Parents teach their kids how to get along with others, and they enable them to build meaningful relationships for the rest of their lives. But the education shouldn’t stop upon entering the workplace. There’s a big difference between getting along and forming strong relationships with your peers, and although leaders preach about positive work environments, do organizations care to develop the relationship building skills employees need to do important work? How can companies get at the “softer side” of organizational development and ensure their workers’ time there is meaningful?
Contributors

• • Michelle Reina, Co-Founder and CEO, Author, Reina Trust Building Institute
  • Warren Kudman, Former CIO, Sealed Air Corporation

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Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:26]:

Hello, and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com, and as always, we invite you to join the discussion on Twitter, hashtag CTR live and hashtag leadership. Today’s topic is Teaching Workplace Relationship Building, and our guests for today’s show are Warren Kudman, who’s the former vice president and CIO of Sealed Air Corporation. Morning, Warren. How are you?

Warren Kudman [00:00:51]:

Good morning. I’m doing great. Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:55]:

Great, and we also have Michelle Reina, who is an author and cofounder and CEO of Reyna Trust Building Institute. Good morning, Michelle. How are you?

Michelle Reina [00:01:02]:

Good morning, Sanjog Aul. I’m well and happy to be here with you and Warren.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:06]:

The honor is all ours. Now parents teach their kids how to get along with others. My mom and dad taught me that all along and how to be polite and know right from wrong, but then they grow up and get jobs, and we expect them to still know how to interact and make relationships that are meaningful, but often when you get into this workplace, it’s a different animal, and if we are really looking for great innovation and collaboration and we want best value out of our employees, are we really working to make sure that they get along and build true relationships versus just treating each other as a coworker? So we wanted to see if leaders are actually teaching these sort of skills, and the organization is fostering a DNA where such relationship building can be taught and also can be sustained. That said, Michelle, if you were to look at the genesis of this question is because there are certain issues that we find in the way organizations have their workers relating to each other. They say, okay. I’m gonna go and hang out with my friends after work, but the majority of the time, which is 8 to 10 hours every day, they are essentially working or hanging out with their coworkers, but the relationship is seen to be more meaningful with people outside of work versus within the workplace. Is this by design, or is this self-inflicted pain which is causing us harm?

Michelle Reina [00:02:33]:

It’s a great question. What I hear in the organizations that I work with, because this is smack dab in the middle of the kinds of things that I’m hearing people talk about in organizations every single day, and it’s a dichotomy. What people are experiencing is in the day to day, there’s so much focus on task and function and deliverables that they are missing the opportunity to really forge relationships and to connect with one another in more meaningful ways. So often that’s occurring outside of work, yet the frequency in which that occurs outside of work is declining because people just don’t have the time. Because there’s also this strong hunger and desire for life balance. So what people are really looking for, Sanjog Aul, is more holistic relationships and an opportunity to come to know and understand both who we are as people, who we are as human beings, in addition to what we know and what we do so that we are forging relationships in a way that’s helping us connect more deeply as human beings.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:50]:

Warren, when you have, kind of worked with the organizations and throughout your career, do you think people have this relationship deficiency that persists because, as Michelle already mentioned, we do not really have the time to rejuvenate ourselves to relate and have good relationships with people outside of work because we hardly go out in the first place, and then when you are at workplace, we somehow have developed this stigma that you cannot build good relationships at workplace. Perhaps people have been hurt badly when they attempted to do so. What have you seen percolating as a culture?

Warren Kudman [00:04:24]:

Yeah. I don’t know that people have been hurt by trying to build relationships, but I do agree that we typically don’t give it enough thought. I think building on what Michelle was saying that there is so much pressure in the day to day workplace that we’re focused on what we have to deliver, yet if we stop back and think about it, building strong relationships would actually help us deliver a better end product and potentially do it faster, and the lack of relationships is what can often get in our way or can lead to a solution that other stakeholders don’t find satisfactory because we didn’t have the strong relationships that we could have had, and had better collaboration through the process. So I think I don’t think that people are necessarily, as a whole, naturally deficient in their ability to build relationships, but I don’t think we invest enough in the time to do it, and we don’t coach our teams through that relationship building enough.

