Achieving our aspirations involves ongoing personal reflection,

continuous learning and  nurturing our relationships.

With 2011 around the corner many are looking reflectively at the past year and considering ways to improve  our efforts for the new year.

Most of us already have several systems to organize our lives, project plans at work, a family calendar in the kitchen, perhaps a journal for personal reflections. The tools we employ can range from the software provided on  latest mobile gadget to a hasty shopping list scrawled on a piece of paper.

The beginning of a new year is a good time to refine our processes. Life is a work in progress,  review your plans more often, on a monthly or even a weekly basis.  What do you want to do?  Where do you want to go?  How will you get there?

Cultivate Quality Relationships in 2011

The first relationship to consider is your  relationship with your self.   Decide upon the skills,  people,  projects and activities you wish to pursue in the coming year.

If you aspire to enlarge your social circle this year,  join a group,  it  is a good way to meet new  people.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by your involvements, choose how you will spend your time and efforts.

Develop an awareness of your existing network.   Who is in your network?  How well do you know them?

Of the people you know, with whom  would you like to strengthen a relationship with?   Make it a priority, schedule time with that person.

Developing interpersonal relationships by engaging with others  on a regular basis and getting involved in groups adds value to life and enriches the quality of our experience.

Consider the roles you play in your existing relationships.  Think of the ways in which you interact with these people.   What are your responsibilities?  What are your expectations of them?  Are these roles understood clearly or is there a need to communicate them?

Get to know  people who have expertise.   Their viewpoint, and interpretations may help us to see what we cannot.

One reason we develop relationships is so that we may engage collaboratively with them to achieve a common goal. By working together the group can often  achieve more than individuals could do on our own.

Approach your relationship management tasks in an organized and thoughtful manner.  Determine what priority they play in your life and how  you will put your efforts into improving them

Make it Happen

So how do we find the time to do all these things?   Time management is  the range  of  skills,  tools and techniques for managing the time required to achieve our goals.

Essentially there are two approaches to time management.

Task Orientated – Bottom up

Bottom up methods  are typically used for project management.  Large projects are broken into into smaller tasks, which are associated with a time estimate and the  resources required for completion.  The tasks are prioritized, scheduled and  assigned  to accomplish the larger objective.   Recipes , project plans and todo lists are examples of task orientated, time management systems.   David Allen has popularized a personal task orientated system with his book Getting things done (GTD)

Result Orientated – Top Down

Top down methods such as  Stephen Covey’s system places goals and roles as the controlling element of the system and favors importance over urgency.  Using a results orientated system, we focus on the results, and look for opportunities to achieve those results moving forward.   A result orientated strategy is helpful for achieving business or personal  goals that are less tangible such as improving a relationship with someone in your life.

A  personal  infusion of  Time Management Methods.

Jordan McGilvary of DIYplanner.com has shared his time management templates and an application for printing your own calendars and agenda pages.   Jordan has also  shared his  insights into  The Middle Way Method, a time management system that works for him.

The Middle Way Method encourages me to uncover who I am, who I want to be, and how to become who I want to be, while being able to handle everything that is thrown my way. … I feel that this approach gives a balance between the important things of life and the daily grind.

When it comes to taking soft skills seriously is that most bosses think they are just about ‘touchy-feely’ people skills. Soft skills are powerful in creating great workplace environments, happier relationships and better communications. Encompassing listening, sharing with clarity, heightened awareness, both personal and communal, we raise the bar on being self motivated and professionally respected as a value to any team. In a world where getting, keeping and succeeding at work is imperative, anything we invest in that can make us irreplaceable has to be worth learning. Good leaders are forged from the fire of engagement at every level of the business rockface. Great CEO’s build on the strength of their people. The dot’s aren’t difficult to connect.

Among Peggy’s important workplace lessons are the following:

•Knowing yourself is as important as knowing how to do the job.
•Learn when to stick and when to shift or the details will hang you.
•Your procrastination is trying to tell you something.
•Get smart about asking dumb questions.
•You don’t need to be everyone’s best friend—that’s what dogs are for.
•Know where to draw the line between self-improvement and self-destruction.
•When it comes to gossip, learn the art of deflection.
•Keep your visibility when you’re not face-to-face.
•Don’t take it personally.
•Stop stereotypes from sinking you.
•You’re the boss, stupid, that’s why they hang on your every word.

And, perhaps, most favorite of all: Get out of your own way.

Peggy Klaus reveals The Hard Truth About Soft Skills: Workplace Lessons Smart People Wish They’d Learned Sooner (Collins, January 2008). Peggy is a world class communicator who understands why important soft core competencies are invariably ignored and reveals the fact that soft skills can be the key to enduring success.

Currently relationship management, across all it’s various attributions, is poorly understood and even more abysmally executed. If the current understanding of relationship management is simply to monitor and respond to negative commentary on your reputation, your brand, your business or your services, or to follow up and cross sell when the customer or client has fallen off your radar, this is no better than shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted it. It’s about listening, responding, reciprocating, acknowledging, modeling ethics and values, everywhere you are or your business is active.

The value of building and maintaining a reputation built on the seven principles of human givens (accountability, boundaries, respect, responsibility, honesty, support and trust) means creating cooperative alliances and rewarding relationships. This cannot be short cut, avoided, undeserved or manipulated. We are each being held to account on our behaviours in regard to our commitments and on this we stand or fall in peer assessment.

