Building Good Relationships By Helping People
In today’s newsletter, I want to share a framework that has repeatedly helped me in the past to get along with people and build good relationships.
The main idea is to be helpful.
But you can't just be constantly asking how you can help. It doesn't work that way.
With time you start to see that everyone has different goals, values and pain points.
Helping people achieve their goals or solve their pain points is the way to help them and create value.
Use these 3 questions below to better understand people around you and how you can help.
- What is their prime objective?
- What do they need in order to achieve it?
- What is valuable to them?
Let's dive in.
1. What is their prime objective?
Even within one company or team, everyone's goals are different. Understanding it is the first step in finding out where you
- New colleague: understand our code and make first impact.
- Senior dev: share knowledge, transfer their experience.
- Product manager: Ship valuable product to customers.
2. What do they need in order to achieve it?
Most of the time, people can't achieve what they want and are dependent on others to accomplish their goals.
- New colleague: pairing sessions.
- Senior dev: facilitate learning sessions, record, write guides.
- Product manager: updates, estimation, red flags.
3. What is valuable to them?
Is there something that the person values most at this time?
One of my prior bosses valued quick execution very highly. So in order to help him, I needed to internalize it and act especially quickly on shared projects. For others it might be:
- New colleague: empathy with "beginner" problems
- Senior dev: scale their impact
- Product manager: good communication
Bringing it all together
So how can you help people around you now? Building out of the few examples from above here are a few ideas that you can start doing in order to help them.
New colleague:
- Offer to pair with them
- Check in frequently (adjust if needed)
- Give helpful feedback
- Praise
Senior dev:
- Record their sessions and turn them into documentation
- Curate team's questions and facilitate knowledge sharing
Product manager:
- Ask detailed questions
- Give heads up
- Raise flags early
I suggest opening up a spreadsheet and actually writing down the key people you are working with and your answers to the questions above.
Not all answers are immediately clear. Take your time, and add things as they come to your mind.
Review the list every few weeks and see if there is something actionable you can do right now.
That's it for today.
See you again next week.
Whenever you're ready, I'd like to help you Level Up personally:
- Join my LinkedIn community (1468 followers) here
- Schedule a free one-on-one with me here
- Ask me anything via email here
Cheers,
Ilya