Results Through Relationships: Building Trust, Performance, and Profit Through People

Chapter 7. Get to Know the Complete Person

Do you know that your boss intends to move to the country and open a bed-and-breakfast when he retires in ten years? Are you aware that your customer is a serious student of Yoga and meditates every evening ?

It is frighteningly common how much we don't know about personal passions and the things that really make people tick, yet we spend more hours with many of them than with our own families. We also don't know much about our coworkers' career hopes and dreams or their failures and frustrations. Often, we only know the bare minimum necessary to work together effectively. Sure we might chit-chat about nonwork activities—a professional football game, a movie, a child's accomplishment. But we consider this nonessential information. It doesn't contribute to making us or them more productive or effective at work.

Or does it? The reality is that if you keep your relationships on strictly professional footing, you limit their potential. If there isn't a mutual exchange not only of personal information but feelings about things personal and professional, you can limit the results the relationship produces. A bond of trust and understanding will be missing from the relationship—a bond that motivates people to do more for relationship partners than they would do for anyone else.

Getting to know the complete person is not something you can achieve in one meeting or one week. You don't want to be a creepy stalker and say, "Janice, we've been working ...