Relationally Intelligent Leaders
You’ve probably seen the statistics about how much of an employee’s likelihood to stay with the company depends on their manager. According to Udemy, nearly half of employees said they’ve quit a job because of a bad manager. Gallup found that 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.
But at Core Strengths, we think there’s more to the engagement and turnover picture: relationships. What if nearly half of employees have quit a job because of a bad relationship with their manager? What if 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined by the manager-employee relationship?
Yes, bad managers exist. But have half of all working people really encountered one? Or have (mostly) good managers just tried to manage everyone the same way, and have their efforts fallen flat? A diverse group of direct reports will have different needs, motivations, strengths, and values. The biggest mistake managers make is to apply a similar leadership style to everyone, rather than viewing management as a series of individual leadership relationships.
And while management interactions happen in the moment, relationships are built over time. They have a past, a present, and a future. The reason you may not be as effective at managing certain employees in the present — and why they may view you as a ‘bad manager’ — is that some experiences with them in the past haven’t been productive, leaving lingering mistrust. To co-create a future that both parties are bought into and excited about, you have to align expectations on the six Rs of manager effectiveness:
Relationships
Roles
Responsibilities
Recognition
Reasons
Results
Alignment in these six areas will increase trust and make employees much more likely to stay.
Relationships
Often, when thinking about retention, managers think first about aligning roles, responsibilities, and results — but you’ll only have effective conversations about those topics if you start with relationships. Employees’ sense of purpose, and therefore their job satisfaction, can be bolstered through their primary relationships: with their boss and the other key people in the organization who they work with.
To heal past mistakes and misunderstandings, have effective interactions in the present, and create a productive future, managers and employees both need to develop Relationship Intelligence, or RQ. Relationship Intelligence is insight for adjusting your approach to make interactions more effective.
Since relationships develop over time, you can use three components to gauge the quality of a relationship:
Bad relationships often have a history of conflict and an expectation that things won’t get better and that not much will be accomplished together. Good relationships often include a history of disagreements and even some conflict, but the people involved have worked through such issues, work effectively together, and look forward to accomplishing shared goals.
RQ allows you and your employees to maintain mutual positive regard, meaning you believe you both have the capacity to reason and to make your own decisions, and that every person has a moral right to be treated with dignity and respect. This creates conditions where people are free to do their best. If you have positive regard, you can give feedback to employees from a place of care, curiosity, and lack of judgment.
To develop RQ, you and each of your employees should take the SDI 2.0 assessment, a simple questionnaire that shows who you are and how you work through four interrelated views:
Motives: You’ll learn the three core motives behind your approach to people, performance, and process, a blend that’s expressed as your Motivational Value System (MVS).
Conflict: Your Conflict Sequence shows your changing motives as conflict escalates, giving you the chance to course-correct before you get too upset and limit your ability to see other perspectives.
Strengths: Your Strengths Portrait presents all 28 strengths you use at work. It also reveals how your motives drive the strengths you use most often.
Overdone strengths: Everyone pushes their strengths too far in some cases. You’ll learn which ones you overdo—insight that can keep you from losing effectiveness.
As you’ll soon come to learn, these four views will look very different for each of the people who report to you, and you’ll have to adjust your approach to work most effectively with each of them. This is a good thing! RQ gives you an actual system to leave one-size-fits-all management behind, once and for all. It also provides a reliable way to adapt your approach to others while still feeling genuine and authentic.
Once you have these skills and apply them in your management relationships, you can start talking to employees about their other critical relationships and helping them apply RQ in those. Anyone with a strong network of thriving relationships at work will be far more likely to stay and grow with the company.
Roles
Roles are seemingly straightforward, but role confusion is surprisingly common among employees — and it’s not their fault. People may understand their job description, but their actual day-to-day role can change quite a lot from the time of hiring, or they can take on multiple roles, while their job description doesn’t get updated.
A role also doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s a description of who someone is in the organization: where they are on the org chart, who they report to, who they support, what’s their territory, etc.
As the manager, have a curiosity-based conversation with your employee, not an inspection. Too often, managers approach role clarification with a tone that the employee has strayed from the path laid out for them. But roles can actually get very fuzzy over time, and everyone can benefit from regular conversations clarifying their definition.
The better you both understand their role, the better they can understand, and nurture, their most important relationships within the organization.
Responsibilities
While the role is who someone is to the organization, responsibilities are what someone does for the organization.
To clarify responsibilities, sit down with your employee and enumerate all the things they’re doing, alongside all the things the team needs to get done. It can be difficult for someone to even list everything they do in a busy work week, but specifics are important in this exercise. You’re likely to find things they could do more of and things they can skip, automate, or delegate to make better use of their time.
Your relationship with the employee — and with everyone on your team — plays a huge role here. If you understand their strengths, you can move some tasks around so people can flex their top strengths on tasks they’re naturally good at.
On the opposite end of the strengths spectrum, you can have grace for people stretching the strengths they may use less often — understanding that they may not enjoy certain tasks, or might be slower to complete them. Helping people be more agile in the use of their strengths is part of your role as a manager and will lead to more fulfilled employees as they see concrete evidence of their personal and professional growth.
Recognition
According to TINY pulse survey data, employees that don't feel recognized when they do great work are almost 2x as likely to be job hunting. But all recognition doesn’t land the same way with everyone. Relationships play a huge role in learning how each employee prefers to be recognized for their contributions.
It’s crucial to recognize someone based not on what’s important to you, but what’s important to them.
Think about someone who really loves cars. They know a lot about cars, and they feel that the car they drive is an expression of their personality. Suppose they have a friend who doesn’t know the first thing about cars and couldn’t care less. If they give that friend a compliment on their car, it won’t mean anything to the friend. But if they receive a compliment on their own car, it will mean a lot.
When you start recognizing people for accomplishing what they care about and are deeply motivated to do, it will change the relationship for the better.
Reasons
Reasons are also all about internal motivation: can the employee connect the work they’re doing to their values? This is about engagement in daily tasks but also about growth and development.
Engagement in tasks
Employee engagement is low nationwide because many people are complying with instructions but not engaging in their jobs. Again, it comes back to RQ. If you know your employee well, and can connect their primary motives to the team and organizational goals, they’ll engage more deeply than they would for any external motivational system.
Engagement in development
As a manager, you spend a lot of time coaching employees to support their growth and development. But when someone needs to start or stop a behavior, nothing will change unless you connect the feedback to a good reason to change — their values and motivations. The abundance (or lack) of opportunities to grow and advance is also tightly connected to retention, so frequent growth and development conversations will help people see that you’re invested in them and they can grow with you.
Results
So often, as managers, we start with the result we need and focus all our energy on getting that. But if the other five elements above are in alignment, results will most likely fall into place.
In the event there’s a mismatch between the effort your employee is putting in and the impact they’re actually making, a relationally intelligent conversation can get them back on track to get results.
If there’s a strong, trusting leadership relationship, anchored in a mutual curiosity and understanding of what matters most to each person, you can give honest feedback while letting the employee know you’re rooting for them — and they’ll believe you. When an employee with RQ has a development conversation with a supervisor with RQ, that’s when engagement can transform, results can multiply, and people stop putting out feelers for a new job.
Core Strengths can help you retain employees.
Our SDI 2.0 assessment is the place to start when you want to learn about yourself and your team, and develop relationship intelligence. You’ll gain insight into everyone’s motives, conflict styles, strengths, and overdone strengths.
If you’d like to take it further, we offer many more services and tech products to help you make RQ part of your organization’s daily life.
