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Back in November 2019, before Covid-19, I was sharing dinner with LV Hanson, director of culture strategy at Procore. Procore is a successful Inc. 500 company with unicorn status and has been named twice in the “Best Places to Work” list by Glassdoor. I’ve been friends with Hanson for many years, and asked him how Procore, a client of the company I work for, has succeeded with hypergrowth and being a great place to work.

Hanson didn’t list a number of bullet points or a framework. He shared highlights of great leadership at the company and a major focus on and investment in the company’s culture. To illustrate the company’s approach, he shared a story about Olympic American rifle shooter Matthew Emmons.

Some of you may remember the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. There, Emmons was competing in the men’s 50-meter rifle three-position target event. The event required a shooter to fire a series of shots with a .22 rifle from the standing, kneeling and prone positions.

Besides being a great shot, Emmons was also a trained accountant, known to be methodical and detail-oriented. Emmons, as expected, did superb through each round. He was in the lead before his final shot and needed only a mediocre score to win him a place on the podium. Emmons took position, aimed, placed his finger on the trigger, pulled the trigger and (bang!) bull’s-eye.

“Great, right?” Hanson asked. I nodded my head in agreement. Except, Hanson explained, Emmons hit the bull’s-eye of the target in the next lane over and received no score at all.

The moral of the story, according to Hanson, is that leaders can be so fixated on hitting a bull’s-eye — key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives and key results (OKRs), revenues — they may not see the most important target that’s right in front of them: people. Hanson was reminding me that in friendships and business, your relationships are the most important target.

We Forget Good Relationships In A Crisis

Now that the pandemic has gone on for so long, you might find it tough to concentrate on building relationships when you have declining revenues and orders. However, collaboration and cooperation are exactly how your success was built, and that’s also how you can survive the current crisis.

According to J.P. Pawliw-Fry, co-author of the bestselling book Performing Under Pressure, we don’t focus on our relationships in a crisis because of stress. In threatening situations, the fight-or-flight response takes hold.

When you feel threatened, your body releases the chemical cortisol into your blood, which can affect the brain and behavior in several ways.

• It reduces your working memory. This means your mental focus may become limited, preventing you from thinking of new ideas or taking in new information.

• You may fixate on perceived threats. All you see are your KPIs and OKRs going down. You may not be able to focus on anything (or anyone) else.

• You may default to self-protection. That’s “me first” thinking. You may work hard to say it’s not your fault while ignoring the relationships you built with your clients and colleagues. Or even worse, you may throw them under the bus.

When all this happens, do what I do: Take a walk and clear your head. The stress will eventually fade, and you can take in new information to help you work on your current crisis. Check out the SOS method to learn more about what you can do.

How To Focus On Building Good Relationships

Once the stress has faded to a low ebb, try to focus your brain on the “right target” of fostering strong relationships with your clients and colleagues. Remember, they are also under stress and could use your help. Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor, suggests strong relationships can be built by caring personally and challenging directly.

Caring personally means caring about what happens to the people working with and for you. This is where you need to practice your soft skills of empathy and communication. I do this by checking in with my direct reports (and clients) and really listening to what they are saying. Together, we make adjustments to work levels and expectations based on reality (like having to take care of children while working or dealing with illness) instead of always trying to improve by 20%.

Challenging directly is about telling people when something isn’t good enough — and also when it is. If you have built good relationships through empathy and communication, you can communicate candidly with your clients and colleagues.

Challenging directly could be about work expectations, delivery times, costs or anything. If you challenge directly, then any issue becomes about problem-solving together and not apportioning blame. This is how I have worked with my reports and clients to co-create solutions and sustain my business during the pandemic.

Sometimes, as leaders, we can be so focused on bull’s-eyes that we don’t realize we are shooting at the wrong target. If you want your company to emerge strong after the pandemic, focus more on building relationships, and the numbers will be more likely to come.

 

About the Author Ken Sterling