People Skills Are Key For Outstanding Performance & Success

Stacy was promoted to Director of Strategy and Marketing and has been reporting to the CEO, Joe, for the last six months. The two executives have many complementary interests, skills, experience and concerns.

They also work in very different ways.

Performing doesn't mean the same thing for Stacy as it does for Joe. After six months, Joe is having a hard time working with Stacy, especially when discussing strategic issues, and he is not happy with the way she is delivering. Everything Stacy does is wrong. Joe decides to fire her.

This happened fast. But it wasn't handled well, and could cause problems for Stacy, for Joe, and for the company.

Stacy had tried to do her best and had received a lot of support; being terminated was unexpected and a shock. Having this on her record could create barriers to employment and harm her career.

For Joe, it weakened his leadership position. His teams felt that he made the wrong choice when he should have been able to avoid the situation in the first place, and he disrupted their workplace with the termination.

The company suffered from wasted time, lost productivity, and wasted money: Three months delay on the project, one month of on-boarding, four months of coaching. The effect on the motivation, engagement and performance of Stacy's team and others was disastrous.

It's Harder Than Ever to Get—and Keep—the Right People

Better understanding the chemistry of how people perform in teams is increasingly important every day.

When not satisfied with their relationship, people and companies can and do choose to go their separate ways. It is even more tempting today with digital options like online resumes and social media. Everyone can potentially access better jobs faster. Thanks to new sourcing techniques, companies and their leaders have more options to easily reach out to new talent.

With the advent of Glassdoor and other websites that review what's going on inside companies, levels of employee engagement and retention are visible to everyone. Dissatisfaction can no longer be hidden, and this leaves companies with no choice but to handle employee relations in a much more refined way than, let's say, a decade ago.

And as we observe in a high-pressure environment such as Silicon Valley, people issues must be handled with care even at high speed. Better awareness of individual employee satisfaction and development enhances an organization's capability to perform effectively and grow faster. Smart companies and leaders understand that lavish benefits and high salaries are not the only way to motivate. They realized that if they don't apply other methods to retain employees, their company can develop a bad reputation, dissuading other talent from joining the firm.

Improving Relationships

The story of Stacy and Joe, along with the above observations, lead to the follow questions:

• How can the relationship between people be more efficiently handled?
• How can it be a more fulfilling journey, before, during and after the contractual relationship - through the engagement, retention, motivation and separation processes?

Look at these questions from the perspective of personal relationships - think marriage, partnering, engaging or dating. Much understanding is needed to handle those relationships with care. And as we all know from our own experiences, it may take years for a parent to better understand his or her child, for anyone to know his parents, siblings, spouse or partner. It even takes a life for someone to really understand who he or she is, what drives and motivates him or her.

It is no surprise, then, that building an efficient working relationship is also challenging, like it was for Joe and Stacy.

Particularly when dealing with strong internal and external pressure, one cannot possibly maintain a productive and rewarding work relationship through good and bad times without actively developing a deeper understanding of his or her own behaviors and the behavior of teammates.

Developing the People Skills of Your Leaders

Situations like Joe and Stacy's can be avoided.

Often the leader must take the initiative for the relationship to be better handled. The leader needs to make sure that new team members are properly recruited and on-boarded, that the teams are properly engaged and that all their members are working together efficiently.

Even in turnaround and conflict situations, the communication between employers and employees can be better mastered.

As a GRI user puts it: "Getting the team dynamic right at the front end is one of the critical success factors to the outcome of the effort. It's actually one of the things that's hardest to do for managers because it requires a level of intuitive understanding that, honestly, can take years to amass if you're just working with people on a day-to-day basis. So getting that right early is honestly one of the biggest challenges that successful companies get right early..."

It's Worth the Effort

The people skills of leaders are at the heart of great relationships. These skills are certainly the hardest skills to develop in a highly pressurized business environment, and take the longest. But it's important for leaders to develop them quickly, and with much refinement.

For Joe and Stacy, it's too late.

But all is not lost. Joe can do better when he chooses Stacy's replacement, and he can improve the relationships with his current staff to regain his lost leadership credibility. Going forward, if Joe works with a program like the GRI, he can salvage his relationships and come out stronger and more effective, and he can do it much faster than through his own trial-and-error experiences.

In our modern, ultra-connected, fast-paced and continually changing world, the relationships leaders and managers build with employees will be an important strategy for success.