Photo by: tom_bullock
As a relationship-oriented leader in your organization you focus on having meaningful, productive conversations with your peers and staff. You work on encouraging new ideas and being collaborative for the sake of getting to great solutions.
But it’s not always about solutions or action. The important task of building relationships in your workplace means that sometimes you have to just listen. Particularly in the circumstance where one of your people has to get something off their chest and you sense that they don’t want your opinion or your input, they just want your ear. In this case, your job is simply to make the other person feel heard.
True, if you field too many rants you won’t get any work done. But if you willingly receive them on occasion, that same person will surely feel safe in coming to you to openly share much more.
(Check out this rant about printers that I deeply identify with!)
