THE IMPORTANCE OF REALLY GETTING TO KNOW YOUR TEAM

If you’re stepping up from being part of the team into a leadership role, then there is every chance that you know your team quite well.  

As time progresses and team members come and go, you will have to get to know new team members. If you are promoted to lead a different team, either internally or externally, the same challenge will exist- to get to know people that you haven’t worked with previously. 

You may have embarked on this journey of getting to know other team members because of your personality, or because you’ve simply found yourself working alongside certain colleagues, and as a result you find out snippets of information about their work history and personal life.  

Once you step into a leadership role there is a need for you to have as high a trust relationship with as many team members as possible, and not just the ones that you worked closely with or that you ‘clicked with’. One of the key ways to build trust is showing a personal interest in every member of your team.  

Whereas before you may have existed as a very introverted team member who focused workplace conversations on workplace issues, in stepping up into a leadership role you’ll find it beneficial to enter into those conversations where you get to know team members at a deeper level in order to make “deposits into the relational bank account” that exists between the two of you. 

As an example of this, I remember delivering leadership training in a business many years ago. On day one, a senior manager instructed me that we would be taking the only table from the lunchroom and using it in the training room over the course of the day.  

At the time that the senior manager and myself were removing the table, the commercial manager queried us as to what we were doing. Regardless of the need for course participants to use a table throughout the day, he was very disgruntled by this decision and was openly vocal about it.  

As the saying goes “you only get one chance to make a first impression” and as a result of this first impression, this commercial manager was quite cold towards me for the first few months where I would come and deliver a day of leadership training per month.  

Over that time, I often encountered him on morning tea and lunch breaks and as is my normal practice with virtually anyone, I asked him questions to get to know him. As it turned out, this gentleman was an immigrant to New Zealand. I find it really easy to have conversations with immigrants because of fascinating backstories in terms of their home country’s culture and the cross-cultural experience that they have had migrating to New Zealand. Over time our relationship went from decidedly frosty, to the point where I would enter the reception area, and if he saw me, he would walk with me down to the lunchroom chatting away and would ask me if I needed help moving the table! It was a really rewarding shift in our relationship and it all boiled down to the simple practice of having a genuine interest in wanting to get to know people. 

Don’t underestimate the value of showing authentic interest in both the work lives, and the personal lives of your team members. If you are an introverted person who is very task-oriented, then this may seem like an inefficient use of time for you, but it’s another example of a short-term pain that will generate a great return on investment as a long-term gain.