There is no excuse now, given the quantity and quality of tracking technologies and social media assets, not to create a formidable and very manageable strategy to build and sustain quality relationships and use all positive testimonials, word of mouth recommendations and quality referrals to build personal and professional capital as well as business advantage. To fail to implement such a strategy is to be asleep at the wheel in a fast moving and competitive world.

This is a short, sharp reminder that when working with friends in a business situation, move from the informal to the formal, create clear boundaries, commitments and psychological contracts that you would do elsewhere if you seek to succeed in business.

As Donald Trump says ‘ It’s not personal, it’s just business’.

Managers at all levels also play an essential role in this process, because for their employees, their attitudes, personal values and communication styles represent an embodiment of the company’s philosophy. The problem is however, that in modern companies forming and popularizing such value-oriented philosophies, often gives way to short-term oriented action plans, which bring quick financial results at the price of undermining the stability of inter-personal relationships in the company and hence threaten its long-term success. In this respect, the importance of corporate culture cannot be overlooked any more and it is more than ever before necessary for the establishment of a rational, responsible and conscientious management.

Two large online surveys were conducted among employees in Germany to explore the importance employees and organizations lay on aspects of interpersonal respect in relation to other work values. The first study (N1 = 589) extracted a general ranking of work values, showing that issues of respect which involve supervisors are rated particularly high among employees. The second study (N2 = 373) replicated the previous value ranking by and large. However, it is shown that the value priorities indicated by employees are not always matched by organizational practices. Especially respect issues which involve employees’ supervisors diverge strongly negative. Consequences and potentials for change in organizations are discussed.

Values are generally seen as intrinsic and enduring perspectives individuals hold throughout different stages of their lifetime. They indicate “what a person consciously or subconsciously desires, wants, or seeks to attain “. Work values represent these sentiments in applied settings, signaling what people strongly care about at their work place. Following this definition, work values are somewhat similar to the valence term in expectancy models of motivation and are thus believed to have a substantial impact on the actual behavior shown at the workplace. They encourage individuals to act in certain ways, affecting even such things as job choice. Whereas commonly work values are assessed as people’s preferences for certain objects or outcomes, such as job security, level of payment and others, we sought to integrate interpersonal respect in this list of more or less classic work values.

The first kind points towards the general acknowledgement of another human, an equal member of the same group, referred to as “recognition respect” or respect for persons. The second kind is directed at an acknowledgement of expertise or skill, referred to as “appraisal respect” or respect for work. These two kinds, although both named respect, are very different in their essence. Recognition respect is very similar to the kind of respect the philosopher Kant proposed. It follows a categorical imperative to respect other human beings by not only seeing them as means to an end but also as an end in themselves. In an organization this respect may show in supervisors who do not only focus onto the performance aspect of their subordinates but are also compassionate or understanding in a time of a private crisis on behalf of the subordinate. They acknowledge that all humans deserve to be treated in the same way that one would want to be treated oneself. Its essence is thus unconditional. There is no question if it is deserved or not. It is not about a personal appreciation or favoring but about following a clear set of conventions, which give people equal rights even though they are different. Research underlined this reasoning by confirming formal rules in justice issues as one of the antecedents of recognition respect.

Appraisal respect on the other hand points at an entirely different phenomenon. It is about the esteem one receives if one performs, if one masters a skill, or one accomplished things that set one positively apart from the rest. So, whereas recognition respect involves a message of equality, appraisal respect does just the opposite. It acknowledges positives differences and rewards them with status. This kind of respect does not draw itself from a general normative law instead it derives its legitimacy from the perceived object itself; it or its actions demand respect.

Thus in an organizational setting appraisal respect might show itself in a supervisor who acknowledges work or performance, may it be through spoken recognition, a promotion, or a raise in salary. Similarly, employees who state that they work for a supervisor they deeply respect is usually a sign of appraisal respect. Whereas in empirical research recognition respect seems to be a result of formal rule following, appraisal respect seems to rely more on the informal treatment in justice concerns.

The following list of work values were those that were posed to the respondents, which encompassed more or less classical aspects of work values usually investigated in companies (such as the original IBM survey later used by Hofstede, 1991; or typical values assessed by consultancies:

(1) having high job security
(2) having a high income
(3) having good career opportunities
(4) working in a job that is valued by society
(5) having enough leisure time besides the job
(6) working on interesting tasks on the job
(7) being able to work independently
(8) working on tasks which require a high sense responsibility
(9) having a lot of direct contact with other people
(10) being able to help others through the job
(11)working in a job that is useful for society
(12) having the feeling to contribute something meaningful
(13) working in a healthy work environment.
(14) working for a supervisor who appreciates my work
(15) working with colleagues who appreciate my work
(16) working with colleagues who treat me with respect
(17)working for a supervisor who treats me with respect
(18) working for a supervisor I can respect
(19) working with colleagues I can respect

As an article written by Dan Bobinski, CEO of Workplace Excellence, in Management Issues highlights, if managers and leaders will not model the expected behaviors for the workplace community, its unlikely the rest of the employees will have any regard for community standards, either. Behaviours equally ought to reflect a commonality of agreed values for the workplace, irrespective of what individuals espouse outside of work.  Relationship Management Institute endeavours to create a ‘plug and play’ culture that enfranchises all employees under a set of principles that offends no one’s personal beliefs but allows a common concordance of cordial collaboration culturally.