[00:00:00] Pia: Human beings are hardwired to be relational, but in the competitive, fast-paced world of business teams can become tunnel visioned into achieving tasks, delivering technical expertise, and in doing so sometimes creating friction and challenge in the dynamics. So what's the payback for investing on developing your work relationships? Well, we'll explore this next secret in this connect. I'm Pia.

[00:00:25] Dan: And I'm Dan, and this is Squadify Connects. Research shows that investing in strong personal connections drives motivation, trust, and engagement, all of which improve performance. Creating strong personal relationships is is not a soft skill or a somewhat fluffy, nice to have, but instead it's a vital skill and an ingredient in a high performing team.

[00:00:48] Robert Putnam sees it as social capital. It's the act of building reciprocity that encourages people to support you and offer goodwill. Often we wait until we engage in the task, test our relationships, but by then it's almost too late, proactively bonding within the team and bridging outside. It creates a stronger chance of getting buy-in and support and achieving better outcomes. With stakeholders that may be looking for new ways to add value in advance, seeing the world through their eyes, and investing some time and in being well, just interested

[00:01:25] Pia: And yet our Squadify data tells us that we have a big bias to being tasked and transactionally focused, and yet we bemoan the fact that we can't get things done fast enough or are hampered by politics. Strong personal relationships is ranked. 38 out of 40 for importance. And indeed presence has been historically row, but is now starting to trend and rank higher at 15 out of 40. So the real signs that relating to one another is becoming increasingly important to getting things done and is a strategic skill. 

[00:02:01] Dan: Here are two success stories of teams using Squadify to show a significant 90 day impact by focusing on these relationships first, a remotely located diverse team working in the tech industry. Used Squadify to discuss the topic that was difficult to talk about in the intensity of day-to-day work and those merciless time zones.

[00:02:22] They made time to discuss, how lonely, isolated and mistrustful they were, feeling as a team. Boom, that simple conversation started the ball rolling. They focused on their personal relationships with each other, took more time to check in. They listened to one another and looked for opportunities to support one another. This team raise its trust levels by 20% and increase their personal connection scores by 32% in just 90 days.

[00:02:50] Pia: Similarly, a specialist compliance team in pharma who was strongly individualistic, highly skilled and independent, but the team was not performing at the pace that the business needed and was feeling overwhelmed and burned out with little energy to embrace the new strategy.

[00:03:06] They focused instead on strengthening personal relationships to allow themselves to be vulnerable and then to truly support each other. They now celebrate shared successes in Regi regular Agile retros. This improved their team alignment by over 62% and created better efficiency in delivering team projects, skill building for all team members as they support each other to learn. And it also sped up the onboarding process of new team members. 

[00:03:36] Dan: relationships can be built within teams or across teams. They're called bonding and bridging in Putnam's theory, you may need to create a stakeholder map of the key relationships you need to be successful and rate yourself out a five on their current strength. Try using asynchronous communication Slack videos, group chats, Marco Polo video apps to create different channels of communication, just to keep that communication cadence up. Do you know the key important personal details of your teams? They're kids by name, what hobbies they have, et cetera. It seems possibly meaningless in the business, but these are all signs that you are interested and not just trying to be interesting 

[00:04:18] Pia: And a final story. Sergeants in World War I were known to carry these details about their troops in their notebooks. They used them to help soldiers through the toughest of times in business. There are times of need when the pressure is on, and it's the strengths of your relationships that will enable you to achieve more.

[00:04:39] Investing in and connecting with others builds the all important social capital in your team. And across your organization, it helps to define your leadership brand and it builds the moments and memories that become the fabric of your team. Simply, it's a leadership choice.