Michelle Reina [00:05:37]:

Sanjog Aul, can I jump in and piggyback off Warren for a moment?

Sanjog Aul [00:05:40]:

Sure.

Michelle Reina [00:05:41]:

I’d really like to comment that I so agree with the points that Warren is making. I don’t think people really get hurt in their efforts to build relationships. I think people are feeling more hurt by the absence of efforts to build relationships, and in the workplace, people have a strong desire to connect with one another as people, and through that connection, the floodgates open for creativity, for collaboration, for engaging in decision making, and just the kinds of results that are produced become exponential. What people are the most hurt by right now is the absence of attention to building relationships, the time dedicated to it, and the support in helping them to foster the kinds of relationships that people are really hungry for.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:43]:

Michelle, you make an important point here that they have the missing—there’s a gap there now. If people really want it, they would make time but if the workplace demands that they are doing other things besides actually consciously developing relationships, then there would have been an effort but the belief system either is missing or we are essentially saying this relationship building is a means to an end versus the end itself. If that’s the— is that the belief system that percolates or it is existing in an organization and starting from leadership all the way down to a programmer, for example, if you were to take IT?

Michelle Reina [00:07:26]:

I think what I see in my work every day is that there is a fundamental belief that many organizations have and the leaders that I have the real privilege to work with hold, and that is a belief in the value and the importance of relationships, and the value and the importance of relationships to creating a healthy, vibrant culture as well as a culture that really produces strong business results. So there is a strong value and a fundamental belief in the importance of that. The challenge is many people just really don’t quite know where to begin or how to support people to cultivate those types of relationships in a meaningful way, and so in the absence of not quite knowing where to begin or how to help people develop trusting relationships, it can get a little bit lost in the fray, if you will. So, Warren

Warren Kudman [00:08:31]:

Go ahead.

Michelle Reina [00:08:31]:

I’m sorry.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:32]:

Go ahead, Michelle.

Michelle Reina [00:08:34]:

No. I’m gonna pause and, Warren, hand it over to you. Okay.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:39]:

So, Warren, if you were to look at what Michelle just said, do you think that people do not have the capability to get started or find their way? And in case some of them do and others don’t, then you still have that weakest link issue, and because of which, you’ll have many people who don’t have that capability, and we as leaders and our parents or as an organization are not treating them as parents. We are looking at, okay. I’ve got 200 people. I do not know what personality do they bring, and so I’m not sure where to start coaching them. So that person is waiting, and you do not know what to do. So God bless us all.

Warren Kudman [00:09:18]:

So I believe that most people have the inherent capability to build relationships, but I’ll go back to what I said before in that we might not be thinking enough about the importance of exercising that skill, and turning it over time into something that’s more natural in the workplace, but I agree with Michelle. I think that there’s many great organizations, and I’ve had the privilege to work in them, where relationships are valued. It might be described as the value of collaboration and teamwork, but you ultimately can’t have those things if you don’t have people that can work well together and build relationships, and so as leaders and managers, are we specifically looking as we’re observing our teams and our staff work, are we looking at how they are exercising relationship building? And are we giving them feedback on that? Are we coaching them on that? I think if we value relationship building, we recognize it as an important element of getting to high performance, then we have to explicitly be observing how relationship building is working, and we have to be available as role models and coaches, and so when we see situations where somebody isn’t taking the opportunity to build a relationship or they may be damaging a relationship, leaders and managers need to act quickly and give timely feedback and coaching and present examples of alternate ways of building relationships so that it becomes more natural and part of the day to day working practices over time.

Sanjog Aul [00:11:18]:

Michelle, if you were to look at the way an organization allows promotion of an individual who works their way up, Most of it is performance driven. Most of it is the way they carry out tasks and perhaps the way they manage and or lead troops. None of those capabilities truly are a direct indication that these people also know how to build good relationships, and when they go up, they’re expected to help others learn how to build relationships. That could be like leading, like, blind led by another blind. What would you say is wrong in this approach where the person’s performance appraisal doesn’t have this aspect, which is essential to eventually helping others build relationships, to have that cohesive culture, to have that innovation and growth that they are always looking for?

