How to Build Strong Work Relationships

How to Build Strong Work Relationships

In Atomic Habits, James Clear writes that behavior change happens when you build on existing habits, make change in small increments so it’s easy to do, leverage a system, and make the behaviors part of your identity. The actions to build strong relationships with work colleagues are habits. Here are ways you can build your relationship-building habits at work.  

Build on existing habits

• Make a meaningful connection. You’re already meeting with someone, so take advantage of that time together to spend a few minutes learning about the other person. No extra time needed; shift your attention and intention to connect. By showing sincere interest, they’ll remember how you made them feel in a positive light.

Make change in small increments

• Ask how you can help them. This flips the interaction from what you want to how you can be a resource for them. They’ll appreciate the gesture, you get to learn something about what’s on their mind, and it opens opportunities to follow up. 

• Send a quick follow up note, with appreciation for their time and a reflection or resource related to your conversation. It shows you heard them. 

Create a system for staying connected

• Track the date of your last meeting and put a reminder on your calendar to follow up. Take notes in a way you can easily access, so that when it’s time to follow up you can quickly refresh on what you talked about and continue the conversation. 

• Schedule time. Pat Romboletti, author of Bulletproof Your Career, recommends dedicating one hour every Friday morning to sending updates and reconnect notes to your network. 

Make relationship-building part of your identity

• Relationship building is about providing value and expecting nothing immediate in return. It becomes who you are when you are excited to share updates about a project a colleague is working on, trends in their industry, or connected to something their favorite hobby. Building relationships this way, you are:

• A connector

• A trusted partner

• Someone who cares about other people, and 

• The person they’ll go to for insights on their challenges. 

What is one action you will take today to foster your relationship-building habits?

To learn more about effective relationship building, check out the Twelve Skills brief Expanding Relationship Building. 

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Expanding Relationship Building Workbook. It will help you put these ideas into practice and boost your relationships. And best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

The ABC’s of Executive Presence

Have you ever wondered what makes a business executive look like, well, an executive? If you’ve given it any thought, you’ve likely noticed a few things about top leaders that stand out. First, they look the part, meaning, whatever environment they’re operating in—from the basement of a tech start up to the C-suite in a FORTUNE 100 corporate office—they present a visual image that says “I’m a leader here”. Next, they carry themselves with a certain air of confidence and swagger. People conclude they’re in charge because they act like they are. Lastly, they speak with authority, expressing a self-assured demeanor as they do. If these three things resonate with you, you’ve picked up on the important cues senior managers often transmit. Now let’s take a quick tour of the ABC’s of executive presence, exploring each one in turn.

1. Appearance is how you present yourself in the workplace in terms of dress, grooming, and posture. It’s true standards of dress have changed over the past few years thanks to the remote work revolution, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a dress code where you work; every place has them—formal or informal. Regardless of your environment, it’s essential you take the time to understand how you’re showing up looks-wise at work—your success depends on it. If everyone in your athletic apparel company wears hooded sweatshirts, jeans and trendy sneakers in the office, showing up in a button down shirt and a blazer sends the unmistakable message that you don’t understand “how we do things around here”. Whether you’re trying to fit in or thoughtfully stand out, you need to demonstrate you know the rules of the game when it comes to dress code and grooming.

2. Boldness shows calm, courage, and confidence in the face of challenging situations and the ability to speak honestly and directly even when you’re feeling uncomfortable. One of the characteristics that we value in leaders is confidence. It give people the feeling that no matter what happens, the challenges we’re facing or opportunities we’re exploring will work out favorably—and should the not for some reason, we’ll still be okay. As leadership author Peter Bregman points out in his Harvard Business Review of the same name, “Great leaders are confident, connected, committed, and courageous.” All of these embody the boldness we want, even seek, in our leaders.

3. Communication relates to how we express our ideas when speaking or presenting. As far as leadership effectiveness is concerned, communication is one of the most important skills to be developed. Seasoned executives radiate presence when they speak, projecting their voice clearly with words that are easy to understand. In terms of message delivery, professionals don’t use filler words like ‘um’ and ‘you know’. They’re also thoughtful regarding the pace and tone of their speech so they can reinforce important messages. Some of the best known politicians were former actors and their aplomb delivering messages became hallmarks of their time in office.

There you have it: The ABC’s of executive presence—Appearance, Boldness, and Communication. You need to check your appearance, making sure you fit in before you try to stand out, consider how bold your physical presence is, and review your patterns of communication. Together these three components of executive presence engender confidence and inspiration in colleagues. Sprucing up any one of the three areas will improve how you’re perceived as a leader and quite possibly your overall effectiveness too.

