It isn’t unusual to leave work exhausted.
The demands on leaders – pressure for performance, budget constraints, meeting after meeting, workforce issues and conflicts, ever-expanding expectations, burdensome reporting requirements, and tiresome organizational dysfunctions mixed with constant change – all take their daily toll. It’s easy to understand why many leaders feel overwhelmed and unable to perform at their peak.
At the end of the day, they’ve done their best, but many must doubt if their efforts really made much of a difference?
There is a solution though – not that you still won’t go home tired – but that you can leave work with the satisfaction of knowing the work you put in has strengthened your work group and made it more capable and able to succeed.
What’s this solution?
The solution is a daily attention to relationships.
Relationships are leading indicators of performance. People’s efforts are highly dependent on the relationship they have with their work, with their co-workers, with their boss. When you regularly stitch the human fabric of the organization, you create a dynamic (positive) tension much like an isometric exercise strengthens a muscle little-by-little. If you neglect this, because you’re too busy, or distracted, or you just think it’s a waste of time, organizational atrophy sets in.
So you don’t neglect it. You focus on relationships every day.
You look for ways to improve your knowledge of people. Who they are? What’s important to them? What opinions they have? How they can be helped, or encouraged, or motivated? You listen. You engage. You enjoy every opportunity to increase your understanding, appreciation, and personal connections with them.
Communicating your interest in others communicates strong leadership.
And that’s why, no matter how exhausted you are, you can go home assured your organization is stronger at the end of the day.
– Jerry Strom
Twitter: @JerryRStrom. For more information about our leadership and team development programs, please visit http://www.JerryStrom.com . Join the mailing list to receive new articles as they are published. This article is based on research conducted for the *‘The Relationships Report: The Linkage between Leadership and Relationships,’ by Jerry Strom & Company, Inc. Find ‘How Leaders Build Relationships at Work’ at http://www.jerrystrom.com/research/js_relationships.html short insights on Twitter at #RelationshipsRPT