Building Relations: Key to Effective Management

Building Relations

Teghkaran Singh

Building Relations: Key to effective management

Teghkaran Singh

PMC 140A

Tim McKenna

January 19, 2015

01/19/2015

Page 1

Building Relations

Teghkaran Singh

Building Relations: Key to effective management

Why leaders hire smart workers- to listen to them? If leaders don’t listen, why hire these

workers in the first place? Let someone else have them. (J. Gary Augustson, 2002, p.16). The

question as intriguing as it sounds supports the idea that encouraging open dialogue and listening

to your team members is the key to building relationships that in turn helps a leader get the best

out of his team. It not only helps achieve organization targets but also to become a successful

manager. When team members see that each one of them is being heard by their boss and they

are getting the respect of their co-workers it gives them a sense of accomplishment and they feel

a connection to the mission of the company. Such teams then do better, function better together,

are retained better and are much happier.

Task conflict is most of the times associated with effective decisions and relationship

conflict with poor decisions. However, task conflict is often misattributed as relationship conflict

and sometimes harsh task conflict techniques trigger relationship conflicts. It has been found that

intragroup trust moderates the relationship between task conflict and relationship conflict in 70

top management teams (Simmons and Peterson, 2000, p.102). This was one of the tenets that

were discovered in Google’s project oxygen where in their good managers avoided

micromanaging their team by providing them freedom and stretch assignments to help the group

tackle big stuff and build trust. Project managers need to take steps within the group so that

advantages of task conflict can be realised without the risk of destructive relationship conflicts.

In the end managers have a greater role to play in the...