Relationships? ‘Sorry, Gotta Have ’Em to Get Stuff Done’

HR Isn’t About Compliance

We spend a lot of energy worrying about regulations and compliance, says Schooling, but that’s not HR. We professionals in HR:

• Pay attention to changing conditions, constantly scanning the environment.
• Explore and stay tuned in to human dynamics.
• Understand theories of motivation like push/pull and Maslow.
• Are empathetic and tuned in to where others are coming from.
• Understand cause and effect: If we do this, we’ll get that.
• Analyze why stuff happened.
• Build trust earned by promising and delivering.

It’s a critical time in business, says Schooling. We’ve lost people and changed work styles, and one of the results is that there’s more project-type work. And that requires relationships with teams both inside and outside the organization.

It’s HR’s job to help build strong, cross-functional work teams across silos. You have to teach your teams the basics:

• Define expected results.
• Clarify the scope of the project.
• Specify the deliverables.
• Determine dates and deadlines.
• Develop checkpoints when the project owner, perhaps at the VP level, reviews monthly or quarterly goals.
• Regularly communicate between team members and outside the team.
• Provide resources and tools, especially new technology resources for meetings and other communication.
• Let your team decide how to work together. Let team members suggest how and when to meet and/or to communicate.
• Test the mechanism for reporting.
• Provide learning opportunities for team members on how to lead, how to facilitate, and how to be a team member.
• Verify understanding of all the above (deliverables and deadlines, etc.) with all the team members.
• Secure commitment from team members.
• Celebrate the team’s accomplishments and meeting milestones.

If your team does well, you may want to consider expanding the scope of the project or extending it in some other way. With some of her clients, Schooling says, when a team does a particularly good job on one project, the client has elected to keep the team intact and recharter it for a new project. This works even if the team members would never have been selected for the second project without having demonstrated how well they work together.

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Team Members Support Each Other

What makes teams successful, Schooling asks. Is it stability? Staffing? Vision? Meaningfulness? Rewards? Recognition?

Studies have shown, says Schooling, that the single, strongest predictor of group effectiveness is the degree to which team members support each other. She offers the Giver-Taker-Matcher approach for discussing supportive cultures.

Taker Culture

Taker cultures do not make for good teams. The taker culture is an environment where team members:

• Get as much as they can from others while contributing less in return.
• Help others only when their expected benefits will exceed their “costs.”

Matcher Culture

This is the most prevalent culture, Schooling says. Employees help those who help them. Employees trade in closed loops. This results in inefficient exchanges because people don’t necessarily go the right person; they go to the person with whom they like to deal.

Giver Culture

The giver culture tends to make teams successful. Team members in these teams:

• Make connections without expecting anything in return.
• Help each other.
• Share willingly and often.
• Offer mentoring.

A giver culture can make sense of cross-silo data; a taker culture cannot, Schooling says.

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Seek First to Understand

Get over the fact that people have to love you, says Schooling. And don’t approach people with, “Here’s what we are doing for you.” Instead, follow Stephen Covey, she says. “Seek first to understand” (one of Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people). What is on the other person’s plate? Once you know that, you can come in as a partner.

In tomorrow’s Advisor, how to build a relationship with that “tough nut to crack” plus an introduction to the guide especially directed toward the small or even one-person HR department.