperation.
Relationship comfort. When people do not work well together or are not in harmony, they get distracted from the job at hand because of the dissonance in their relationship. This comes from:
- Judging each other, measuring if the other person is doing something right or wrong
- Feelings of superiority or power imbalances
- Not agreeing on the confused or vague task components
- Not honoring or valuing the others ideas, input, involvement
Whatever the reason for the interpersonal strife, it detracts and discourages maximum performance.
Balancing these task clarity and relationships can be a challenge. Try getting clarity on the tasks first. It makes it easier to create harmony by building on a common understanding of expectations. Task clarity will help build consistency of behaviors that are applied to the work and reduce relationship tension.
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