Spending Time With the Right People at Work?
Now that we’ve reached the middle of the year, it’s a good time to take a step back and assess how we are progressing. Usually, when we do this type of assessment, we look at progress against our business plan, project timelines or other priorities we’ve identified.
I suggest we all take a look at our key work relationships and assess how those are going. We all know that our work relationships are important for a wide variety of reasons. We also know that these relationships shift over time. Perhaps someone who it wasn’t important to have a good working relationship with in the past is now an important partner. Someone who we worked closely with in the past moved to a new role or division and we don’t really work together anymore. And sometimes, there are people we need to build relationships with but we don’t because they are difficult… or perhaps building a new relationship with them is outside of our comfort zone.
Assess the balance in your network of work relationships and ask:
- Who are you spending a great deal of time with?
- Why do you spend that much time with them – familiarity? The ease of the relationships? Because you need them to get work done? It could be a combination of reasons.
- Based on what you want to achieve, is that the right amount of time to be spending with them?
- Who are you spending less time with but should spend more because they are important to success?
- What needs to happen for you to be able to spend more time building the relationship? Do you need to spend less time on those relationships that are comfortable but not as important to the work? Do you need to force yourself out of your comfort zone?
- What’s your plan for building or expanding the relationships you need to work on? Set 2 or 3 goals for making the necessary changes to rebalance your relationships and put them into action now.
