Improve work energy with high quality connections

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Look at your team. Is there a lack of energy and drive, are there rivalries and disputes or do members treat customers, suppliers or one another disrespectfully?

Jane Dutton, professor of business administration at the University of Michigan says the key to building a healthy and energising workplace is to create "high-quality connections." High-quality connections are interactions that make you feel engaged, open, motivated and revitalised. They are not necessarily dependent on close or intimate relationships - a quick message or a simple exchange in a meeting can be high quality if it makes both participants feel valued. Whenever your connections are high quality, you can transform a conversation into one that benefits everyone. This, I believe, is a big step towards positive interpersonal relations.

According to Dutton, you can create high-quality connections in three ways: respectful engagement, task enabling and trust. Here are some of the ways you to do this.

Respectful engagement:

• Be present: focus whole-heatedly on the person. Do not allow your attention to be diluted by thoughts, people or even your phone.

• Really listen to them: focus on understanding what the person is saying with his words and his body language, give him time to fully articulate himself without you interrupting or jumping to conclusions
• Empathise: it is important to communicate your awareness and understanding of someone's situation. For example, you can tell people that you know they are under a lot of pressure, and praise them for how well they are handling it. Encouragement makes them feel noticed and appreciated.

• Be transparent: if you are clear about what you think and believe, if you are authentic in your communication, you give people permission to do the same. This relieves tension better than anything else does.

Task enabling

• Facilitating: help people get the job done or make their lives easier by giving them access to people and information. Sharing knowledge does not take much effort but it can make a huge impact on someone who is new to an organisation, team or area.

• Be accommodating: where appropriate, create a sense of mutual support by being flexible about deadlines or ways of doing things, especially when others are under pressure.

• Coach: ask people questions and allow them space and to come up with their own ideas about how to solve problems or get things done. Working together in this way is a powerful way to build connections and team buy-in to the outcomes

Trust

• Get comfortable with giving and receiving high quality feedback: if people know how well they are performing and what they can do to improve or leverage their skills, then they will feel more secure and comfortable

• Be vulnerable: nobody is perfect yet few of us are willing to expose our weaknesses. By sharing vulnerabilities, we make ourselves more approachable and with that, making meaningful connections is easier

• Delegate: as a manager, you can convey trust when you delegate tasks and hand over responsibility for projects to your team. It shows that you believe in members' ability to do the job right. Just be sure to give them the room to do the job or you will undermine trust.

Underpinning each of these areas is positive intent. One must work hard at this mindset, as the aim is to build and improve relations with every interaction. It takes effort, especially when life is demanding, but the reward is usually better connections with those around us.

Improve the quality of your connections by being present and authentic and by listening actively to others. Be accommodating and nurturing in your task assignments. Build trust through self-disclosure, delegation and asking for feedback and encourage your team members to do the same.