Build Trust - At their best people are magnanimous and forgiving…
At their best, people are magnanimous and forgiving; at worst they hold grudges for years. As you build trust with your team and customers, you must remember to establish safety nets. That is, to build grace into your relationships, so that when something goes wrong, and it will, the people involved are magnanimous and forgiving. Sounds easy, right? Well, here is the tough part. It begins with you. The worse people offend you, the more you have to be a model of grace to others. We looked previously at knowing yourself, and you will have your own guidelines for when a relationship is becoming toxic, but before then you must work to resolve conflict in a way that allows for further interactions. Said another way, do not burn bridges. In today’s ever-changing IT world, you have no idea if today’s customer will be tomorrow’s partner, or if today’s competition might be tomorrow’s boss.
How would you like to be treated by others? Do you treat your team and customers that way today? If you had a close family member as part of the user community, how would that change the way you viewed the community? Why not spend a day thinking of the users that way? You need to start mentally re-aligning your users as customers. You likely have years of mental models of users being problematic, so it is not an easy switch to realize that user problems of today are really customer challenges of tomorrow, which in turn are opportunities for your IT department. So reach out to someone you know you upset recently, and ask for their advice on how not to do it in the future. Try not to be defensive when/if they respond, and try to LISTEN attentively.
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