To improve your relations with your colleagues, understanding their personality and yours is the first thing. But then you have to improve your personal skills or what are called “soft-skills”. You can then work on the following levers:
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- Practice Active Listening: If you are a manager, try to encourage your employees to speak up and make them understand that they can express themselves very freely. Respect and listen to their opinions, ideas and points of view. Accept that they may have a view of things that does not correspond to yours, do not judge them and be enriched by these differences. To show that you are listening to your collaborators, try to maintain eye contact with the other person, nod your head a few times and try to repeat in your answers what he said previously. Your interlocutor will thus feel considered and listened to. Obviously, remember to adapt to each person to whom you will speak.
- Show A Genuine Interest In Your Colleagues: you work most of your day with your colleagues, so try to learn a little more about their lives and what is important to them. This will strengthen the relationship you have with them.
- Find A Quality In Each Of Your Colleagues: Among your work team, you are probably not going to particularly like one or two people. However, you cannot let your personal preferences detract from the performance of the business. So if you have difficulty with the character traits of a colleague, the best way to deal with the situation is to try to find at least one preferentially professional quality in the latter.
- Recognize The Expertise Of Your Colleagues: To build relationships based on trust, try to let your colleagues know that you respect and value their expertise. Don’t hesitate to ask them for help with a project if you feel their skills could be highly appreciated. On the other hand, always remain honest, genuine and sincere. Do not say that you recognize in them a particular quality just to feed their ego when that is wrong!
- Cultivate Empathy: always try to put yourself in your colleagues’ shoes in order to better understand them and communicate better with them. Try to understand beyond the words your coworkers give you. Finally, control your emotions. Your workplace doesn’t have to be a place where you unload all of your personal emotions. Embrace a positive attitude by reminding yourself of the good things in your life and work every day. So whether you are stressed, upset or irritated, try to put your emotions aside and at all times, be calm and patient when expressing yourself.
- Be Responsible: take your ideas, opinions and decisions with your colleagues. Also learn to accept and own failure and to admit that sometimes you can be wrong. In general, show confidence with your colleagues. Be confident in your abilities and don’t be afraid to express your needs as well as your limitations.
- Develop Your Emotional Intelligence: learn to decode non-verbal language as well as the emotions of your colleagues and learn to take a step back.
- Promote Collective Intelligence: put your talents at the service of the group, if you are a manager, encourage collective reflection to innovate but also to find solutions to problems encountered collectively or to difficulties experienced by a particular employee.
- Practice Active Listening: If you are a manager, try to encourage your employees to speak up and make them understand that they can express themselves very freely. Respect and listen to their opinions, ideas and points of view. Accept that they may have a view of things that does not correspond to yours, do not judge them and be enriched by these differences. To show that you are listening to your collaborators, try to maintain eye contact with the other person, nod your head a few times and try to repeat in your answers what he said previously. Your interlocutor will thus feel considered and listened to. Obviously, remember to adapt to each person to whom you will speak.