In this day and age, it’s hard for anyone to make any major achievement without the coordination from others. That’s why “teamwork” and “building relationships” are highly valued skills in the Corporate America today.

The working relationship is like a bank account

For most Asian immigrants, teamwork comes naturally. After all, most of us were brought up in a culture where we were taught to put the interests of the team/group we belong to ahead of our self interests.

However, many of us find ourselves struggling to build a “good relationships” with our co-workers because of the language barrier and the cultural differences. Should I go play golf every Sunday afternoon with my colleagues? Or should I learn what a RBI is to strike a water cooler conversation with my co-workers on Baseball?

Let’s take a step back to look at why we want to build a working relationship. The ultimate objective of building a working relationship is to be able to work better with others and help each other to do our work more effectively and more efficiently. A working relationship between two individuals is like a bank account. When you draw help or benefit from the relationship, you are taking withdraws from the account. When you help the other person, you are making deposit to the account. Building a good long lasting relationship is all about making deposit to the account to maintain the proper balance so you can withdraw when you need it most.

Finding the right currency

Unlike a usual bank account, for a relationship account the first thing we need to figure out is what the right currency is. We need to understand what the other individual needs and how we could help him/her to address those needs. For different people this may mean very different things but when you look hard enough you could always find them.

Several years ago I took a job to build sales capabilities into the various customer contact channels. The objective was to make a new product offer to a customer whenever she calls us for service, whenever he goes to our web site, and whenever she receives a statement or other communication from us. In order to do this job well, it’s important for me to build great working relationships with the heads of the operations units. These folks are senior executives two levels above me at the time and most of them had not known me. It took me a week to get a voice mail back from one of them and another three weeks to set up a half hour meeting with him. I absolutely needed their supports to do my job, so I had to figure out what they need that I could help them address, or what the right currency is.

After months of searching I found the right currency. I started to realize that there was a big communications gap between the business units where all the decisions are made and the operations units where the decisions need to be executed. The heads of operations don’t always know why a certain decision is made or even what decisions are made, but every single decision would deeply impact their lives and the performance of their units.

Working in a horizontal function across multiple business units I had a pretty good view of different initiatives going on in different business units. I started to inform them when I saw certain new decisions in the pipeline that may have severe impact in a particular operations area. This gave the operations folks enough time to prepare for the changes or even an opportunity to interfere with the decision all together. I was able to make boat loads of deposits into my relationship accounts. As my balances in those accounts got higher it became much easier for me to draw their helps to do my own job well.

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Please read the original post Managing the Relationship Account at Oldniublog.com