Relationships in our office or at home can be a source of consummate happiness or unending pain. They can release stress or create it. Some people have an uncanny ability to develop relationships effortlessly while others wallow in uncomfortable loneliness.
Our competence of building and maintaining relationships is a prediction of our being labeled as “Mr. Popular” or “Ms. Lonesome” or “Mr. Irritation” at the workplace.
This competence of dealing with relationships, we tend to develop on our own.
In order to succeed or build a happy life, we have to build working and successful relationships within our family, our relatives, our team members, our superiors, our neighbors, our peers as well as the requisite Government departments with which we are forced to interact.
Quite a huge agenda for building relationships!
In case we fail in this delicate balancing process, the resultant feelings are those of “walking on broken glass”.
In spite of having such an important agenda for the application of this competence, there is no conscious effort to develop it either in the schooling or the professional development systems, we have.
When I examine, my own experience and that of othersaround me, I only see learning through “trial and error”.
Though this system of learning works, it is very costly.
The invariable blunders that we commit, tend to haunt us for a long time. They leave deep emotional scars. The most resilient among us, recover while others wallow in failure.
An engineer in a textile company, wanted to get cooperation from workers. He developed a tendency to say to the worker, “Here, take this money, go and do that work”. Such an approach is bound to fail.
The workers are going to invariably make fun of him, behind his back, though they would be extremely willing to take the money from him. Additionally, that would be the only way to make them work subsequently.
How can we avoid such failures?
This guy has successfully completed a professional course in engineering but he does not have the competency to extract work from a worker. He is going to go through a lot of pain before the competence is going to develop.
Managing our relationships is one of the key challenges that we face. If we fail in this endeavor, we invariably lead frustrated and painful lives.
Let’s take another case which is based on reading body language.
Michael came home one day and noticed that his wife was not speaking to him. She opened the door and moved to the kitchen from there he could hear the clings and clangs of utensils.
“Is something wrong?” Michael asked.
“No nothing is wrong”, said the wife.
Please tell me, what is wrong? Has something happened? Have I done something to upset you?
“No” says wife.
Then why are you so quiet? Please tell me what the matter is?
“You are late and you never call and inform that you are going to be late”. You think that I am not affected by these actions of yours.
Says Michael,” I’m sorry, I didn’t inform. Next time I’ll make sure that I do.”
“All right” says wife and smiles.
In this case Michael observed the body language of his wife and realized the presence of a covert issue.
If the covert issue is not surfaced, it will continue and may exacerbate. Thus surfacing of the data is critical .If it is not surfaced it cannot be resolved because one does not know what the matter is.
Guessing is a poor alternative. Thus asking searching questions is an important ingredient of the skill of active listening.
Let’s take up a case from the workplace. A new executive gave a report to his assistant to type. The assistant did not do the work for 1 week. The executive again reminded him to do the work. The assistant did not do it. Next time, when the executive asked him, the assistant said rudely, “I am not going to do it”.
On facing this flat out refusal, the executive lost his temper and started shouting at the assistant.
What was the result? The executive’s peers came to know about the incident. The executive’s manager rated him a “poor” in interpersonal relations. Though the incident passed and the
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