If you’d like to learn more about executive presence, check out the Twelve Skills brief Enhancing Executive Presence.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Executive Presence Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Red Cells: The Antidote to Groupthink

“How can our leadership team avoid groupthink?” This is a question we’re asked frequently when advising on strategy. It’s a problem that many teams face when it comes to thinking strategically and there’s a variety of causes.

Sometimes it’s the team’s composition that’s the challenge—the team lacks diverse perspectives, the kind needed to cultivate truly new insights. In other situations, it’s that the team’s longstanding routines have grown stale generating few new ideas. It could be that novel, offbeat insights are frowned upon due to senior member behaviors or politics. Regardless of the reason, groupthink is an Achilles Heel to teams that prevents genuine creative thoughts from emerging. But there is a solution, one that comes straight from the military: red cells. 

Red cells were developed during the 1980’s by special operations leaders to pressure test the effectiveness of American military plans and tactics. The practice is often used in war games to represent an opposing force whose mission is to disrupt the friendly force’s plans. With that background, it’s easy to see how the concept can be applied to strategy efforts. There’s a few simple steps needed to make the practice work:

1. Charter, Select, and Separate Red Cell Members. A red cell should be expressly included as part of the strategy effort at the start. Team members should be comprised of leaders and employees who are know for their nontraditional views of the business. They should be told their mission but shouldn’t participate in any of the strategy efforts of the main team, at least initially. In fact, they should be separated from the main group entirely.

2. Steep the Red Cell in Competitor Tactics. While the main team engages in strategizing, so too should the red cell—but from the perspective of competitors. Red cell members diligently study competitor plans and strategies to get themselves into the mindset of their organization’s most significant competitors. This outside-in perspective is needed to ensure they are adequately prepared to respond from the viewpoint of an adversary.

3. Focus on Disrupting the Core Strategy. When the strategy is complete, the red cell analyzes it with the express purpose of identifying gaps and undermining the effort. They should make choices and conceive responses that would severely hamper or fully disrupt the strategy. 

4. Update the Strategy Using their Findings.  When their interrogation is complete, both teams should unite—main members and the red cell—to review their findings, revisit the core strategy, and make key adjustments. The red cell’s perspective will be both informative and instructive for the overall team.

If you’re unsure whether the red cell concept can be successfully applied outside of the military, don’t be. The idea has been similarly tested in a business book entitled Kill the Company (a very red cell like title). In short, it works.

Groupthink is a debilitating behavior that undermines the kind of strategic thinking teams need today. Employ a red cell and watch how the effectiveness of your strategizing improves.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your strategic skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Strategic Leadership Starts with Strategic Thinking

Who are strategic leaders? There’s two answers to this question.

First, strategic leaders are specific people—the executives who sit at the top of an organization. They comprise members of the board of directors, the top management team (TMT), and senior leaders who head major business units, functions, or geographies.

Second, strategic leaders are those managers who think and act strategically. They are known not buy their position, but rather their behavior. They, too, are strategic leaders but by action, not title.

Many leaders aspire to be both—more strategic in their day-to-day work as well as senior leaders rising in their organization. We assert that focusing on the latter—becoming a more strategic leader behaviorally—is the best path to achieving the former—a strategic leadership post. So how does one get from the backroom to the boardroom? According to the authors of Becoming a Strategic Leader: Your Role in Your Organization’s Enduring Success there are three individual skills that are required:

1. Strategic thinking. The intellectual and social process skills needed to enable a broad understanding of the organization and how it fits (and evolves) with its environment.

2. Strategic acting. The actions necessary to drive the organization toward its desired future destination despite challenges, obstacles, setbacks, and uncertainties that arise along the way.

3. Strategic influence. The behaviors needed to gain commitment from stakeholders, both inside and outside the organization, to compel progress toward strategic outcomes.

While each of the three are essential, strategic acting and influence will be of limited value if they are taken absent effective strategic thinking.

Senior leaders are expected to have the conceptual skills needed to not only survive, but thrive in the fast moving VUCAD world—volatile uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and digital. Anyone who wants to ascend the corporate latter will need to be a proven strategic thinker well before they step into those roles.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your strategic skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Think Before You Think Strategically

This might seem like an odd title for a post: Think Before You Think Strategically. You might be asking yourself, “Isn’t this what strategic thinking is all about? Changing the way I think?” It is. But to understand how to improve your approach to analyzing data and information, it helps to take the time to think about how you go about thinking in the first place. Unfortunately, people skip this activity to their detriment. Thinking about how you think—or metacognition as it’s known—is a key ingredient to thinking more effectively. If you’re interested on improving your own metacognition, here’s a few helpful hits to start you thinking.

