While your promotion to manager places some distance between you and your former team members, it opens up an entirely new and potentially valuable network of peers in other front-line management roles. One of your early tasks as a manager is to begin cultivating relationships with your new peers. This article offers 6 ideas to help you break the ice and start a dialog with your fellow front-line managers.
6 Ideas to Help Build Relationships with Your Peers
1. Turn Right and Left and Look for Your Internal Customers and Suppliers
No function in an organization is an island including yours. Some groups supply you with resources, information, or physical products. You do the same for others. A great starting point is to seek out the supervisors or managers of these customer and supplier groups and ask them what you and your team can do to better support their efforts. Bring the ideas back to your group and put them into action. Plan follow-up sessions to gauge how well the improvements are working and begin identifying additional opportunities for cross-group collaboration.
2. Invite Other Managers to Join Your Operations Meetings
Every manager appreciates the opportunity to share what her team is doing and how they are innovating or striving to change. Invite a fellow manager to share an update at your periodic operations meetings. The manager gains the opportunity to educate another group and your team members gain insights into the workings of other teams in the organization. Ideally, your peers will reciprocate the offer and invite you to do the same in one of their sessions. Take advantage of these invitations—they offer great opportunities to you’re your visibility across the organization.
3. Seize the Power of Reciprocity by Offering Help First
Reciprocity—I help you/you help me, is a powerful tool in human interactions. Strive to be the first in your new relationships to provide help or support for the initiatives of your team members. When it’s your day, your initial support will be remembered and rewarded with their support. And yes, you will need their help at some point.
One of your early tasks as a manager is to begin cultivating relationships with your new peers. Click To Tweet4. Selectively Ask for Advice
Not everyone will jump through hoops to help you out, however, many of your peers on the front lines of your organization are close enough to their own first-time experience, that they will be happy to help. Be selective about the types of things you ask for, placing emphasis on seeking ideas to solve problems or navigate across functions. Questions that focus on how to get things done are more useful here than personnel or management questions. Reserve those for your boss.
5. Collaborate on Gray-Zone Problems
I describe gray zone problems as those issues that are visible annoyances or inconveniences that no one owns fixing. Often, these are process-focused issues, and with a bit of cross-group collaboration, new processes can be developed or old processes refined to improve the situation. When the work is successful, shine the spotlight liberally on your peer or her team members.
6. Teach your Team the Importance of Serving as Ambassadors
Enlist your team in building relationships across the organization. Instead of building walls or strengthening your firm’s silo mentality, teach and hold your team members accountable for building bridges and cultivating relationships. Treat your customers like…customers and strive to delight them with your services. Your team members will model their behaviors based on your example, so make sure your do matches your tell when it comes to relationship building.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Building strong relationships with your peers is smart management. Ultimately, your success will be a function of your ability to bring the right resources to bear to solve ever-larger problems. The peer relationship you initiate today may very well be the critical ally you draw upon tomorrow. Oh, and in some cases for fast-track managers, today’s peers become tomorrow’s employees. It pays to start the relationship building today.
—
Leave A Comment