Start Building Connections For An Enduring Corporate Culture

Change your perspective

The best parts of life and work involve relationships. Connecting with others in authentic and respectful ways is a crucial life skill and one that is required in the business for building an enduring culture. While every relationship evolves and changes, how we connect with people and grow relationships that stand the test of time will always require our effort and attention. Developing an enduring culture in business means making connections, creating trust, and often, changing our perspectives.

Get Connected

Let’s begin with how we get connected and build great relationships. While we all want to build great relationships, we often fall short on a practical level. In Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” building and sustaining relationships are critical to everyone’s success. In “Take Command, Find Your Inner Strength, Build Enduring Relationships, and Live the Life You Want,” my co-author, Michael Crom, and I, pose a simple question: “Have you ever wondered what makes a relationship?”

These five approaches can help you make connections and keep them.
 

• Be warm. The quality of genuine warmth is underrated. Studies show highly charismatic people demonstrate both competence and warmth. Being warm is being open and friendly, and it requires not only the right words, but the correct tone, facial expressions, and body language.  


• Listen. Listening well is more than simply not talking while someone else is. To listen well, we must open our minds and really hear to what is being said (without planning our next words). Asking follow-up questions for clarification and understanding is also a part of listening well.


• Find common ground. Common ground (values, hobbies, interests, professions) is where we can make connections or reconnections in relationships.


• Show genuine care. Showing genuine care goes beyond vague, general greetings and makes it clear we can speak openly about our lives. It means making space for the hard stuff as well as the good stuff.


• Give honest and sincere appreciation. Everyone craves appreciation. It affirms their value and shows they matter.

Even if we only focus on one of these areas, it is a great way to start making the connections needed to build an enduring corporate culture.

Create Trust

Once we’ve made the connection, creating trust is the next step. When we trust someone, we can be vulnerable, open, and let our defenses down with them and vice versa. Vulnerability is often seen as a weakness, but it is ultimately the key to trust. WE can’t establish real trust unless we can let our guard down. Vulnerability demonstrates our authenticity, believability, and relatability, fostering deeper connections with others as we embrace our true selves and risk how others will respond. Showing vulnerability doesn’t make us weak, but rather makes us human as we show our authentic selves to others.

If vulnerability and authenticity build trust, what destroys it? In many cases, we destroy trust when others share with us and we fail to keep it in confidence but rather repeat it in a way that hurts them. If we kept what they shared privately as intended, we would immediately earn their trust. Inconsistency is another enemy of trust. We can all name someone in our lives who says one thing and does another. Even if it’s unintentional, it makes it difficult to trust them. Finally, when we fail to listen and communicate well with those around us, it leads to a lack of trust. Trust once build is fragile, but it can be restored with genuine effort – honesty, admission of mistakes, supportive actions, and time.

Change Your Perspective

Making connections and building trust goes a long way in building an enduring culture, but there is a final step – changing your perspective. Dale Carnegie explained it this way, “Remember that other people may be totally wrong. But they don’t think so. . . try to understand them. Only wise, tolerant, exceptional people can even try to do that.” As humans, we struggle with understanding other people’s perspectives because we are so invested in our own views and feel confident we see the world the ‘right’ way. When others challenge our perspective, we feel uncertain and even threatened, and we sometimes go into ‘fight’ mode.

How do we change that? How can we get to know others, change our perspectives, and deepen our connection with them? We begin with factual questions (Where did you grow up? What do you do for work? Etc.) and move to causative questions (Did you like growing up there? Why led you to your profession? Etc.) which gives us greater insight. Finally, we go to value-based questions (Tell me about someone who had a major impact on your life. As you look back over your life, tell me about a turning point. Etc.) and we learn about their heart, beliefs, and experiences, and we begin to build empathy.

When we look at the world through their eyes, we can empathize with them, see them in a new way, and change our perspective. A different opinion or perspective shouldn’t be threatening, but rather an opportunity to connect and understand each other better. We have to be willing to see their experiences as they do, not how we imagine it and not with the motive of proving them wrong or changing their mind. When we look at others through our own narrow lens, we fail to understand them and we miss making the connection with them.

Building an enduring culture requires us to make the connection, create trust, and empathize with others by changing our perspective. We have to avoid judging them based on our own beliefs and our limited experience. We have to try to understand them, and find the reason they think and act as they do, and it begins with healthy communication, seeing them as human, and asking what you can learn from them. That’s when we build an enduring culture with genuine, lasting relationships.   

Author Bio

Joe Hart is the President and CEO of Dale Carnegie Training, the most experienced training organization in the world. Early in his tenure as CEO, Hart had to adeptly navigate the company through an unforeseen global pandemic. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Hart led a lightning-fast change of the business model shifting business activities from almost exclusively in-person training to repositioning the business to generate 95% of its revenue online. As a Dale Carnegie graduate himself, Hart’s first business, InfoAlly, provided online programs to support the Dale Carnegie, Leadership Training for Managers, and Sales Advantage Courses. Connect Joe Hart