1. People Often Aren’t as Smart as They Think. Do you know anyone who, no matter what you say to them, responds with “I knew that already”? There’s a possibility they did, but it’s more likely they’re suffering from a cognitive bias know as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. There’s ample research that shows when people are polled about things like driving, their health, and other behaviors, they rate themselves as well above average. People who are overconfident are especially prone to this bias. A dose of reality is a good starting point for upping your thinking.

2. You Can Improve Metacognition. Virtually everyone can improve how they think, if they try. There are a variety of resources available to assist. Prompts geared toward planning, monitoring, and evaluating highlight what you’re thinking in real time and encourage reflection when you’ve finished. Other techniques such as polling, conducting self and/or group assessments are beneficial practices too. Keeping a learning or reading log can be especially beneficial.

3. How You Organize Information Matters. If you do keep a learning log, one of the most effective approaches to structuring how you engage with, and process information, comes from the Cornell Note Taking System. As basic as this sounds, it’s a very effect tool that improves understanding and retention. Sound a little ‘old school’, note taking that is? Maybe. But research shows that writing notes by hand is more effective than with a computer. That said, the Cornell Note Taking System can be adapted for tech users as well. If you’re interested in learning more, The Learning Strategies Center at Cornell offers a free, publicly available online course in Canvas.  Even if you’re not interested in taking the course, there’s helpful videos to watch on the site.

Anne Hutchinson one of the early American feminists is quoted as saying, “I have been guilty of wrong thinking.”  She is not alone—most of us have. Take the time to explore your own cognition and your ability to think well and strategically will improve.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Tools to Get Started with Strategic Thinking

If you’re reading this post you probably agree strategic thinking is an essential leadership skill. We at Twelve Skills concur. But it begs the question, “If it’s so important, why don’t more people do it?” There’s a few reasons we’ve come across in our work that are often offered to explain the malaise:

• No time—“I just don’t have time to”

• No direction—“No one told me to”

• No idea—”I don’t know where to start”

Unfortunately, if you really want to get better at strategic thinking you’ll need to:

• Find the time—you have more time than you think

• Seize the initiative—great leaders make things happen on their own

• Engage in skill building—because everyone can improve

Here are a few ideas on how to jumpstart strategic thinking for yourself and, as importantly, for your team:

• Understand your context with PESTLE Analysis: Work with your team to define the context you work in. What key factors are shaping your competitive environment? Where might change drivers be coming from? Use the PESTEL analysis to explore your Political, Economic, Societal, Technological, Legal, and Environmental variables. See if the industry analysts agree with you by comparing your work to published analyst reports.

• Explore future trends with the Time Cone: Brainstorm the impact of trends from your PESTLE analysis using the Time Cone. Consider what might happen over the short, medium, an long-term horizons. Try to picture, as tangibly as possible, what different futures might look like. And don’t be afraid to look outside your competitive arena to detect potential disruptors or inflection points beyond your normal periphery.

• Set up Futurist Discussion Groups: Nature abhors a vacuum, so don’t work in a one. Gather your team to discuss and share what you’re learning together. Prepare for group work by engaging with sources such as pod casts, think tanks, and analyst reports. Facilitate robust dialogue about future trends and what you could be doing now to prepare for their impact.

These are great strategic thinking starting points for any individual. If you’re a team leader or Learning & Development manager, these can especially be powerful tools to help develop talent—and engage senior leaders on topic they’re concerned about. No matter your role, strategic thinking is everyone’s job.

If you’d like to access tools like the Time Cone for yourself or your team, get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here. 

Starting Point for Strategic Thinking: A Good Question

There’s no shortage of advice on how to think strategically—current blog authors included (see below). There are principles, practices, processes, steps—that, if followed, promise to top up your thoughts on the challenges and opportunities the future holds. To be fair, there’s value in almost every piece of advice. But regardless of which approach you choose, all methods should start the same way: with a good question. A good question helps you avoid three problems that can frustrate your efforts from the start.

1. Alice in Wonderland Problem. In the book Alice in Wonderland, when Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which road to take, he responds laconically, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road can take you there.” This is true with strategic thinking and fairy tales (not to mention your life; see here if this applies to you). If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, all the web searches you conduct and articles you read won’t have much value. More likely, they’ll probably lead to frustration stemming from information overload.

2. Forest for the Trees Problem. You’ve no doubt heard someone quip, “She can’t see the forest for the trees” when a person is so close to a situation, they miss the big picture. When searching for information—especially when hopping from one bit to the next—it’s possible to become so focused on the particulars you lose sight of the overall scheme. The right question calibrates where you are in the details.

3. Blinding Flash of the Obvious Problem. There are few events more unnerving than conducting far-reaching research, getting to the end, summarizing what you learned only to discover that your ‘novel insights’ have been widely known for the past decade. As humorous (and humiliating) as this sounds, it happens.  An effective question ensures canvasing the information landscape yields as much of what’s known in an area of interest as possible.

