Chapter 5. Managing Relationships with Your Subordinates, Bosses, and Peers
Chapter Objectives
This chapter will help you:
Understand how managing your relationships with your subordinates, bosses, and peers influences your effectiveness, career success, and well-being
Understand how authority dynamics influence your relationship with your boss and subordinates
Develop skills for managing your relationships with your subordinates, bosses, and peers
Develop mentoring and networking skills
Understand the role of impression management in everyday work life
Business, after all, is nothing more than a bunch of human relationships.
—LEE IACOCCA, FORMER CHAIRMAN OF CHRYSLER
Decades of research on organizational effectiveness have led to the same conclusion: The quality of your relationships with bosses, subordinates, and peers has a significant impact on your work effectiveness, career success (in terms of number of promotions, salary increases, and job satisfaction), and personal well-being. For example, research suggests that:
Social skills are a stronger predictor of executive success than are technical skills, and the need for social skills increases as one moves higher in the organizational hierarchy.[1]
Employees' commitment to their supervisors is a stronger predictor of their productivity than is their commitment to their organization.[2]
Employees in “high-quality, trusting relationships with managers” are likely to receive higher performance ratings than those who are not in such relationships.[3]
People who are willing and able to perceive other people's needs and adapt their behavior in response to other people's needs (a skill known as self-monitoring) tend to get promoted more, receive higher salaries, and have more mentors than do those who don't do so.[4]
People who have a strong network of relationships tend to live happier, healthier, and longer lives.[5]
Undoubtedly, investing in relationships with your subordinates, bosses, and peers is one of the most important things that you can do for yourself, others, and the organization. Indeed, if you are a manager, it's your job to manage your relationships consciously and systematically. After all, the manager's job is to get work done with and through others. But it's not only managers who benefit from building high-quality relationships. For example, research suggests that technical professionals who have strong networks tend to receive higher salaries than do technical employees who don't have strong networks.[6] This is not surprising because today's problems are too complex for even the smartest person to solve alone, and most jobs are designed to be interdependent with others. Unfortunately, many of us get so busy with the technical details of our day-to-day tasks that we don't invest enough time to build relationships with others who can help us become more effective.
At the end of the day you bet on people, not strategies.
—Larry Bossidy, CEO, Allied Signal
In this chapter, we will focus on developing high-quality relationships with your subordinates, bosses, and peers. Regardless of whether you are managing up, down, or sideways, remember the following two assumptions about human relationships:
High-quality relationships are built on trust, respect, and reciprocity.
We are all fallible human beings who depend on each other for our professional effectiveness, career success, and personal well-being.[7]
With these assumptions in mind, we will move onto the rest of this chapter. We will first focus on how we develop our attitudes toward boss-subordinate relationships and the consequences of these attitudes on our effectiveness. We will then focus on strategies for managing your relationships with your subordinates and bosses. We will then look at three skills that are useful regardless of whether we are managing up, down, or sideways: mentoring, networking, and impression management.