PART 2

CONVERSATIONS TO BUILD RELATIONSHIPS

Relationships enable leaders to develop others, make great decisions, and take powerful actions. They are an essential ingredient in effective leadership conversations and the catalyst for achieving orders of magnitude more than you could alone. The ability to continually strengthen existing relationships, build new ones, and blend relationships into strong teams is fundamental to success.

Building relationships is not a task on a to-do list that you attend to from time to time. Rather it is something you need to do well—consciously and unconsciously—every minute of every day. Conversations with your bosses, peers, direct reports, and other stakeholders are the lifeblood of your business relationships.

Part 2 opens by describing the new rules for leadership success (Chapter 5) and explaining how your relationships define you (Chapter 6). Then it points out that your strengths can at times have a shadow side that inhibits the clarity of your thinking and the durability of your relationships (Chapter 7). Next it encourages you to focus on people as individuals (Chapter 8) and extols listening, transparency, and authenticity as attributes of effective leaders (Chapter 9). Part 2 closes by focusing on a leadership skill that is especially vital in a global economy: embracing differences (Chapter 10). Taken together, these chapters will assist you in building relationships more consistently and at higher levels.