Karl Wieck the renowned organizational theorist noted that research often starts with some issue or problem that piques your interest; a problem or paradox you’d like to know more about. Same with strategic thinking. Taking time to define and refine what you want to know, will put you on the path to better learnings. 

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

What the Best Strategic Thinkers Do

Improving your strategic thinking might sound like a daunting task. With an ever-swelling ocean of information swirling about, it’s dizzying just imagining where to begin. The good news is becoming a great strategic thinker doesn’t start with endless web searches or petabytes of data to get going—it begins with simply setting time aside to think about the future. 

That sounds easy but it isn’t.  When people hear this advice, their response is often: “How do I set aside time to think about the future when I can’t even find time to finish the work I have today?” Here’s three simple steps you can follow to begin carving out the time you need.

1. Make a Commitment. You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.’ But even before you take the first step, you’ll need to make a commitment for the journey. A commitment says—to you especially—becoming a stronger strategic thinker is a priority. The demands of operational work will always crowd out strategic thinking, putting the important at the mercy of the urgent. Those who excel at peering into the future deliberately set aside time today to contemplate what it might look like.

2. Find a Place. Not everyone does their best thinking in the same way or even in the same place. Some people can find solitude and peace of mind amidst the backdrop of a busy coffee shop. Others need the silence of a library to gain the clarity they need. Regardless of whether your best work is accomplished in the presence of a barista or alone in a quiet study room, locate a place where you can retreat and let your imagination run free.

3. Set a Routine. It would be wonderful if during your first thinking session you conjured your company’s next big product idea. Wonderful yes; likely, no. Becoming a great strategic thinker requires a routine. To start, block a time as short as 15 minutes on your calendar, every week, (and hold it no matter what) to start developing your point of view about what the future may bring.

As romantic as the blinding flash of insight sounds, most great ideas don’t come that way. It took Thomas Edison thousands of experiments to develop the incandescent lightbulb. Hopefully, your greatest discoveries won’t require that long; but like Edison, they’ll need commitment, a familiar place, and a regular routine to turn your thoughts into your own breakthrough thinking.

If you’d like to learn more about strategic thinking, check out the Twelve Skills brief Mastering Strategic Thinking as well as all of the other Twelve Skills topics.

Serious about improving your skills? Get the companion guide to the Twelve Skills book the Twelve Skills Strategic Thinking Workbook. Packed with thought provoking activities, hands on exercises, and bonus material, it’s a proven way to boost your knowhow. Best of all, IT’S FREE! 

Get your own complimentary copy here.

Welcome to the Twelve Skills Blog

If you’re landing here for the first time, welcome! We’re grateful you’re taking time to explore the Twelve Skills world. We created Twelve Skills based on our work with dozens of organizations, scores of managers, and hundreds of students over the past 20 years. Over our careers, we observed a specific set of skills that people need to develop to advance into roles of of greater responsibility. While technical abilities are essential early on in careers, its the skill related to leading people that matter when it comes to moving up.

We tested our historical observations by looking at leadership development programs produced by top tier consulting and human capital firms. We didn’t stop there. We examined a range of business publications that highlighted the skill leaders need to succeed. Or findings led to the development of the six areas and twelve skills found in our ‘dartboard’.

To summarize, as managers climb the corporate ladder, they need to master strategy and its correlate results. They also need to build high performing teams that develop talent. And while the world outside evolves, they must be able to communicate effectively to drive change. Within each of these areas are two specific skills constitute the bulk of what leaders must be able to do as they become more senior.

To ensure we brought the best, most useful thinking to Twelve Skill readers (and users!), we selected content from one of the best known and trusted sources in business research over the past 100 years—Harvard Business Publishing (HBP). As strategy consultants, executive coaches, and Ivy League educators, we’ve not only used—but in some cases helped create—ideas that have shaped how management is practiced today. Twelve Skills provides a concise, curated, and actionable set of tools aimed at helping anyone who practices them become recognized as an effective leader in their role and, as importantly, someone who is ready for greater responsibility.

With that said, take a look around the Twelve Skills site. You’ll find free resources that include a book chapter, a short assessment, links to related videos and articles, downloadable ‘cheat sheets’, a quick start guide and best of all, a comprehensive (and complementary!) workbook anyone can use to improve their skills, their team, and even their entire organization. We also have a Twelve Skills Linked In group—join and connect with like minded colleagues who are traveling on similar development journeys.

Thank you again visiting our blog. Check our Linked In group or this spot for reading and reach out if you have questions or would like any thoughts on how to get the most out of The Twelve Skills!

Laura and Ed