Build Authentic Relationships

Essential Cultivation Tools: Rakes, Hoes, Plows and imapMyTeam

Today, more than ever, achieving success in business requires collaboration and the ability to achieve not only personal goals, but ones held in common.  Establishing authentic relationships at work is a key ingredient to encouraging others to willingly collaborate in good times and perhaps more importantly when there’s much at stake and the going gets tough.

Before you can set out to build effective, authentic relationships with others, it’s important to have an accurate and authentic picture of yourself. Having an accurate and authentic understanding of yourself is powerful in that it gives you the ability to choose how you will behave towards or respond to others. It gives you the power to manage yourself; in the best interests of important relationships or the best interest of the project. 

Virtually all of the reports in imapMyTeam.com® will help you understand yourself [and others] better. Reading your own reports and reports about others is incredibly useful. Yet there is one additional step that you may not be taking full advantage of; a conversation.

The imapMyTeam.com® reports are also designed to be conversational.  If you work with someone quite a bit, take a couple of minutes over a cup of coffee, or lunch – whenever you can carve out the time- to print the reports and talk about them. Share your thoughts, expand on the language. Capture important insights from your discussion and record them in the notes section of your personal imapMyTeam page next time you login.

Authentic relationships don’t just happen, they require intentional cultivation. 

Angst for the Memories

Our title is a play on the name of Bob Hope’s signature tune- ‘Thanks for the Memories’ – which he always sang to close out his act. The lyrics tell a story of two people’s interconnected lives with one favorably reminiscing over the great times they had together.

Have you thought about how your coworkers will remember you? Will they be inclined to ‘thank you’ for the memories of working together or might it be ‘angst’?

People that we interact with experience us in one of two ways; when we are at our best, through our usual behavior or when we are less than our best, through our stress behavior.

Our usual behavior is the source of our strengths and is also adaptable so we can manage ourselves to be more effective with others. Our stress behavior is our frustrated behavior and is a transformation from under control productive behavior to out of control counterproductive behavior. Our teammates and colleagues typically do not care for us much when we are this way.

While it may be obvious, if we operate from our stress mode much of the time, we can create angst for others. It’s also true that if we inappropriately or over-use our strengths we may inadvertently cause angst to others.

You can use the grid based strengths and stress points found in your “Team Player” report at www.imapMyTeam to point out the differences. The grid will provide insight on how to effectively use your strengths as well as ways to mitigate the impact of your stress behavior.


Armed with self-awareness of your stress behaviors and the discipline to effectively use your strengths, you’ll not only be productive but likely ensure others will remember you with “thanks” rather than “angst.”

Change itself doesn’t cause stress…what stresses me is HOW the change affects ME

You may not be able to control the changes coming your way, but you can learn to respond in a way that minimizes the stress that threatens your productivity.

At the risk of oversimplification, how change personally impacts us is fairly predictable. When change is aligned with our own internal motivational needs we embrace it quickly and effortlessly. In these cases the change does not seem to be too ‘big’, ‘radical’ or threatening - we adjust to it fairly easily.

However when the change is not aligned with our motivational needs the change, no matter how ‘small’ or ‘simple’ will cause us to take immediate notice. That change has now fundamentally disrupted the conditions that contribute to our success and we may react adversely and be on the cusp of, if not fully engaged in, unproductive behaviors.

If the changes push us too far from our motivational need our poor reaction to the change may heighten to the point it will impede our ability to succeed. In other words we have exceeded the ‘optimum’ level of stress and rather than engaged and challenged we’re stressed!

In the pull down menu in the center section of www.imapmyteam.com® we’ve added a new report titled “ When Change Stresses You”. This report will help you understand how change that disrupts a basic motivational need may trigger a stress reaction from you. The report also includes a prescriptive tip that will help you neutralize that stress reaction.


Change in the workplace is unavoidable; through understanding and use of the When Change Stresses You report, change that disrupts your performance is.

Planning for Success = (R+B) +(Y+G)

Defining success is an important first step in understanding what it might take to get there. Once you’ve spent some time getting clarity around what success looks like for you, your team, your program, it’s time for a plan.

It is always good to understand how each member of your team contributes to the planning process. To understand your team, please run the Team Dynamics Report and refer to the strengths page.

The opposite quadrants bring the greatest difference to the planning process. They tend to look at the situation very differently and their strengths, while contrasting, are complimentary.

Let’s look at how the Red-Blue strengths can complement each other:

The red quadrant brings speed to the process. A red plan is all about being decisive and moving decisions to action quickly. The emphasis of people in this quadrant is on the tasks that make up the plan.

The blue quadrant brings direction to the process. A blue plans by taking time to think through complexity, and making sure we are confident in our direction before we begin to take action. Their emphasis is on the impact and consequences of the plan.

Let’s look at how the Yellow-Green opposite strengths can complement each other:

The green quadrant brings flexibility and conviction to the process. A green plan may focus on being responsive and changing quickly to meet shifting business circumstances and being assertive in doing so. Their emphasis is on flexibility in managing key relationships.

The yellow quadrant brings focus and accountability to the process. A Yellow plan is about staying the course with the process and established plans, giving them time to work. The emphasis of people in the yellow quadrant is on the details that lead to a successful implementation of the plan.

As you consider your goals or how you can best contribute to an established strategy, looking to your proven strengths is a great way to get a solid start in arriving at your final destination. Even better, is to understand how each member of your team contributes to the plan and then use those strengths.

Go to www.imapmyteam.com ® for a guide to using the strengths of each of the quadrants to help you develop your well-rounded implementation plan.

Standing In? – Then Stand Out!

The businesses that get ahead are the ones that who get things done.

 

In order to get things done as a team, you have to all be on the same page and heading in the same direction. And to be on the same page you need open and consistent communication – so what happens when there is a schedule conflict and competing meetings are tugging at key participants?

You get asked to sit-in for someone at the meeting! When is the last time you have been asked to stand in for your boss at an important meeting or series of meetings?  Are you prepared – not just with proper content - but knowledge of key behavioral traits for all the participants?

Perhaps you have just been assigned a new role that will require you to meet with others in the organization you really don’t know very well.  Maybe you are currently participating in a meeting where after a meeting or two you just do not feel like you are ‘clicking’ with one or two others as well as you’d like.

www.imapMyTeam.com allows you to customize your home page by adding groups to your “My Meetings” space.  Simply click on the “create meeting” link to get started by naming and describing your meeting. Once you’ve labeled your new meeting, you have the option to go ahead and “create the meeting” or “create and add members” in one step.  When you “create and add members” a pull down window appears with names you can highlight and select to add to your meeting.  As participants are added or fall off of your meeting roster you can edit imapMyTeam accordingly.

With imapMyTeam at your fingertips, you have the ability to participate in unfamiliar meeting territory with confidence.