Leaders must thoughtfully create conditions that will allow their employees to work to their best ability. One of these conditions is working relationships between employees on your team and between your employees and others in the organization. You can’t assume employees know how to interact with their peers across the business; you must provide clarity.

I find that these are the 3 most common relationships a leader needs to clarify with their team. Each one has a specific purpose, accountability, and authority. The goal is to provide clarity, so that each employee knows what work they’re accountable for and how that work supports the entire organization.

Most workplace issues arise because leaders fail to set the conditions for effective teamwork.

These role relationships help work flow effectively through a value stream. We covered the importance of clarity in last week’s newsletter, and the same concept applies to clarity on working relationships. Here’s an overview of how they each work.

Imagine a data analyst who gets a request for an updated report. She’s already in the middle of another task that won’t be done for another 2-3 hours. Should she stop the task to complete the data request? Does the stakeholder who requested the data need it urgently? What is the expectation for support? Is the data analyst held accountable for providing reports promptly? Does it make a difference who the requester is?

These are only a small sample of the questions going through our data analyst’s head when they see the new request pop up. Leaders set boundaries, which provide clarity and direction. Without this clarity and direction, employees are left to guess or overthink how they should respond. The data analyst’s leader could set an expectation of responses within 4 hours. They could also create a priority list of data requests. They could even go as far as creating an intake workflow for requests that ensures automations keep the process moving slowly. Leaders have to create boundaries so their employees can operate without becoming overwhelmed.

Another common issue that arises for leaders is inter-team conflict. This typically happens between positions of some power, like a team lead and another team member. Using the team lead relationship from the image above, you can set better expectations for the support a team lead can give, and how much support an employee should expect a team lead to give.

Your team leads can’t be supporting all day; they have to get work done, too. Your other employees want help, and they can easily get frustrated if they don’t understand how the team lead is supposed to support them. With clarity, these issues almost disappear. You’re dealing with people at the end of the day, so you’re always going to have conflict to manage. But you can reduce your headaches by providing clear working relationships that outline what your employees are accountable for in their daily interactions.

Until next time,

Rick

P.S. You can check this out if you want to measure how well your team works together. Measuring the current state is the best way to chart a course toward improvement.

P.P.S. These are just a few of the many relationships that exist in the workplace; feel free to reach out to me directly if you want to discuss an issue you have that doesn’t fit within these three. You can reply directly to this email!

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