How Good Relationships in the Workplace Help Build Resilience

Are you sitting comfortably? Welcome to my series of podcasts that will help you to navigate the issues that you’ll inevitably come up against as a business owner. Today I want to talk about how good relationships improve resilience and your chances of success. 

If you’ve listened to the other podcasts in this series, you’ll know that there are a number of things that contribute to and build resilience.  

There’s good physical health, emotional intelligence and self-awareness, and as well as that, another important thing that can impact our resilience; the state of our relationships.  

This includes personal and working relationships, and both are a source of support and strength if they are healthy. If we have good relationships with the people around us, we’ll be more resilient, because we’ll feel supported and we’ll feel like we have the strength to both cope with, and overcome problems and challenges.  

So let’s look at personal relationships first.

If you’re a business owner, the main gripe that your partner, family, and friends will probably have is that they don’t see enough of you. You work all the hours God sends, then you miss putting the kids to bed, you don’t spend quality time with your partner or see your friends, and as much as you love your job, you feel resentful that you don’t have much of a life outside of work at times.

So what do you do?

Having no time to do the things you love or to spend with the people you love probably isn’t on your list of reasons you started working for yourself.  

One of the best things you can do to regain some work-life balance is to learn how to delegate. If your inner control freak is shuddering at the thought, just think for a moment about how you spend your days.

Do you spend it on onerous unimportant tasks that aren’t growing your business?

If that sounds like you, you need to learn to delegate, or you will never have a successful business that you can eventually step back from.  

Have you created a business that can’t run without you?

If so, don’t worry. All you need to do is learn how to trust your employees to complete tasks to standard even when you’re not there. I know it’s not easy, but if employees don’t feel that you can trust them, how will you ever have a good relationship with them?

If you don’t have a good relationship with them, they won’t be engaged or motivated to work hard and do well, and you won’t be able to step away and leave things in their hands. It’s a vicious cycle.  

So if you’re a self-confessed micromanager who believes that nobody but you can run the show, how can you learn to trust your team to take the reins? Well, you just trust them and show them that you do.  

Workplaces, where there’s a lot of mistrust and conflict, are not happy and productive workplaces, so if you want the freedom that comes with being your own boss, you have to take steps to change things. Here’s how: 

Start by trusting people to do the right thing.

Don’t assume that your employees are inherently lazy or incapable. Show them that you believe in them, and you’ll be rewarded with motivated people who want to do the job right.  

Be the manager who understands that sometimes people make mistakes, but it doesn’t mean that they aren’t capable or they never will be.  

The next thing is to make your employees feel empowered. Do you want a capable, hard-working team who don’t have to come to you with every little problem? The way to do that is to encourage them to use their initiative and give them some responsibility.

When people have control of their work and responsibility for something bigger than themselves, they’re likely to be far more engaged in doing the job well and getting a good result.  

Delegation is the thing that pulls everything together.

It’s about trusting your team and empowering them by giving them tasks to do, without you going into micromanager mode and looking over their shoulder or suggesting how something could be done better.

Once you show them that you trust them to succeed, independent of you, this lays the groundwork for you being able to take a step back from the business, sooner rather than later.  

But just handing out tasks to your team isn’t enough.

You have to delegate effectively, which means delegating the right things to the right people and making sure you take the time to give clear instructions and explain exactly what your expectations are.

You might also need to provide some further instructions or explanation about specifics, but this is time well spent; it’s an investment in your employees’ future and it’s an investment in your future.

A future where you have less hassle, where you get to spend more time doing what you love, and more time away from work with the people you love.  

Delegating tasks might not be completely seamless at first.

There might be some teething problems, and this should be expected.

But if you take the time to choose the person you want to delegate to carefully, and you delegate the right tasks,

it should be smooth sailing the next time you delegate, and the time after that, until before you know it, you’ve finally created a business that can run without you-isn’t that the dream? 

Want more help in building your resilience then book an exploratory call now.

Read more about building resilience here.

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