Michelle Reina [00:12:10]:

What I’m seeing, Sanjog Aul, is that there’s actually, and I think this is very positive, that there’s a shift away from that. When there is that very linear view on performance, which is, for ease of language, I would call the hard side, perhaps a person’s technical skills or knowledge or core concrete competencies, when there’s a focus on that in absence of the softer side, which is the interpersonal skills and the relationship building, there can be a skewed lens, because a person can have depth of knowledge and expertise around a subject, but be very ineffective in how they are relating with others. What I’m observing in many organizations is there’s a shift away from that because people are increasingly noticing and becoming aware that if a leader does not have the ability to forge healthy relationships, how much they know is not of as much value because it’s more difficult to access. So increasingly, I’m seeing built into performance review processes, those formalities of evaluating a person’s performance, there is a holistic view on both their accomplishments in terms of concrete deliverables as well as the health of the culture and relationships that they are cultivating.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:42]:

Now, Warren, in your experience, what are some of the signs that you’ve seen when people are giving away those signals that there is either not enough trust among one another or there are some other unhealthy attitudes and relationship portion of the coexistence is missing.

Warren Kudman [00:14:02]:

Well, I think you see signs in that people will self select and try to not work with individuals that they don’t feel they have good relationships with. So you’ll see patterns of avoidance. You may see isolation, and you may see team performance that suffers because the team itself doesn’t have good interpersonal dynamics and they’re struggling as a result. I think all of those are pretty strong signs, and if you tie in some of the things that Michelle just said with this question about leaders not having strong relationship skills, when you think about how work gets done more and more, it gets done through partnerships and alliances inside an organization, and it’s through strong relationships that we achieve better performance. So it’s really not likely that somebody can achieve a strong leadership role if they aren’t able to build partnerships and support in different parts of the organization because they’re going to need that to be effective. So when you see people who are smart but who tend to be isolated, it’s a very strong sign that they haven’t built great relationships.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:36]:

Michelle, you got anything else to add to it?

Michelle Reina [00:15:38]:

Oh, absolutely. What Warren’s really talking about is the core truth of business in any type of organization, any size, shape, any place in the world: business is conducted through relationships, and trust, this thing called trust, is the foundation to the health and the effectiveness of those relationships. Leaders are really responsible for both the health of the business and the business results and the health of the culture. Trust is what builds the bridge between business results and people connecting, and without it, there is always the compromise to effectiveness on both sides, the hard side of the business as well as the soft interpersonal side of the culture.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:29]:

Let’s take a quick break. Listeners will be right back and continue this conversation and perhaps also touch that why when we see the signs, where do we get started? Because there are so many different personalities, and we really do not know what is causing people to behave in a certain way because something is going wrong with their family or anything else that’s happening, which may be causing them to behave in a certain way in a longer period, and that may be causing this toxicity in the relationship. So what is happening? How do we get to know? How do you get those people to get over those humps and then start getting into the groove where everyone at a workplace is able to build healthier relationship. Let’s explore that more. Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:17:19]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impact business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner.

Speaker 0 [00:17:49]:

Bosch Software Innovations is proud to sponsor this program. Visit www.bosch-si.com/connectedmanufacturing to find out how Bosch can help you improve your operational performance and become a manufacturing industry leader in a connected world. Change the way you predict, manage, and produce outcomes. Bosch connected manufacturing.

Speaker 0 [00:18:21]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Tap into our expertise, innovation, and services to bring your most important workloads to the cloud. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:19:07]:

Welcome back. So, Warren, based on what your response was where you saw a few signs and Michelle added to those. Now coming back to you, Warren, if you do see those signs, how do you approach these issues as a parent or as an organizational leader for you to be most effective and be able to further diagnose and then work with those individuals or groups to make success happen?

