A good question to ask yourself as a leader is this: Do you see your staff only when there are problems? If so, you are losing many opportunities for growing your team members and the organisation.

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A positive one-on-one relationship with those you directly lead is vital to their performance – and to everyone’s well-being, including your own. This is an investment that not only prevents fires, but creates more possibilities for the organisation.

Positive psychology researcher Dr Barbara Fredrickson says nothing beats eye contact and smiling when creating positive connection with someone.

Here Are Six Tips To Develop One-On-One Relationships With Your Team Members:

1. If you are looking for a structure for one-to-one conversations, explore Dr Kim Cameron’s monthly Personal Management Interview (PMI) which you can find in his excellent book entitled Positive Leadership. Research has shown that morale, trust, engagement, performance, productivity, and goal accomplishment improves with PMIs. People also experience less burnout with PMIs.

2. Use a coaching approach. You can attend training to pick up coaching skills. Or you can learn to ask great questions and practise deep listening in other ways.

3. Keep notes on your staff so you can recall their growth, strengths, challenges, what’s important to them, their family etc.

4. Team lunches are important. You can also schedule oneon-one lunches with your team members and get to know them as human beings, not only as professionals.

5. Enjoy micro-moments of positive connection which may not have anything to do with tasks. A smile in the corridor, a compliment, a question showing genuine care, a shared joke – little moments mean a lot in creating a positive work experience. If you want more information on the power of this, read Love 2.0 by Dr Fredrickson.

6. Make communications uplifting with a human touch. See whose emails/messages put a smile on your face and uplift you; and which are flat, lifeless, or leave a negative imprint. Learn by reflecting on your own experience.

But It’s So Slow

This kind of one-on-one contact can seem slow.  We want to do big things fast. Sometimes my mind moves at a mile a minute. When it does, I notice I am less present with the people around me, and I cannot bring them along with me in directions I see as helpful or move in directions they know is more helpful.  At a slightly slower pace, I can make  a  meaningful  connection  with  others,  enabling  them  to  feel valued,  appreciated, and   loved.   And   when   this   connection   happens,   people   move   in   more   uplifting directions.

As someone wise said:

People don’t care how much you know till they know how much you care.

Avoid fire-fighting and busy-ness from taking over. Protect one-on-one time with your team-members, and put this in your planner. It’s where magic happens.

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