Working at relationships

From your earliest days as a leader, you will need to build relationships with your team and a range of stakeholders throughout the organization. The ability to understand and influence people is a key skill, and thinking of relationships in terms of “stories” gives you some tools to analyze and control your interactions.

Telling stories

We each carry in our heads our own stories—the narratives we have constructed over the years to make sense of our collected experiences, emotions, habits, and thoughts. These stories bias our perspective in all new situations and may push us toward embracing the future or—conversely—constrain our actions. Relationships are built by exchanging
these stories with other people we meet. As we tell our stories, we disclose more about ourselves, our backgrounds, roles, and beliefs—and create new, emergent stories. Just as individuals have their own stories, so do organizations; these stories encompass the history and values of that organization and describe how they get things done.

Relationships are built by exchanging stories. Just as individuals have their own stories, so do organizations

Listening to stories

By listening analytically to a person’s story, you may be able to understand why they want to work with you and what their motivations are likely to be. Stories also point to ways of negotiating successfully with individuals or companies, and even indicate whether a joint venture may succeed. Leaders who fail to take full account of a person’s or an organization’s past thoughts, culture, actions, and aspirations—as well as what they observe in the present moment—can find themselves facing a culture clash they had not anticipated.

• Do the stories convey a strong moral code, judgments, or beliefs?
• Do the stories place the individual in a particular role—hero, participant, or victim, for example?
• Do the stories make or break connections between things?
• Are the stories mostly set in the past, present, or future?
• Do the stories claim particular skills for the individual?
• Do the stories express themselves in protective jargon?

LISTEN TO THE SUBTEXT

Listen for recurrent patterns in peoples’ stories. What do they tell you about the way they relate to others, their modes of thinking, biases, and barriers?

---

Case study

MERGING CULTURES

A merger between an international company (A) and a smaller, but dynamic national company (B) was jeopardized when rumors emerged that the merger would be accompanied by redundancies in B. The directors of both companies