Warren Kudman [00:19:35]:

Yeah. I think it comes back to coaching and feedback. So I think it’s very important for a manager, for a leader, to pull an individual aside, and if there was a difficult experience that had just occurred, not to wait, but sit down with that person, revisit the situation, explain alternate ways that it might have been handled differently, and have the individual develop an awareness of how their behavior can sometimes get in the way of building a stronger relationship and how the lack of relationships are going to make them less effective, and I think that what can be very helpful at times is to point to other individuals who have very good relationship skills and are recognized for that and use them as examples and models that might be able to help the individual. So that individual, as they go through the course of their day, can be observing as well as practicing relationship building skills. So it’s that individual coaching and mentoring that I think can be most valuable. You talk about being a parent, being an organization leader. I, in the past, have had people come to me and tell me that they’re having a difficult time working with another individual or they disagreed with somebody else’s approach, and my response to them is, look, I’m not going to be the parent, and I’m not going to act on your behalf to make it right. What I’m going to do is talk to you about how I think you can engage with that individual to get over the challenge, and that ultimately comes back to exercising relationship building skills. I think if we fix the problem for our teams, they’re not going to ultimately learn how to do it for themselves.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:39]:

Any different take from you, Michelle, in the way Warren mentioned that he would not be a parent, but actually help those people develop that skill that strengthen their DNA, if you will, so that they get better. What are the ups and downs of that? Because I would also personally deal with that as a leader, whether I should help cradle someone all the way to helping solve their problem or let them fight it.

Michelle Reina [00:22:06]:

Right. Well, let me first comment that if we could see each other, you would notice a big smile on my face when I was hearing Warren speak, and I want to just first share with you both and the listeners that this is such a core critical issue. How do we respond when we are seeing that there are signs and indicators that are getting in the way of healthy relationships? In fact, my business partner and husband, Dennis Reyna, and I wrote a book dedicated specifically to this topic. It’s called Rebuilding Trust in the Workplace. So it’s a very useful tool for those who may want to dig a little bit deeper, but building upon Warren’s comments, I so appreciate and have tremendous respect for what he offered. There is a coaching mentoring component to it. Quite often leaders tend to turn the other way because it can be a little bit awkward or often people don’t quite know how to respond when there are signs and indicators that things are breaking down. What we find to be most helpful is the first step is to really acknowledge what one is seeing. Quite often, as Warren commented, people can begin to withdraw. The collaborative spirit can begin to wane. Often in organizations when there’s a breakdown in relationships, there’s a heavy amount of gossip, backbiting. The rumor mill is running in overdrive, and people’s level of enthusiasm is beginning to diminish. So it is helpful to in a coaching mentoring way to acknowledge what one is observing, and as Warren said, to step people into a conversation where they can explore more fully what is going on, and to consider what are extenuating circumstances, what bigger picture may be at play, what else might be going on from a business perspective or a cultural perspective, and another key component is often helping people to understand how they themselves may also be contributing to the challenge in the relationship. Often it’s easy to look at other people’s behavior, and any of us may get caught up in pointing a finger or blaming another person, but when the coach is helping the individual step into the discomfort of a breakdown in relationship, there is always that honest assessment of one’s own behavior and how I may have been contributing to what’s getting in the way of the thing I want, and then what kind of responsibility can I take and can others take? So what we’re really talking about here is stepping into the discomfort and the breakdown and working through it to come out on the other side with restored trust, with healthy connecting and vibrancy so the relationships can be sustainable. Often the biggest mistake that people make is they move in the opposite direction and get caught up in defending their behavior or rationalizing their actions rather than stepping into what’s really been getting in the way.

Warren Kudman [00:25:29]:

Wow. I really like that point, Michelle. I think it’s worth saying again. I think so often we all feel that it’s the other person that needs to change, and we’re fine. We are in denial, and I’ve made that mistake myself in the past, and I think we always have to recognize our contribution to a difficult situation or a breakdown in a relationship and ask ourselves and get feedback from others about what we might have done or should have done differently. I think it’s an excellent point.

