5 tips to develop effective working relationship with your peers

1.       Search for common goals
Proactively reach out for a common denominator. Think of how you can add value. Extend a hand to support your peers in areas that you can influence.
If excellent customer service is critical to you and your peers, initiate a discussion with them on the best way to achieve it. Find out the relevant variables that will impact customer service. For instance, one of the variables is timely delivery, in full, of your products within 30 days from the date of an order.
You should proactively seek to understand the entire delivery process of such product and determine what you control directly as well as what you can influence indirectly.
Say, the entire delivery process will involve receiving an official order from the customer, keying in order details into your supply chain system, reviewing order details by the product fulfilment group, confirming products availability, assigning them for shipment, packing the products and shipping/delivering them to customers.
Based on the delivery process, you would know exactly which components you have direct control on. And for those components, you execute promptly.
Likewise, you would also know which components you can influence indirectly. And for these components, offer assistance and support to your peers wholeheartedly.

2.       Establish trust and respect
Create an environment of trust and respect with your peers. The effective way to establish that is to consistently demonstrate these behaviours:

• Do not put your peers on the spot: If there are any issues or problems related to your peers work systems, make sure that you engage and discuss with them directly first.  The last thing that you would want to happen is for such issues to be brought up in the management or staff meeting or email correspondence without their prior knowledge.
• Be a true professional: Avoid talking about your peers behind their backs or being involved in office gossips.
• Keep your commitments: If you say you want to do something within a certain time, do it and deliver on time.
• Resolve conflicts with urgency: Work on addressing conflicts with your peers at the earliest possible time. Unresolved conflicts will hamper progress in relationship building, team building as well as ongoing projects.
• Make yourself available: Adopt an open door policy. Be available to listen, discuss, debate and strategize together with your peers. Occasionally, make time to have lunch together.

3.       Pursue collaboration
Always ask yourself, “How best can I work jointly together with my peers for the benefit of my organization?”
You can consider the following approaches to collaborate with your peers:

• Seek clarity on shared goals, roles and responsibilities: You must start on the right path. Engage with your peers and discuss about projects that you mutually work together. Be clear about the project goals. Talk through details on who is supposed to do what and when. Capture your mutual agreements in terms of shared goals, roles and responsibilities to ease the process of monitoring progress later.
• Negotiate fairly: When negotiating for initiatives, budgets and resources, always remember that your organization needs come first, not wants. Take the high road. Focus on the mutual purpose. Identify respective needs. In the event that you end up with unfavourable outcomes, concede without being personal.
• Be responsibly responsive: Respond to emails and voicemails in a timely manner. Treat your peers’ issues and concerns just as much priority as yours. Avoid copying a huge list of people on a long email chain with an intention of exposing fault or winning mindshare from others. When you have a serious disagreement in a meeting, take the issue off line, in private.
• Celebrate success: Recognize success as it comes, no matter how small. Make it a habit to celebrate every milestone achieved. Such celebration and recognition sustain your momentum and motivation to go on further. In fact, take the opportunity, in a staff meeting for example, to recognize your peers and highlight their significant contributions.

4.       No blame game
“When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing at himself.”- Louis Nizer.
Quit blaming others. If something goes horribly wrong, be it in projects or relationship with your peers, take a step back and review the situations under these lenses:

• Treat everything as a learning experience. Every single day presents a new opportunity for you to learn to be a better person. The best way to learn the most is by focusing on these three aspects:
  • Take stock of what really happened
  • Capture what’s working and what’s not
  • Agree on what should be done differently moving forward

• Make a choice. Choose not to label yourself as the ‘victim’. Blaming others for everything that goes wrong around you will give them your power. You will end up at the losing end – feeling sorry for yourself, continuing to leech on the problem and unable to let go. As a result, you won’t be able make any progress. Instead, be a little self-critical. Recognize your imperfection and the fact that you might have partly contributed to the whole situation. With this state of mind, you would be able to objectively analyze the situation and decide for yourself on the key improvements that you want to pursue.

5.       Make time to bond with each other
This is so obvious that many tend to take it for granted.
It pays to get to know your peers well. Take a genuine interest in their lives. Spend time with them in a relaxed setting outside of the office such as going to lunch/dinner, playing golf, doing common hobbies etc.
It helps to build rapport which will go a long way towards establishing a situation of mutual respect and consideration among each other.

source:salwanaali.com