How do you feel about your work relationships? Are you walking in a dangerous zone where you must pretend and be aware of every move? Or are you in a comfortable space where you can relax and be yourself?
The quality of our relationships enormously impacts our satisfaction and productivity. Toxic interactions can eventually bring down a resilient and happy person. Inversely, people who are personally struggling can thrive if supported by a powerful and loving community.
Relationships should be a central point of attention for people who work in sports. After all, sports are about teaming, making it together, and supporting each other to go further. However, as in any industry, many of us still suffer from unhealthy and abusive relationships.
Creating bonds is an easy but fragile art. Making connections is simple: sometimes, it only takes a brief moment of shared laughter, crying over a common grievance, or working together to overcome a challenge.
However, we can quickly break these connections by neglecting the importance of cultivating our bonds. Either because we are too busy or because we don’t value relationships as we should, we move fast from laughter to irritation, from empathy to judgment, and from collaboration to individualism.
It is easy to get tired of nurturing relationships and wanting to get straight to business. The belief behind that mindset is that we are paying and being paid to work, not to get along with each other. However, it’s not a secret for many team leaders that it is easier to train someone technically than to transform a disruptive collaborator into a collaborative one.
Focusing on relationships is time and cost-effective. Not that it needs to be, but it is. It doesn’t require people to become intimate friends. It requires a space where people can be seen, heard, and respected.
When people feel they can trust us with whatever they need to be fully present at work, we nurture healthy relationships. Some people may want to share more personal information, while others may just want to share concerns about their work. Some people need more space, and some will be more reserved.
The bottom line is that when we build healthy relationships, we create fertile ground to build powerful partnerships and projects and mitigate any noise or conflict before it is amplified and becomes destructive.
Focusing on relationships is not about being a nice popular leader who constantly says what people want to hear. We all know people who can be incredibly charming socially, creating an aura of a relationship-focused person, but who are actually negligent or brutal with people around them.
Relationships are about authenticity and truly caring. It’s about an awareness of the effect we have on people. Do our presence and attitude create and strengthen bonds, or does it destroy and weaken them? An accurate answer to this question may help us take the right path to becoming relationship builders.
At Legacy, we put relationships above anything else. We know that solid teams and satisfied clients and partners depend on nurturing healthy bonds. Our goal is that people want to engage not only because of the quality of our work, because they feel good about being and working with us.
What is the quality of your relationships? What are you doing to take care of them?
TEC – HEART – SPORT is our latest series of articles explaining the mission, vision, and culture that Legacy Sport shares with its community and the world. See below for a summary of each topic we will explore during the series.
Thrill
Expertise
Courage
Humanism
Empathy
Advocacy
Respect
Transparency
Sustainability
People
Olympism
Relationships
Transformation
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