Michelle Reina [00:26:09]:

Thank you, Warren, and I shared this with you. I think we all have had this experience, and what I find to be key in helping any of us step into this is, yes, take some responsibility and ownership, and at the same time cut ourselves a little bit of slack. If we begin to beat up on ourselves or beat up on others or point a finger or make one another wrong, it makes it a little bit tougher to really look at ourselves because none of us intentionally contribute to a breakdown in relationship. The vast majority of us don’t set out to hurt somebody or let somebody down or behave in ways that are not true to ourselves. We don’t intend to. We don’t set out to, but life happens, and we all trip up, and I find that if we can bring in the presence of compassion where we’re not judging or criticizing ourselves or others, we’re simply trying to learn and to grow and to own it, holy cow, there’s just so much growth and insight that we can acquire that we actually find ourselves in some funny kind of way grateful for the wrestling through because of where we land on the other side.

Sanjog Aul [00:27:34]:

So there are only so many compassionate and caring, shrink-like Warrens out there within an organization. Right, Warren? You are approached by people you did not ask for it. They came to you because they thought that you care. You will really work with them to help them solve their problem. Now your organization may be much bigger, and there may be many other people who may not feel that there is enough people and they’re so far removed from you that they do not see there is any option inside organization. So they go outside, and then those outside people may not have full understanding of what’s going on within the organization. So they may not do justice to that coaching or mentoring or parenting, whatever that may be. How do you handle that with other people in the organization so that we don’t have such victims existing in an organization?

Warren Kudman [00:28:31]:

I think it becomes a value that you have to actively promote and model. As a leader, what I need to make sure I’m doing, and I put a lot of emphasis on, is providing feedback to the people that work closely with me, who are part of my leadership team, and then I set an expectation, but one where there’s rationale for how it benefits all of us, that that same kind of coaching will be done down the line, and I think Michelle is right, a lot of organizations today make it an explicit part of the evaluation process where we’re not just looking at outcomes, but we’re looking at behaviors. So it comes back to having an expectation that this will be done and then modeling that and communicating the value of that and making it part of a team’s working practices.

Michelle Reina [00:29:55]:

And Warren, what I find in the kind of situation that you’re describing, because I’m right there with you in the point of view that you’re providing, is the other component of it I think that’s important on behalf of leadership, where there’s the modeling and the setting of precedent in terms of here’s the values and the beliefs, but actually backing that up in the way that they are living those values and those beliefs. The other component is, and I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this as well, is that often people need some help to learn how to practice those behaviors. They need some help to learn how to be that leader or that coworker as a coach, as a peer coach, as a team coach. Often people have an innate desire that, yeah, I want to be that person. I want to show up in that way. I want to practice those behaviors. I want to be that role model, and sometimes they need help to learn how to be that person, to model those behaviors.

Sanjog Aul [00:31:00]:

Let’s take a quick break. Listeners, we’ll be right back. Warren will continue this conversation once we are back from the break. So please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:31:18]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Tap into our expertise, innovation, and services to bring your most important workloads to the cloud.

Speaker 0 [00:31:30]:

Bosch Software Innovations is proud to sponsor this program. Visit www.bosch-si.com/connectedmanufacturing to find out how Bosch can help you improve your operational performance and become a manufacturing industry leader in a connected world. Change the way you predict, manage, and produce outcomes. Bosch connected manufacturing.

Speaker 0 [00:32:01]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:05]:

Welcome back. So, Warren, you had a comment which you were trying to make on Michelle’s last comment.

Warren Kudman [00:33:13]:

Actually, I might need to be refreshed on that. I apologize. I don’t

Sanjog Aul [00:33:18]:

Oh, that’s okay. So while you bring that thought back up, I’ll ask you, Michelle, this question about how many times does an organization take a pause and pause with an individual to say you, you’re doing whatever you’re doing, keeping the performance portion aside, but how are you doing, John or Jane, to make sure that they are talking their heart out?

