Imagine this scene: a manager comes up with an idea, is in a hurry because he is going into a meeting and quickly tells a member of his team before rushing into the boardroom thinking he has communicated it effectively. Your colleague has been left completely cold. Nothing wrong if it didn’t fit a pattern of behaviour.
John Maxwell called it the law of connection and defines it as one of the 21 laws of leadership. When it comes to connecting with people, the heart comes before the head.
Leadership is relational and works more or less like this: at the base is a relationship or set of relationships, and the better it is nurtured, the better possibilities will be explored together that will lead to identifying joint actions that will achieve results. In addition to being relational, leadership is non-hierarchical, it is made up of pure influence. He leads who seeks the connection first.
Many leaders ignore this because they still live in the mental models of positional leadership: “I am the boss, they are my employees and they have to come and get me”. They either think that the connection must therefore be the responsibility of the followers or, driven by an executive eagerness to “make shortcuts”, they forget the above and go straight to actions. In either case, they work on very weak relational foundations, find little traction and perceive it as a lack of commitment from their teams.
“They don’t care what you know until they know what you care about,” Maxwell said.
We can add to this that relational models in organisations are more convivial and egalitarian, more dependent on the relationship itself. As Peter Drucker said, “the modern organisation is no longer one of “bosses” and “subordinates”, but is organised as “teams of associates”.
Connect first – how do we connect effectively?
First of all, you must show genuine interest in the person(s). All human beings are open to connect and are also quick to perceive manipulation. Following Maxwell, “it is one thing to communicate with someone because you have something valuable to say, and another thing to communicate because you believe the person is valuable to you”. We are designed to quickly spot the difference.
Also, people need individual attention, even when we are in groups. Do you know the birthday of the people in the team? Their family situation? What makes them laugh? Their aspirations, their strengths? How well do we really know each other? We only get to know things when they matter to us. If we don’t know them, it brings us back to the previous point, the need for genuine interest.
Finally, another important point is to go where the people are. Leaders develop a constant movement between “going up to the balcony” to understand the system or see emerging patterns, and “being on the dance floor” where they pick up the pace of professional activity. Well, we will always connect better from the dance floor. The balcony is not to communicate but to gain perspective. In order to communicate, we need to eliminate barriers of all kinds (spatial, cultural…) and it is common to be unaware of them. Organisations have wanted to give leaders “positional attributes of differentiation” that tend to disappear but that still exist and act as barriers. If we do not want to give them up, we make the connection more difficult.
And in that work of nurturing the relationship, when we have already allowed ourselves to be influenced by them, because we have a focus on them and not on us, the influence by which a person naturally accepts to be led by you will begin to work. The greater the challenge, the stronger the connection needs to be.
And you, what are you doing to connect with your collaborators?
