Build Trust - Understand the people
We mentioned earlier that context is extremely important; even more important is understanding people in the correct context. Everyone has peaks and valleys in their career. Sometimes it is their number one priority; at others, their family or their health takes a front seat. It is therefore critical to your success, not just within your team, but also with your customers, to understand the context from the other individual’s perspective. My wife is habitually late; she blames it on the fact that she was born on a Caribbean island; and it drives me insane. But after much frustration, I learned that to her five minutes really means an hour or two when she is with her family. This concept of time would seem absolutely insane without context. Imagine being told your flight is in five minutes, when it is really in two hours, or worse, that you flight is in two hours when it is actually in five minutes!
By understanding the people you partner, work and live with, you gain critical insight into what is acceptable and important to others. If being present at a family wedding is vitally important to a member of staff, undertaking a major implementation involving them on that same weekend is probably a bad idea. You would need to negotiate with them to find a solution that works for all parties. Maybe they could train someone else to take their place, or schedule the implementation over a course of a couple of evenings rather than a weekend. Without investing time and energy into understanding what makes people tick, you will not gain insight into how to motivate, or worse, infuriate them. Also, people react differently to different kinds of praise and reward. Without understanding each of your team members and partners, you will not be able to fully define what success looks like to them.
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