Michelle Reina [00:33:43]:

Yeah. No. It’s a great question. I think that, in the past, in the life of most organizations, there hasn’t been those pause moments, and so as a result, we often hear people talk about challenges and issues that go unaddressed or unresolved, and they build and build over time. Or there may be cultural surveys or engagement assessment scores that indicate there are signs and troubles and issues, yet they go unaddressed. So I think there’s been a predisposition to not take those momentary pauses because of the speed and pace of life. However, what I feel extremely encouraged by is there is a growing cadre of leaders who are paying attention to this and who are recognizing the need to take a pause and pay attention to the health of the relationship. So let me give a very specific example that I think will illustrate this. There is a large insurance company that I’ve had the honor to work with for a couple of years, and this is an interesting paradox, because in this organization, there is very fast, fast, high growth. Double-digit growth for over five years and a high degree of profitability. So one might think that, wow, this is a really exciting, extraordinary place to work. Yet what was happening is a paradox. The people within the organization, the employees, have a tremendous amount of passion for the organization, for the products they provide, the customers they support, and a strong belief in the difference they make in the world. So all of that is at play. Yet at the same time, engagement was beginning to dwindle, and people were beginning to have the signs and indicators that Warren was talking about earlier of relationships losing their vitality. Collaboration began to dwindle. People had passion, yet their enthusiasm for what they do every day was not as strong. So what these leaders did was something very bold. The first thing they did was actually step into the organization, and they decided to do a baseline assessment on the level of trust. So they exercised the courage to ask their employees to engage in assessment that actually measured the level of trust. They were able to pinpoint specific behaviors that contributed to trust and healthy ways of relating and pinpoint the kinds of patterns and dynamics that were getting in the way of healthy ways of relating. So they were able to take a pause and step into the organization and make it safe for people to talk about what they were experiencing in their relationships with one another and within their leaders. That helped them to do two things, identify their leverage points and identify vulnerabilities. What these leaders then did was garner their support of their HR professionals and others to help them build some skills and tools that they could use to teach their employees how to practice the behaviors that would help them strengthen their relationships, and Sanjog Aul, every 8 weeks for 1.5 years, leaders brought people together for a 90-minute period of time, and they did this throughout their entire company. It was in the United States, this particular division, but they did it throughout their company, and every 8 weeks for 90 minutes, they brought groups of people together, and they took a pause to focus on their relationships and to learn one or two skills that would help them collaborate with one another, to have open honest conversation with each other, to manage agreements and manage expectations with one another, and over the course of time, they began to see significant shifts in how people related to each other across functional lines within teams, and they had results that began to really show the payoff of that investment in not just taking the time, but to invest in the skills and the tools to support building those kinds of relationships. At the end of the day, it’s what really transforms a culture and takes business to a whole new level.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:39]:

Great points, Michelle. So Warren, now I come to you with the strategy that was utilized by this company Michelle mentioned. If people come together and they are shared they basically are allowed to collaborate, etcetera, to say these are some of the things. What we are essentially doing there is trying to help them change their behavior, and that would foster a better culture, presumably. Now think about the way people behave sometimes is not a direct reflection of how they’re thinking, and that could essentially take people back to their original state if that constant 8-week program was stopped. If that is the case, how do we know that’s not the case? What people are doing today is not because they really want to do from within and they have suddenly formed more love for their coworker. It’s because the company said the HR said we are gonna get this thing together. I’m trying to go a level deeper than the behavioral exercise. It’s more the intent exercise.

Michelle Reina [00:39:41]:

I think what you’re referring to, the first point, is around awareness, and that’s where behavioral change first begins: raising the level of awareness. So if we take a situational context where an organization is devoting time and energy and effort to building healthy relationships, in my view there must be that presence of trust. It requires first a level of awareness of what it is that builds healthy relationships. What are those behaviors that contribute to high-trust relationships, strong healthy relationships? So there’s an awareness. There’s the introduction to behaviors that contribute to the very thing we want, and out of that, people begin to make choice. I call it conscious choice. Through the awareness of behavior and language to help me discuss those behaviors, me and others, we are supported to make a choice, a conscious choice of how we show up and how we behave. Because we may value healthy relationships. I believe we all want it, and we all deserve it, but the only thing that builds it is the way we show up and behave. That requires awareness, and out of that conscious choice, and then the outcome of the behaviors that we practice contribute to those healthy relationships, or when we lose our footing and behave unconsciously can contribute to the vulnerability of them.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:17]:

Great. Now, Warren, do you think and this is something you can share with your experience if we show a behavior of getting along, smiling when we shake hands with each other, does that always mean there is an internal intent which has changed to say, I really want to build a relationship in a corporate setting?

Warren Kudman [00:41:40]:

So, I mean, obviously, it goes beyond the smile and the handshake, but yes, I strongly believe that people will react to the behaviors that they see being demonstrated by others. There’s a well-worn phrase, called tone at the top that many of us have probably heard before, and teams will look to organization leaders and observe their behaviors and very often will be influenced and will tend over time to model those same behaviors. So I think it’s both the top down and the bottom up, and what Michelle described and what we’ve been talking about is it is that awareness, it is that coaching that’s very important, but what’s observed in the workplace by people who are very visible tends to be role models for others. The behaviors that they actually execute are strong examples for what people believe is expected of themselves as they go through their day to day working practices, and there are different types of relationships as well. There are relationships between a subordinate and a manager. There are relationships among peers. Those things may execute somewhat differently, but each one of them is important and each one of those types of relationships can be coached, and I think that a manager just demonstrating and acting in a way where they’re looking to relate to their team members sets a very strong example for people to think about how they can act in their relationships with others.

Michelle Reina [00:43:33]:

I also think, building upon Warren for a moment, that there are ways that coworkers can demonstrate and model for one another. The tone at the top reminds me of the other phrase that I think we’re all familiar with, which is walking our talk, and Sanjog Aul, I appreciated your question around we begin with a smile and the extension of a handshake. That would imply that there’s intentionality. So that would create a starting point, would open the door for healthy relationships and healthy ways of behaving. It then needs to be backed up continuously again and again by actions and behaviors that give birth to patterns. Often in organizations there’s heavy focus on how people at the top behave, and there’s rightness and appropriateness about that. However, what I’d like to also offer is a perspective that everybody has responsibility. So yes, while setting the tone and modeling and coaching resides with tremendous responsibility with leaders, leaders don’t have 100% responsibility. So wherever an individual sits in the space of their organization, every one of us makes choices in how we are behaving day in and day out, and our leaders, yes, provide coaching and role modeling and mentoring, but there is tremendous value we can gain from the coaching and role modeling we experience from one another, and in cultivating a culture where relationships are healthy and vibrant and there’s high trust, that begins with each and every one of us and the choices that we make and the way we are behaving every day.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:29]:

So in short, just for clarity, Michelle, if we are to create good relationships or at least create an organizational culture, then we could start with modeling certain behaviors, let people adopt and embrace, and that will then start going below the skin and start making an impact that this really is helping, and they will start creating a belief system among themselves that if the way I’m behaving, it is coming from deep within. That means I really start working on the relationship side. I will have dividends, and that will create that fundamental transformation at an individual level as well. Is that what we are saying?

Michelle Reina [00:46:07]:

Yeah. Absolutely, and it is because every single one of us contributes to the experiences that we are having. Often when we’ve talked about signs and indicators that relationships aren’t healthy, I also wanted to just acknowledge that often there’s focus and emphasis on how people feel disappointed and let down by their leaders. Well, the truth is leaders often feel disappointed and let down by their people as well. So it brings us back to each and every one of us, but through the raised awareness of how we can build healthy relationships, the kind of coaching that Warren has been talking about, the choices that each and every one of us make, the magic that begins to happen, yes, our workplaces become formed, but guess what? So do our relationships at home because wherever we go, there we are, and we all go to work every day, and we all go home every day, and how we show up in relationships applies to the people that we live with, the people that we work with, and in an organization when people are supported to learn how to behave in ways that build healthy relationships, it contributes to the relationships they have at home, and that’s often the icing on the cake for leaders, is when they have a chance to hear that, you know, I went home and talked with my husband about what I learned today, or, wow, I had a very different conversation with my kid than I would have a week ago because of what I’ve learned and what I’ve been practicing and experiencing here with my team. So there’s a way that it is transformative through all aspects of our lives.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:58]:

Let’s take a quick break. We’ll be right back, and, Warren, when we come back, let’s look at the multigenerational workforce, their different approaches to how they build relationships, the fact that we are trying to have more people work from their respective homes so they don’t see each other face to face. How does all of that new transformed organizational setup impact how well you teach people to become better in terms of building relationship? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:48:49]:

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Speaker 0 [00:49:21]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Tap into our expertise, innovation, and services to bring your most important workloads to the cloud. HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:37]:

Welcome back. So, Warren, fundamental difference in multigenerational workforce in the way they model their behavior, want to behave with each other, build relationships, then you got peoples working from their respective homes, at most have video conferencing once in a while. That doesn’t help. It makes the matter more challenging. How do you deal with that?

Warren Kudman [00:50:55]:

Yeah. I think the multigenerational challenge is a particular one that’s difficult. I think we have to go back to having people from different generations with different styles of talking to each other and building relationships is to appreciate where the other generation is coming from. We’re never going to transform, let’s say, millennials back to putting down their smartphones and tweeting and using social media to picking up a telephone and actually having a conversation, which is a discussion I have with my kids all the time. They might be willing to do that periodically and people who had not grown up with social media might find it challenging to supplement their relationships through that type of mechanism, but I think that we have to also coach and have people who are my age, let’s say, pretty ancient now, but appreciate that the younger generation is using that as an important vehicle of communicating and maintaining relationships. So can we meet halfway? Can we all bring something to the table in terms of what we’re looking for in the mechanics of our relationships as well as ultimately getting to those personal connections? And so taking that importance of making the personal connection and bringing it then to a remote workforce and people working from home, I’ve actually had a lot of that in my career where I’ve had members of the team who work in a remote location where the bulk of the team is not located or work from home for whatever reason, and the video conferencing helps. Actually seeing somebody’s face when you’re having a conversation, I think, does help build a bridge, but what I found is that it’s still important to bring people physically together periodically to really build as strong of a bond as possible. There’s nothing like, for example, getting people together and breaking bread together and having a relaxed couple of hours over a meal for people to feel more comfortable with each other on a more personal basis, so that when they do go back to their respective workplaces but they’re still working together remotely, the bond that they have forged makes the working relationship much more effective. So I think remote working can work, but it’s really important to still take advantage of the opportunity to bring people together in the same place from time to time.

Michelle Reina [00:53:59]:

I couldn’t agree more, and I comment both from my own actual experience with my own firm, where my business partner and husband and I have an actual virtual team ourselves, and we have a team where we span across multiple generations. So there’s that millennial component, where we have members of our team who work virtually and are of the younger generation that heavily use social media and text and don’t have the same kind of need for perhaps what might be a higher touch in the way that my generation, because as with you, Warren, I think I’m a little bit more seasoned at this age of my life, and there is something about opening ourselves up to learning from them of these new ways of being able to communicate, at the same time asking them to learn from us. So there’s kind of a neat bridge that can be built there. I wanted to just comment on that because I got a kick out of hearing you speak about that and so related to it, but the other aspect about the virtual arrangement I find for myself that 15 seconds, Michelle. It requires more effort, and there is nothing that can ever replace what happens when there’s that FaceTime. So there’s something about the commitment to making sure that that happens and it makes the virtual be much more fluid and effective.

Sanjog Aul [00:55:39]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you, both Warren and Michelle, for sharing your thoughts on how organizations can create a culture where we can teach individuals and groups how to build strong relationship and sustain a culture of that sort. Thank you so much again.

Michelle Reina [00:55:57]:

Thank you. Bye.